Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

The most recent mass shootings in America have me recall a conversation some years ago. A single mother, and fellow graduate student, shared the difficulty of raising her young son. She did not want him to playact violence. She wasn’t necessarily a pacifist, but knew intimately the dangers of violent boys who become violent men.

Between the ages of five and eight his holiday wishlist was filled with swords, combat figures, and toy guns. She didn’t understand why, until she realized that playdates with friends meant encounters with everything from toy rocket launchers to gun-toting cowboys. One morning, watching him in their front yard construct his own gun out of sticks and blades of grass, she decided to take him to Toys R’ Us.

Is it this overwhelming sense that fighting is an irreducibly, encoded fact of human biology the thing that prevents us from working toward a society free of guns and conflict? This perception of ourselves prevents us from building communities that are guided by love, decency, human regard, trust, and respect for life.

Evil seems inevitable and violence is painted as its antidote. Guns, it is argued, deter criminal intentions, and protect lives. And thus, we need more weapons in order to eradicate gun violence. We are urged to arm teachers and to pass carry-free laws, otherwise we open up ourselves to the worst in society. If that bit of reasoning sounds like an Ouroboros, you’re not alone.

How do we foster a greater belief in each other rather than in our guns? How might we come to live without fear of each other? I have no solutions.

Today’s poem points to the conundrum of guns in society and points to the possibility of our imaginations to release us from their hold.

Boy Shooting at a Statue
by Billy Collins

It was late afternoon,
the beginning of winter, a light snow, 
and I was the only one in the small park 

to witness the lone boy running 
in circles around the base of a bronze statue. 
I could not read the carved name 

of the statesman who loomed above, 
one hand on his cold hip, 
but as the boy ran, head down, 

he would point a finger at the statue 
and pull an imaginary trigger 
imitating the sounds of rapid gunfire.

Evening thickened, the mercury sank, 
but the boy kept running in the circle 
of his footprints in the snow 

shooting blindly into the air.
History will never find a way to end, 
I thought, as I left the park by the north gate 

and walked slowly home 
returning to the station of my desk 
where the sheets of paper I wrote on 

were like pieces of glass 
through which I could see 
hundreds of dark birds circling in the sky below.

“Boy Shooting at a Statue” by Billy Collins from THE TROUBLE WITH POETRY © 2011 Billy Collins. Used by permission of Penguin Random House.