Nairobi            The Secret Service, FBI, and most Americans that still resist various strains of conspiracy theories remain mystified about the motivations of the young, twenty-year-old shooter in Pennsylvania who attempted to assassinate former President Trump at a rally in the state.  He killed and was killed, so the odds are that we will never really know what might have propelled this youngster into such a horrifying and tragic action.  Despite that unassailable truth, there are still some facts that are unavoidable, and, if we were honest, should force us all to look at ourselves and our culture in the mirror until we recoil in horror.

We do know he was a registered Republican.  We do know he was a member of a gun club and was wearing a t-shirt connected to a YouTube gun culture.  We do know that his father had bought an AK47.  Those are all facts.

It’s also a fact that the gun culture, myths about the West and the frontier, are, like violence, “as American as apple pie.”  It’s part of our national reputation, and there are no efforts to change that, quite the contrary, as rights to open carry and other relaxed laws about guns proliferate in state legislatures, and, for the most part, are abetted by the Supreme Court in one contorted opinion after another.  This gun culture is so deeply ingrained in everyone’s understanding of America that I should not have been surprised when an organizer trainee in New Orleans from the Netherlands, innocently asked me if I owned a gun and could he shoot it to add to his life experiences.  Equally unsurprising is the fact that even when Republican Trump was nicked by a bullet, there’s still no call for gun controls in Congress.

Another part of contemporary culture has to do with the currency of fame.  Like guns, this is not a new problem, but in the era of influencers, social media, and the art of being “famous simply for being famous” in Warhol’s five minutes, this worship and pursuit of contemporary recognition also stains the American culture deeply.  The Reagan shooter was clear in his crazed motivations that he was taking a shot at the president in the sick hope of bringing attention to himself that might catch the eye of actress Jodie Foster.  There’s no similar, factual proof behind this youngster’s motivations, but it is hard not to believe that in his alienation and isolation that he had decided to go out and do so with the biggest flame imaginable.

There’s a toxic chemistry in American culture now.  When you mix media, politics, and guns together with the apocalyptic confusion about the future in employment, the pandemic, climate, and peace, anything can happen, but none of it, as we can see in Pennsylvania, is good for the country or anyone who cares about America and its future.  We need to look at our culture in the mirror and finally realize that it is not saying that we “are the fairest of them all.”