American Faces

By BARRY FRIEDMAN

Minden, Germany, about two hours north of Hamburg, has a population of 100,000 — or about the population of Allen, Texas. There’s a mall, Werre-Park, in Minden, which attracts 1.3 million people per year, approximately 28% of whom have mental problems. But no child at Werre-Park was shot by any of them on May 6.

You know where this is going.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health Disorders, part of the National Institutes of Health, an estimated 26% of Americans aged 18 and older suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder. In Germany, according to the German Association for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, and Psychosomatics, 28% of Germany’s adult population do, as well — so that’s a wash. Maybe, then, it’s not mental health that’s causing the shooting deaths of 50 people each day in America — maybe it’s, you know, the guns.

Nah.

According to Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas), mass shootings, generally, and the one in Allen, specifically, are a result of too many Americans, “Who don’t believe in an almighty God, who is absolutely in control of our lives.”

He’s not only unconscionably, insufferably, and sanctimoniously smug, he’s wrong.

According to Pew, about 60% of Americans say that God is all-powerful, while only 33% of Germans, according to ringforpeace.org, believe he makes things better.

Germany, meanwhile, has 0.08 homicides by firearms per 100,000 people, America has 19.7.

But we believe in God!

To the gun lobby here, though, statistics on guns and death in America matter as much as parsley on a dinner plate. One imagines that unless every child in the US is shot dead — or, more to the point, if every son and daughter of every GOP senator and House member were (but even then, who knows?) — it wouldn’t matter, and we might as well just move on.

Recently, though, a state senator from Texas, Roland Gutierrez (D), was on CNN’s State of the Union and reminded us what we’re moving on from. “I have seen hundreds of hours of body cam of what happened in Uvalde. And as much as you don’t want people to see that in America, what happens, literally, their face is gone. I have seen two images like that in the Uvalde victims, where little girls’ faces are just gone.”

Days before children lost their faces in Allen, Texas, US Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) posed in a shirt with a picture of an AR-15 on it and the caption, “SINCE WE’RE REDEFINING EVERYTHING THESE DAYS, THIS IS A CORDLESS HOLE PUNCHER.”

She’s hilarious like that.

Next to her in the photo was a smiling man in a camouflage hat whom I can only imagine did not have a faceless child or grandchild lying dead on the ground of a mall.

Wanna bet, though, Boebert still wears the shirt?

I am alive, you are alive, because we were in other malls (or movie theaters or churches) on May 6 — meaning we are lucky that our grieving families did not have to hear a weeping Ted Cruz offer them thoughts and prayers on May 7.

I was going to end the column there — transitions in America from mass shootings to any topic are both insulting and impossible — but the Sunday night after the Allen massacre, I went to Congregation B’nai Emunah in Tulsa, my hometown, to see and hear a musical celebration for my rabbi, Marc Boone Fitzerman, who is retiring after 38 years. There was a chorus and a band and they did songs by Johnny Cash, Woody Guthrie, Leonard Cohen, Smokey Robinson, and Irving Berlin. There was food (well, of course there was — we’re Jews).

Religious and civic leaders spoke too long.

Children talked too loudly.

In other words, perfect.

They played and sang Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” in Yiddish.

There was a moment when Rabbi Fitzerman walked through the sanctuary and saw Rabbi Sherman. Sherman had been my rabbi at another temple in town for many years. There’s an old joke that no matter how small the Jewish population is in any given city, there need to be at least two places of worship, as Jews need to be mad at someone.

Sherman and Fitzerman had been adversaries, colleagues, brothers in religious arms against those in Oklahoma who believe guns are a birthright, and friends for more than three decades.

Sherman stood up.

The two rabbis, one retired, one retiring, embraced. Sherman, the bigger man, enveloped Fitzerman. They disappeared into each other.

Neither seemed willing to let go.

Fitzerman’s successor, Rabbi Dan Kaiman, stood on the bema, smiling, joyously waving his hands in the air, trying to dance, as the music played and the chorus sang.

At the end of the celebration, the congregation sang “This Land is Your Land”; “Oklahoma!”, and, yes, “America, the Beautiful.”

On a cold and ruined hallelujah in Allen, Texas (and in America), here it was on 1733 South Owasso Avenue in Tulsa, Oklahoma: the humanity. The hope. The transition.

Barry Friedman is an essayist, political columnist, petroleum geology reporter — quit laughing — and comedian living in Tulsa, Okla. His latest book is “Jack Sh*t: Volume One: Voluptuous Bagels and other Concerns of Jack Friedman.” In addition, he is the author of “Road Comic,” “Funny You Should Mention It,” “Four Days and a Year Later,” “The Joke Was On Me,” and a novel, “Jacob Fishman’s Marriages.” See barrysfriedman.com and friedman oftheplains.com.

From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2023

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