Running With the Ball

I would like to impress you with some game-changing profundity about school shootings, but I can’t. Those more eloquent than I have long since covered that ground. And we are all repeating ourselves anyway. The only thing that’s significantly different now is the timing. The Parkland, Florida tragedy has presented those concerned about guns with an opportunity.

Maybe some of us are a little tired of the idea that guns represent an insoluble problem and that the NRA has an unbreakable stranglehold on the electoral process. But it’s still only February, and the congressional election, along with the ones for many state and local offices, are months away – plenty of time to start identifying legislators who have taken campaign money from the NRA and putting up candidates against them who refuse to do so. Single-issue politics? More like football. It’s about running with the ball that’s been thrown and caught. Football is about focusing on a single objective: getting the ball across the goal line.

We also hear the refrain that mass shootings are the new normal, that the repetition of these events has forced us to numb ourselves to the pain because there is no other choice. I believe the opposite, that the cumulative effect of shooting after shooting has finally reached a tipping point. Now, it’s school kids themselves accusing their government of failing them. Can they energize a movement where no one else could?

In football, most passes are not touchdown runs. The term “rushing” is a little curious, as most drives to the goal consist not of those big forward pushes but of many little advances -- and the movement is not always forward. Why did the FBI drop the ball on warnings about the Florida shooter?  But life, like football, is about seeing opportunities, taking advantage of them, and persevering until the ball is carried into the end zone, so to speak.

How many of us can remember when it seemed that everyone smoked? I did, most of my friends did, and most everyone in movies and TV did. Now, smokers, of tobacco at least, are a dwindling number. Smoking is thought of as not only unhealthy but inconsiderate of others, and smokers find it more and more difficult to indulge their habit, as venues for it disappear and the prices for cigarettes shoot through the roof. Smoking is still legal, but it’s no longer celebrated, just tolerated. Who would have foreseen that in 1960? This is how it has to be with guns in this country, for change to happen. Will today’s teenagers – the ones who will grow up to be tomorrow’s legislators -- be our ball-carriers on this drive?