“America is not ready” is cowardly
No doubt you’ve seen excerpts from Matthew McConaughey’s Tuesday speech at the White House. As a prominent native of Uvalde, Texas, the Academy Award-winning actor has a personal connection to the mass shooting there. This “green Converse” clip about what 5.56 mm bullets did to shooting victim Maite Rodriguez, 10, is getting a lot of play.
You can watch the entire 21-minute speech here.
McConaughey was coy about his party alignment when he toyed last year with running for governor of Texas. I don’t know much about the “aggressively centrist” McConaughey’s politics. But he knows something about the target audience for any plea for even modest gun control legislation. McConaughey spoke Tuesday with Fox News anchor Bret Baier instead of the network’s fringe-right bomb-throwers.
Even CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta is reluctant to be more graphic in illustrating the kinds of wounds he has seen firsthand.
GSW is hospital code for gunshot wound. An instructor took Gupta’s medical school class to a gun range and used watermelons to illustrate the difference in wounds caused by pistol and rifle bullets. He never forgot it.
Then in Iraq, and later in the U.S., Gupta witnessed the real thing:
I was embedded with the Devil Docs, the Navy medical team that provides frontline medical care for the Marines. There are things that my cameraman Mark Biello and I saw on the battlefield that we still have a hard time talking about. They are still hard to even write about. Limbs blown clean off the body, and wounds so horrific, I thought for sure they must’ve been caused by a bomb or IED.
I never imagined that just a couple of years later, I would see the same sorts of injuries in US cities, including my own, Atlanta. Those are the days when I come home from the hospital simply unable to talk, let alone describe what I had just witnessed.
People wonder, Gupta contiinues, if what’s needed to move the public opinion needle on guns is an “Emmett Till” moment:
Emmett Till was a 14-year-old Black teen who was abducted and violently murdered in 1955 by White racists in Mississippi after a white woman accused him of whistling at her. Till’s mother took the unusual step of holding an open-casket funeral and allowing a photographer from Jet magazine to photograph her son’s disfigured, unrecognizable face to show the country the result of racial violence. Many consider that moment a turning point in the country’s collective support for the Civil Rights Movement.
Many of my colleagues have urged me to further describe the horrific injuries I have seen over the last nearly 20 years as a neurotrauma surgeon.
The truth is I’m not sure America is ready to see that. More importantly, it isn’t a decision anybody can make unless it’s their loss and their story to tell — like Emmett Till’s mother.
It is indeed a decision for the families. Till’s mother’s anguished decision changed the course of history. But waiting for America to be ready is the coward’s way. See no evil.
America was not ready to see pictures of Alabama State Troopers beating peaceful black civil right protesters in Selma in 1965. We were not ready to see Phan Thi Kim Phuc, terrified and naked, badly burned and fleeing after a South Vietnamese plane dropped napalm on her village in 1972. America was not ready to see pictures of U.S. soldiers torturing and abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib in 2004. America was not ready to see Minneapolis police murder George Floyd by slow strangulation in 2020.
Sometimes America needs to be shown. Ready or not.
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