I know most of you probably read or heard about the church shooting in Knoxville this past Sunday. I’ve been trying to find the words to comment on it all week, but it’s really been difficult to put thoughts into words in this case.
Different people I have discussed it with have been most struck by different things about it. One was horrified that such a thing happened when children were on stage performing a play. Another has not been able to get the thought of the child who was covered in his mother’s blood out of her head. I was particularly disturbed by the irony that one of the victims wasn’t a member of the church, but of another church in the community, and had come to the church that day to see the kids’ play, and the fact that some of the other victims were visitors from out of town (I heard anyway).
And I guess one of the most disturbing things of all to many people is the fact that obviously you can’t even be sure you can feel safe in church anymore. Of all places.
I think of the church I grew up in – a small town church, but there are many big churches with large memberships in town and the town’s not all THAT small anyway – however, the church I grew up in was pretty small compared to most. Even with a full house, someone with a gun could have taken out the entire congregation and any visitors in a matter of minutes. That just makes my blood run cold and sends shivers down my spine.
As a kid, I spent literally hours in that church, and quite often by myself – with an adult on the grounds, yes, but not necessarily in the general vicinity where I was or even in the same building. But who wouldn’t have thought that wasn’t safe?
I also lived my entire life until I went off to college in houses that were never locked – not my home, not my grandparents’ – unless you went out of town on vacation, and maybe not even then, because it really didn’t matter. From around the second or third grade on, I walked home from school to a home that had been empty and unlocked all day long, and usually spent another two or three hours alone in the house until my parents got home from work. We didn’t lock our cars; we didn’t have to.
And nobody would have thought twice about the fact that I spent countless hours walking or bicycling around the neighborhood or all the way to downtown by myself, also from a pretty young age. Even when 8-year-old Cary Ann Medlin’s body was found raped and mutilated in the woods in a nearby town when I was 13 – a tragedy that Newscoma, my age and growing up in the next town over at the time, referred to the other day in her own thoughts about the Knoxville shootings – still I continued to hoof it around town by myself all the time, albeit with probably some stronger cautionary words about being careful and watching out for myself. Heck, at 13 years old, that was prime time for me walking downtown every week to spend my allowance at the music shop on records and that week’s issue of Rolling Stone.
But you really didn’t HAVE to worry about not being safe, not then, not there, and not even all that much even in the bigger cities. In 18 years, there was the Medlin case, there was the Marcia Trimble abduction and murder in Nashville that was such unusual and big news that, I guarantee you, every single native Tennesseean still alive that’s over the age of 40 not only remembers her name, but can probably tell you exactly what she looked like. Because stuff like that just didn’t happen, not as a rule.
And people in small towns didn’t go around killing each other. I recall one big nasty murder in the county when I was a child, and one when I was in high school. One was killed by someone who had previously worked for him, the other was shot and killed by a man he knew over some argument. Two – TWO – murders in two counties in 18 years.
And now there’ve been more murders than I can count in both those counties over the last ten, fifteen years – not every day, no, but far, far more than two in 18 years, and many of them seemingly arbitrary or random. Kids get abducted and sometimes wind up dead, and it’s still shocking, sure, but not like it once was. Another school shooting happens and you’re appropriately horrified, but no longer all that surprised.
And now people are walking into churches on Sunday mornings and shooting and killing people. If you can’t be sure you’re safe in school, or in church – where, then, can you feel safe?
Of course, now I live in a city where murders happen every week and I hear gunshots pretty much every day just about now, so I’m even more numbed and jaded by the constant influx of violence and crime. But that’s why the horrible things that keep happening back home – and even in Knoxville, which is not crime free, of course, but nowhere near the percentage Memphis is – that’s why these things bother me even more. Stuff happens here that’s not supposed to happen up there, or there.
Would the church shooting have been as shocking and people so horrified if it had happened in Memphis? Sure, of course it would have. But I don’t know that many would have been all that surprised, sad to say, especially the rest of our fellow Tennesseans. People from up yonder where I’m from, other than a very small handful, they don’t come to Memphis to shop or to see doctors or for entertainment like they used to. They go to Nashville instead, or even just to Jackson. It’s really pretty sad.
I am grateful that nobody I knew was at the church the other day in Knoxville, but plenty of folks I’m acquainted with did have friends or family that were there, and even one or two that are members that weren’t there that day. That doesn’t make it any less disturbing or sad.
And when I heard from someone in Knoxville about a comment someone they know made – someone who is a member of a large Baptist church in West Knoxville, and quite possibly the same one my future mother-in-law attends every Sunday – the comment being something along the lines of well, you know those people in that church practice witchcraft – I just felt sick.
My future mother-in-law – the Baptist churchgoer – used to be involved in programs that were held at the TVUU church weekly, and had just been telling me on the phone the day before what a nice church it was, and how lovely and wonderful all the people she knew there always had been. In fact, it turns out one of her other sons – one of my future brothers-in-law – used to be a member of that very church. Maybe still is technically and still on their rolls, though he doesn’t really go anymore.
Witchcraft. I mean, please. Granted, it wasn’t the Baptists or the Methodists or the Presbyterians or a super well-known sect, and it wasn’t even the Catholics, who goodness knows have been accused of lots of whacked out things in thousands of years. But witchcraft? Don’t be stupid. Google before you go shooting off at the mouth. I mean, Wikipedia’s right there.
The ignorance in this country seems to be at an overall all-time high, and safety’s at a premium, obviously. If you can even say safety exists anymore, when you can’t be safe in church on Sunday.
People are having to choose between buying groceries and putting gas in their car, and at the same time, people are getting laid off from their jobs left and right, businesses are closing, and not too many that still have jobs are reporting that their salaries are going up along with the cost of everything else that’s going up.
When does it all end? Where does it stop?
There’s an election coming up, but is anybody who could really change things really going to do something about it all?
I wonder. Something’s got to give. When things break, you fix them. Are we, collectively, broken enough yet?
