Hi everyone,
This week’s newsletter comes in the wake of a mass shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, political unrest in France and Israel, and reflections on the anniversaries of wars in both Iraq and Yemen (more on Nashville and Yemen below). It also arrives in the middle of Lent, and the many places in our lives that news cameras will never capture where we are longing for God to fill us and make us whole. Whether you find yourself weary or stable, reeling or grounded, may you not grow weary in doing well because we know we will reap a harvest if we do not give up (Galatians 6:9). God is faithful.
Here are our highlights for this week.
Sy’s recommendations:
The shooting on Monday in Nashville felt closer to home for me than most. I have personal connections to teachers in the city and people in the community of the school. The fact that the victims were yet again children made the story pervasive national news. And on top of this catastrophe is the reality that it wasn’t even the only mass shooting on Monday. Fortunately the five people shot in Milwaukee survived. But the 14 mass shootings in the week preceding Nashville claimed the lives of 13 people, injuring another 68. So for many different reasons, I appreciated this prophetic word from Reverend Esau McCaulley in his regular New York Times op-ed. He makes the point that arguing against politicizing these tragedies is, functionally, a pro-gun talking point to maintain the status quo. But our almost daily mass shootings are the result of policy choices, and there is no reason to delay the process of starting to make different choices. Moreover, McCaulley argues, the results of the policy decisions countries make should be a metric we use to judge their success or failure. And America’s failure lies in the sheer number of child-sized coffins we are willing to tolerate.
The AR-15, one weapon of the Nashville shooter as well as the majority of America’s worst mass murderers, was an unpopular gun just 20 years ago. This Washington Post article traces the semi-automatic rifle’s history from a military weapon to a civilian favorite and symbol of pro-gun politics. The AR-15’s rise was the result of sustained marketing efforts by gun manufacturers who needed new sources of revenue due to falling sales in the early 2000’s. They exploited the patriotic zeal after 9/11 and successfully lobbied for the lapse of a federal law that banned assault rifle sales. That mixture of nationalism and greed has had the unsurprising results we see today. You can read more specifically about the marketing campaigns and see a collection of the advertisements used here.
On a separate though related note, this analysis of decades of gun crime data in Chicago from the Chicago Sun-Times, WBEZ, and The Marshall Project sheds light on the reasons police have failed to reduce everyday gun violence, despite pouring massive resources into the problem. The investigation is thorough and nuanced, but one main finding is that police strategy has been to arrest as many people as possible for low-level gun possession, while failing to solve even two out of every ten actual shootings. Like so many other police policies, this means a huge swath of people with no criminal background and a very low likelihood of committing more serious crimes face the incredibly oppressive consequences of the criminal legal system, while most killers face no accountability, victims receive no help, and crime statistics don’t budge. This devastates communities. Which communities? The article covers that too, but I doubt The answer will surprise you. The piece counters narratives we usually hear about guns, emphasizing the perspective of gun owners who arm themselves because of the ubiquity of guns, not because of their enthusiasm for “gun culture.”
Jonathan’s Recommendations:
This episode of the popular podcast Planet Money, and the accompanying article, highlight the system of “Osage Headrights,” which allowed members of the Osage tribe to retain rights to their land’s minerals, even as the government sold off the land. The land had oil, so the headrights created significant wealth for the Osage people. What happened next is a window into how economic exploitation, legalized oppression, and systematic disenfranchisement from long ago stretch into today. Many parties have conspired to take enormous sums of money from the tribe, and paternalistic and predatory laws made that larceny legal. The podcast tells the story of one native man from a different tribe coming into ownership of a headright, and then deciding to give it back to the people who never should have lost it in the first place. The piece for me illuminates how seeking to make things right can be complex and incomplete, but still worth the work on this side of heaven.
This interview from NPR with the president of Doctors Without Borders highlights the Yemeni civil war, and calls it the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. March 25th marked the 8th anniversary of the war between Sunni and Shia factions backed by Saudi Arabia and Iran respectively. US involvement included training Yemeni forces and offering intelligence. Lost in the geopolitical struggle is the harsh reality that a woman in Yemen now dies in childbirth every two hours, and 230,000 people have died in the last eight years mostly from starvation and preventable disease. The warring factions restrict the movement of medicine and healthcare workers, and Yemeni people have a very hard time getting ahold of daily necessities. It is sometimes difficult to make space in our hearts and minds for conflicts not in our newsfeeds, but it’s necessary for followers of Jesus to remain aware of and prayerful for all our neighbors abroad.
LeBron James is arguably the greatest basketball player of all time. But his legacy off the court could rival his impact on the hardwood. This piece dives into the work of his family foundation and specifically his school, called I Promise. Educational inequity is not a simple issue, and it’s intertwined with every facet in the life of a community. So James’ school has also expanded to offer its families healthcare, a food pantry, transitional housing, scholarships for college, and a lot more. Reading this piece, I am reminded that colonization and its effects touch every aspect of society. Addressing radical educational inequity opens up the reality that one oppressive system is entangled with so many others. It takes everyone doing their part for injustice to be undone. You and I may not have the access and resources of LeBron James, but we do have whatever God has given us to steward for his Glory. This story is a reminder of the call to use what we have to love our neighbors well, and for the long-term, by meeting their actual stated needs.
Thank you for reading. Stay safe, and we’ll see you next week.
The KTF team