I was born in Belleville, Illinois. I lived there until age nine. My parents were born there too, and lived there until we moved away when Dad was in his early forties. Mom likes to tell about how as a child she was sent down to the local tavern to get a bucket of beer for the grownups to pass around as they sat on lawn chairs and talked in the back yard on summer evenings.
Belleville has a strong German heritage and in those days breweries were just barely outnumbered by the Catholic churches, which are still on just about every corner. Everyone in Belleville roots for the St. Louis Cardinals, whose home stadium is right across the Mississippi River in the big city where you went on special occasions.
It’s jarring when your nondescript little home town shows up on the national news. And even more so when the reason is for something bad.
But what isn’t jarring about today’s news? That there's been another mass shooting. That the politicians are using it for grandstanding. That the media, observing Trump not making political hay from a tragedy for once, is waxing poetic about how “presidential” and “measured” he is being.
Sadly, that’s the different, and so by definition, newsworthy thing.
“Breaking news! Trump doesn’t respond to terrible national incident inappropriately.”
What IS the most disturbing, and perhaps most correctable, aspect of today’s shooting? The Belleville News-Democrat’s interview with the shooter’s neighbor of 6 years provides the answer:
“I didn’t really talk to him too much. He was a Democrat and I was a Republican, so we didn’t have too much to talk about.”
These days I live in rural Nebraska, one of the reddest places in the US. My neighbors are all Trump-loving Republicans, as are most of the people I see every day. My husband and I quite openly are not. Yet we all talk to one another. We talk about our kids and the weather and our gardens and our cars and where to get the best prices on gas. We exchange recipes and attend each other’s kids’ graduations and help each other fix flat tires. We smile and wave when we pass on the road.
We get along, and relate on the many things we do because we inhabit the same set of square miles and live in the same world. We’re neighborly, because we’re neighbors first, and political partisans second.
But also in the middle of the US lived a man whose slow boiling madness was surely not unrelated to a growing frustration, isolation and rage. He must have known he’d probably be killed during the shooting, but it didn’t matter as much as his need to commit a violent act of desperation. He became self-radicalized, another homegrown white male terrorist. And his neighbors barely knew him, even though they said “he seemed like a normal guy, a regular guy”, just because of politics.
It’s horrible that some one felt driven to shoot people. It’s terrible that some people were hurt and many people were terrorized. But horrible and terrible stories are in the news every single day. What’s noteworthy about this story is that the political divide is now so deep in our country that people shrug off estrangement from their nearest neighbors based solely on political preferences.
Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post summed up the problem nicely here, and he gives statistics about how this trend has been growing.
Many unfortunate things are now the new normal, but this one need not be. And the good news is, it’s one thing we can all do something about.
If there is any lesson from this yet-another-mass-shooting in the US, it is this: Go talk to your neighbors. Go find a reason. Do so especially if you know their politics are different than yours. Because you’ve got something in common, just by virtue of living near each other. Maybe it’s the local sports team, or maybe it’s just the same weather.
So go find out what it is. Nowadays you can’t send your kids down to the corner bar for a bucket of beer, but you can pick up a six pack and share it over the fence.
Better yet, invite them to sit in your back yard for a while. And just talk.