Cyclical State of Grief

It's one of those days where I am struggling and realize that I am having an emotional reaction in real time, which you will see to the conversation that Jonathan and I have with regard to the latest mass shooting in Colorado Springs at Club Q. I try really hard to provide all of you with information, community conversations that make you feel less alone, less crazy, and something that gives you a yeah, okay, this is what we can do or yes, I feel this way to moment as you're

listening to the show today, I'm going to be honest, I am really just sad. I am really sad and tired of covering mass shootings, particularly ones that are aimed at communities that I'm a part of. I wish that this country was better. I wish that our politicians, all of them, gave a shit about saving actual lives, not

just pretending. I wish that people who stoke violence, like Lauren Bobert and Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Green and Paul Gossar and the entirety of the Republican Party were held accountable for the crimes that they are committing, not only against their constituents, but against this country. I wish that for every single tweet and statement that went out with pictures of politicians posing with weapons of mass destruction, that they were fined, that they were tried as accomplices

or accessories after the fact. I wish that there were penalties for their criminal speech and behavior that gives cover and to people whose only desire is to cause pain and devastation and fear. There is no safer space or

haven for queer people than queer spaces. For many people, particularly that are living inside of red states and redder counties, that one queer bar center gathering place is the only time when they can feel safe inside of their own skin, in their own bodies, because whether it's going into a grocery store, going into a place of worship, or a school as a queer person, and for folks who are visibly queer, meaning that there can be no assumption based

on how people are looking at you. You walk around with a target on your back because of people like Donald Trump, Lauren Bobert, Marjorie Taylor Green, Mike Pence, and others that use religion as the shield for their bigotry and hate, who want to cape for those who want the ability to discriminate and to humanize, and then want to turn around and offer their thoughts and fucking prayers as if it does a damn thing or it fucking matters.

I wish that those people knew what it was like to be the only one in a room in space and feel in fear of how other people are going to react to you, because I feel that if everyone experienced that level of fear, then maybe those that have the power to do something about it fucking would But what am I? I'm assuming that most human beings have empathy, and what I realize about the Republican Party is that

they are void of that. When I posted on Twitter, which by the way, as you all know, has become increasingly a sewer, and I don't know how much longer I will choose to be on the platform. I don't want to seed ground to the far right, but I also don't want to expose myself to a level of toxicity and verbal abuse in order to prove a point

and continue to make a vapid egomaniac richer. Nonetheless, when I posted about the shooting at Club Q, I had some asshole decide to comment and say, oh, well, you know, I like how you'll only come out on one side of gun violence, and I'm just like, the fuck up do you think that this is some type of fucking conversation like competition. People should feel safe. I don't give a fuck who you pray to, who you sleep with,

how you identify. I don't care. You should be able to be in your home, leave your home, leave your community, ghost shopping, go get a drink, go to a movie theater, go to a synagogue, go to a temple, go to a mosque. You should be able to feel safe. That should be the marking of an industrialized society, of a democracy.

That it isn't just the freedom to wield and take photos with your fucking cosplay bullshit aar fifteens, but that the rest of us should be able to feel safe in our own skin and the fact that we don't the fact that in this society we would rather teach children active shooter drills than do anything about actual active shooters. The fact that we want to put together policies on red flag laws that in the last two fucking shootings have done dick to prevent them. We're not a civilized country.

I don't even know what that means when people want to talk about civilized or you know, developed. If anything, America is fucking developing, it is an underdeveloped society because it is not one that is marked with empathy. It is not one that is marked with love. It is not one that is marked with safety, not even for those that are carrying around the ar fifteens and the fucking bazookas to go to Starbucks, because that's how fucking small they are in their real lives that they need

external validation. We refuse to have real conversations about where this shit is coming from. So let's all pretend and pause for the thoughts and fucking prayers that don't do shit.

What I want I want a class action lawsuit from the people of these United States that are sick of the fucking NRA, that are sick of the politicians that are bolstered up and get rich off of their ignorance to the largest scope and problem because the mouths around their table are fed, overfed at that because apparently the only way that this is going to stop is that for those that are creating the policies to consistently be harmed and live in fear at the same level that

the rest of us live, or to somehow we fucking held accountable and one of those motherfuckers to go in jail because their tweets and their statements that they're putting out can be directly linked to the violence that is escalating in this country. Because until those people are held responsible, none of this is going to change. It is just going to get worse. And I'm tired of trying to appeal to people's emotions when I realize that they are emotionless.

They just don't give a fuck. So I want to go after the gun manufacturers. I want to go after the lobby sets. I want to go after the politicians. I want to pull up their social media, their voices, and you tell me that they don't matter because he said the same fucking people that are going into libraries and schools to ban books because they believe that those books and the acceptance and inclusion of people from marginalized

communities is somehow going to shift people's thinking. Yeah, it will. It'll make them more inclusive, it'll make them more empathetic, it'll make them more loving. And God forbid we have that, because then you won't be able to capitalize on fucking fear. I'm sick to death of this country. I'm sick to death of inaction. I'm sick to death of the thoughts and prayers. And you will hear in the conversation coming up next with our friend doctor Jonathan Metzel, that our

disassociation does not mean that we don't care. It is the place that we're moving to in order to have self preservation, because no one can exist in this cyclical state of grief on a regular basis. I don't know what else to say today, friends, except to take care of yourselves, take care of each other as you choose to gather with chosen family or blood family and friends,

recognize that these moments are really fleeting. They are really fleeting, and there are too many people that are going to have too many empty seats around their table that could have been avoided if we gave a ship folks. You know that whenever I have the opportunity to sit down with our friend, our in house doctor, doctor Jonathan Metzel, I am always greatly appreciative. And Jonathan, you know, it seems that every week that we talk, it is on the heels of tragedy. I don't know what else to

say about it. Folks were coming and recording this just days after the mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado that took the lives of five of the patrons at Club Q and Colorado Springs injuring I think roughly nineteen that we know of at this point. And Jonathan, you know, I just before we get into any of the specifics, I just want to get your reactions. You know, I'm assuming, like like me, your phone was buzzing the morning following the shooting with alerts from different outlets. So what was

you What were your initial reactions? I mean, first of all, it's impossible to experience this outside the context of the anti queer, anti trans hate that is, you know, always been brewing in our country, but is now reached a truly fatal level. And so the context is important because I understand it has flashbacks for a lot of people to the Pulse shooting in Colorado, But this is a much more dangerous time, even though the fatality numbers were

considerably less than the Pulse shooting. But in the context of what is really kind of acceptable hate right now, I feel like the implications, the kind of broader implications of this are are just incredible, right I mean, there are a lot of people with guns, There are a lot of very unstable people out there, and they're in a way being given a kind of carte blanche in

a way. I mean, we don't know anything about the story here, and I'm sure it'll be a unique story the way it always is, and they'll also be remnants of other stories of histories of violence and misogyny and

guns and stuff. But the context right now is just breathtaking, because even in the Pulse shooting, if you look back at what happened, then it wasn't just the outpouring of support we see, which is what we see now, but also a kind of mobilization of the system that should work to protect people, and particularly people who are most

at risk by the system. And now this is in the context of a very unstable political environment that basically gains and monetizes anti queer, anti trans hat and can I mean the Colorado springs honestly has been an incredible response as far as I can tell, But it's in the context of a county that is a so called Second Amendment sanctuary zone where you can't enforce any gun laws whatsoever, and so all that support is in the context of a framework that really literally doesn't enable anybody

to do anything about it. You know, I have to say that while the numbers to your point about the pulse shooting that happened in Florida that claimed forty nine lives, that when we think about it, just in the context of numbers, we think to ourselves, well, you know, it wasn't as bad. And I was speaking earlier, and the person I was speaking to said, the headline came across,

and I didn't even allow myself to be sad. I was just in full on rage and anger because the very idea that five people being shot isn't as bad as forty nine or seventeen or nineteen children or eighteen children is just like a grappling that emotionally, spiritually we shouldn't have to do right that like that that you know, part and parceling out tragedy shouldn't be a part of our just normal existence in this country, and yet it is.

And so Jonathan, I just want to I want to talk about that kind of the gaps that we're having in our emotional sentiments as we deal with one mass shooting after the next. What I realized as I was getting ready to share, you know, social media, my thoughts, this only comes six months after the Buffalo shooting. It only comes, you know, a handful of months after Uvaldi. In between that was a shooting that happened at the parade that you know, that picked off people on the

Fourth of July holiday. Like, it's just the inundation and then our inability to actually grieve. Can you just speak to speak to that, because I think that it's it's important, and I think that we also beat ourselves up about the fact that, like there's just so much grief that we're not even really touching that emotion in the way that we used to. Post traumatic stress disorder is a framework that people often use to talk about these kind of things, and I feel like it's useful and it's

also not useful. The idea of post traumatic stress disorder is that you have a repeated response to a threat of death or hearing news about about it, or being close to it. But the response in PTSD is a is a hyper vigilance, exaggerated startle response. You're like on edge.

And really what we're seeing is post traumatic stress dissociation in a way that people are so numb that in a way, when it's coming at you so often, it's like exactly like who's whoever sent you that message said, you feel less in a way, And so we're having a kind of dissociation to the horror and trauma of all of this in a way that is not completely linked to what people do in war zones, but it is reminiscent of it in a way that in a way, if you've felt if you felt this all the time,

you really couldn't function. And so in that sense, it's not PTSD because the trauma is ongoing and we're associating, and I think that's part of what's happening. But then the other issue is just you know, the initial PTSD studies were done in military theaters, right that people who were flying airplanes in Vietnam, if they flew five hours of sorties where they were facing anti aircraft fire and thought they were going to die. They had a five

percent chance of getting PTSD. They flew fifty hours, they had a fifty percent chance of getting PTSD, and here and so basically the symptoms correlated with the amount of time you thought your life was at risk and then you flew back to the base and you could feel safe, and then you know that was like there's a beginning and end, and here people across America feel safe never They don't feel safe in a bus coming back from a field trip with their Virginia football team. They don't

feel safe going to a parade in Chicago. They have to look over their shoulder in what should be the safest space, a queer bar where people are just there to celebrate and feel camaraderie and feel support across the community. So these really safe spaces, I mean, that's of course what gives mass shootings their horror and their power, their acts of you know, not not just violence, but their acts of a particular kind of violence that really rupture the safety of that kind of the safest spaces are

the ones where you're the most vulnerable. But really that's the question, where can you feel safe because you never get to fly home to your base. I mean that just description and that articulation, like tears just came to my eyes, Jonathan, because I'm recognizing that that is really true, that what you're saying with regard to post traumatic stresses, is this a reaction that doesn't necessarily match the trauma in itself and the fact that we are consistently traumatized

and consistently living on edge. That disassociation isn't us not wanting to care. It's the fact that we can't have

a NonStop grief, right, And so I wondered them. My question to you is that if if we can't have NonStop grief and we have to disassociate as a way of self preservation, which is what it sounds like, then how do we I don't know, I guess the question is how do we move forward with the same type of organization and strategy to end gun violence when it just gets worse and gets more persistent, Like I, you know, I keep seeing all these headlines you and I have

talked about on the show, like you know, children and their levels of anxiety and prescriptions that are being given out and because of these compacted tragedy. We've talked about this, honestly, and I just don't even know if we are disassociating to the point of just being able to make it through, what does that mean about our ability to actually muster

the strength to stop this. It's interesting if you do what I do, right' I study gun policy, and enough these shootings, people will interview me and say, what about red flag laws? What about background checks? And I give the answer because I think they're important in there what we have. But it's so clear that there's no policy that's gonna stop this from happening right now. I mean,

we have more guns than people by far. We have more mass shootings than days in the calendar year by a considerable amount, and so it's not like there's one policy. And in this shooting in particular, shows that because something like what's called a red flag law, people aren't enforcing it. They're not the law doesn't enforce it. People are reluctant

to call authorities on their relatives. And so this is a particular sign to me that the policy interventions that we have, which were made out of compromise trying to create a middle ground, just don't work, and so the issue is why don't they work? Should we just enforce those policies? And I guess I just think of the places that have faced this kind of trauma, nothing on our scale, but this kind of trauma Australia, Scotland, etc. Etc. And really what those are marked by is not any

particular policy. It's people on all sides coming to the table to negotiate and find some kind of middle ground where there's some compromise. And we just don't have that process. And so as much as we shout frustration about the fact that in this case, Colorado has a red flag law, it wasn't followed for whatever reason, but it's not going to be what at least let me just jump in for a second, because at least what I've heard right, And again we're still receiving details and trying to piece

together the why. But I think you know, the why is to me obvious. But um is that in both the shooting in Virginia with the football team and both this Colorado spring shooting, there were flags right there was In the Virginia at the university, the shooter was flagged for having talked about guns and said that they owned a gun, and but because no violent action had been taken, the officers on the university's campus said there was nothing

that we could do. Similarly, in Colorado Springs, it was like there was a flag there were potentially a connection with bomb that were made, you know, in previous years. And it's so it's like, I guess what is the purpose If red flags are literally to send up a flare this person is potentially dangerous, but then we're not actually going to take action until the violence occurs. Then what's the point of there being a red flag? You know? The Biden gun reform efforts are based on many things,

but one is really bolstering red flag laws. I share your concern and your critique about them very deeply, right because, I mean, let's just be honest. You don't get to become a mass murderer overnight. There are concerning symptoms in

everybody who gets to that stage. But the problem is in part a numbers game, right that for everybody who shows those symptoms and then becomes a mass shooter, you'll have a million people who have the exact same personality profile who never do anything, And so there's no predictive power for that, and then the other part is a lot of people have had these same symptoms for years, and so it's like, what's the day where they're going

to snap. It's psychiatrists and judges and police don't have any idea, and so restricting somebody's guns for fourteen days or even six months, which never happens, is not going to change that. A lot of the issues here are long standing characterological personality issues, and so in that regard,

it's just not effective in a way. And then you on top of that, put that places like El Paso County where this shooting happened, they basically have a stance against enforcing gun laws that's on the books, and so it's just the numbers make this impossible. And even if you look at how many red flag laws have been you know, it's like twelve over eight, you know, over the years in this county because they don't enforce them.

And so it's just like the minute you start, I mean, any any one of these factors would have been devastating for this case, but when you add them all up, it's just the system is not going to work to prevent this kind of violence. And that's kind of where we're at right that that's kind of where we're at. So we're just gonna live with this like it's I mean, like we are. We're just I mean, this is a

part of what it means to live in America. Is that any time that you leave your home, or even if you're in your home, you know, the probability of you being shot to death is pretty fucking high. Look, I I just I don't I'm at a I honestly, this doesn't usually happened to me interviewing you. I'm at a loss. I just I'm at a loss to figure out like the path forward if I don't know what I don't know what it is, Jonathan, I could answer that too, is I mean mass shootings obviously there are

a reflection of our broken political system. Because of functioning society will come together across the table to say, man, our citizens are dying, and what can we do? We are dying, and what can we do to address this so that we can be more safe. A communal framework where people are saying, Okay, here are my rights, but here is your need for safety. Let's work it out. And there are so many other examples of societies that

are not in wartime figuring that out. I don't think that's where we're at, because maybe we are gearing towards some more conflict, but in the meantime, our political system does not allow for that kind of negotiation. So mass shootings are symptoms a red flag law is not going to fix the structural problems of our country right now. And I think that's that's really kind you know, where we're at. I mean, again, there are so many models of countries that have gotten to this point and you know,

taken another turn in a different direction. So it's not like there are no models for it, but it's just that part of that issue is that. And then I also just cannot help thinking if the tables are turned right, I mean, imagine transgender somebody in a drag show took an air fifteen and went into a country bar and killed a lot of people, Like, would we be saying, oh,

this is just America. No. The fact that this is violent that's being done toward already at risk communities really is part of the level of helplessness that we're feeling. And I can just say, you know, I mean, I think there should be no subway crime, but if you turn the tables. You know, black person pushes someone on the subway. It's that racial categories are made so clear, right, Um,

this is minoritized violence against the majority group. But when the tables are turned, as they so often are in these mass shootings, um it, then we get the helplessness narrative. So this plays out around the narratives of America right now.

But it's like, I agree, right to some extent, But then I look at Parkland, and I look at Newtown, and I look at these places where mass shootings have entered into white suburbia, well off places, and I'm like, and if that is not the triggering if it's if, if if, if the narrative can persist that well, it's the crime that happens in the cities, it's it's these it's these marginalized communities that are the ones that are affected. So I don't have to care because it's not me.

But that's not the case, Jonathan. It's like the mass shootings spread well far outside of what has been designated as okay for violence to occur in southside of Chicago. We don't give a fuck about, right, because oh, it's always there's always a shoot of up happening there. But this isn't the case anymore and hasn't been for so long.

So my last question for you is that, like, if white suburban women continue to vote in mass with Republicans, and their numbers continue to increase with Republicans, and it's their kids that are going into the new towns and the parklands like and the UVA campus and all of these things, like, what is going to get these people to care? Well? As we know, as I know from my work in Dying of Whiteness, all roads lead back to more guns. I mean, people see guns as their protectors.

So after mass shootings we see pretty predictable trends where people on the liberal side of the divide will support more regulation like we're talking about here, and people on the conservative side will say, well, this shows that you need more guns now. It's pretty laughable. I mean, imagine being in a dance club with the soundproof walls that's

totally dark and strobe lights. Imagine everybody in that club having a gun when something like this breaks out, you know, it's it's absurd, it's absurd and so but but again, there is a divide that is reinforced and reified every time something like this happens, and so part of the issue is we just have completely different experiences of this. But I would say just going back to my point before and not I mean, I agree there's so many

mass shootings. Again, there's more than one mass shooting a day, But can you think of a mass shooting, and I'm sure there is, I'm just not thinking of every night now where somebody from a disadvantaged group kills a lot of people from the majority group. So I understand Parkland

and Sandy Hook all those things. I mean, those led to more guns and more gun rights and ideas of what you can't be safe in your school, But I would also say again there's you can't really set any trend really, except to say that there is also a case of the kind of message of violence toward disadvantaged groups being held as a kind of logical extension of America and violence and gun culture. I guess you know. My feeling is that no one is held accountable, right,

The gun manufacturers aren't held accountable. The politicians that stoke violence and say that Democrats are trying to kill us and call LGBTQ people pedophiles, and groomers, so the violence that's taken out against them is justified because you're trying to save the children. Like I just like somewhere at some point, the cyclical nature of this violence has to end. And yet we've been having this conversation for close to thirty years since Columbine, and it hasn't ended. It's just

gotten worse. And so I'm like, at this point, I don't know how folks that are working like you have for your career to end gun violence and mass shootings, like, how you continue because I just don't red flag laws, ain't it right? And that's what everybody was pinning their hopes and prayers on, is that, Okay, well we'll compromise on this thing. And the last two shootings over the last two weeks have shown us that that's not the case.

So I'm just confused about where we go chaos or community really, honestly, to think of Martin Luther King, I hope that I'm providing framework for by people. At some point we'll come to the table, and if not, that I'm chronicling demand. I mean, it's it's one of those two things. And defense, what do you ask me? You know? So yeah, caught chaos our community. I mean, that is the ultimate question that we need to face, that we need to ask, and I don't think enough people are

asking it. As always, Jonathan, thank you so much for taking the time to join us on Woke a F. I don't know when we'll ever have a conversation that makes us feel like we are winning, but today is clearly not that day. But I appreciate you continuing to show up each and every week to provide contexts and value to our listeners. Thank you so much. And these are the conversations we really should be happening having after mess shootings, so I'm very grateful in return. Thanks Jonathan.

That is it for me today, dear friends on wok F as always, power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.