They Can’t Kill Human Creativity
by digby
John Lennon died 30 years ago today. And for many people my age it was our first real brush with our own mortality. How could a Beatle die?
There are going to be many tributes today, but none more thought provoking and heartfelt that this one by Michael Gerber:
It’s scary to see adults cry, and I saw a lot of that on December 9, 1980. Lennon’s murder felt personal, ominous even. Was this how we lived now, with rock stars getting shot? Was our country so full of madness that anyone who took a public stand — anybody who dared to be real — became a target? How did we get here? How could our country function under these conditions?
As we’ve discovered, it can’t.
For the first 48 hours after Lennon’s death, there was a sense of righteous indignation: We were going to do something, goddammit, to make sure this kind of thing didn’t happen again. Fathers coming home from work shouldn’t get gunned down by some random fruitcake carrying a cheap pistol. Then, the gun lobby started throwing its weight around, and President-elect Reagan started saying that maybe the solution was everybody carrying cheap pistols, and…that’s the way this country has run ever since. Thirty years of nothing but stupid bloody Tuesdays, with the possible exception of the day we elected Obama. And now even he seems determined to remind us that was a Tuesday, too.
It’s taken me 30 years, but I’ve finally figured out what I want to do about this — to say to Fate or the Devil or Mark David Chapman: yes, of course, you can kill individual human beings, but you can’t kill human creativity. You can’t kill the best of what people are.
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