On the Banks of the Red Cedar

(I am sending out the Midweek update a bit early after the shooting on the campus of my alma mater. As much as I have written about gun violence through the years, I was still shocked by what happened at Michigan State. I realize it can happen anywhere, and often does, but when the icons of your youth are re-envisioned with someone firing a gun and killing people within its walls, your emotions become confounding and not a hell of a lot makes sense. I don’t know how it has happened that we have allowed ourselves to accept these horrors as a part of living in the U.S., but we need to get after the business of making it stop. Otherwise, we get a Uvalde or Sandy Hook every month or two, and other killings in the interim. As always, I ask you to subscribe and share. Keeps a body motivated. - JM)

The Red Cedar River, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan

There is a river that flows through the campus of Michigan State University and the slow, serene watercourse it describes has become almost tonal for the campus and the people who live, learn, and educate at the nation’s first Land Grant University. The Red Cedar River wends past the W.J. Beal Botanical Garden, established in 1873 and the oldest continual botanical garden in the U.S., and courses past the university’s towering Spartan Stadium. Through the tangle of tree limbs can be seen the monolithic Beaumont Tower, the school’s most recognizable landmark. In 1922, MSU’s first collegiate hockey game was played on the Red Cedar’s frozen surface and in the winter months students have been known to sneak plastic lunch trays from their dormitory cafeterias to sit on and slide down the riverbanks and across the ice.

Beal Botanical Garden

Many of us who attended Michigan State have fallen in love while walking along the Red Cedar, holding hands beneath the bright October leaves, and dreaming up our shared futures. I think it might be the most photographed body of water on the planet because there is neither undergrad nor alum who can cross a footbridge without stopping to capture an image with their phones of the light and the water’s ripples and the tunnel of trees. On autumnal weekends, the football team and the famed Spartan Marching Band walk parallel to the Red Cedar to make their grand entrances through admiring crowds of tailgaters, whose pulses run quicker with the first notes and opening line of the fight song.

“On the banks of the Red Cedar……..”

Campus Footbridge over the Red Cedar in Full Autumnal Color

In my anxious youth, I spent lazy spring days sitting by that river and reading the great books of authors whose words and stories changed my life. My collegiate years I lived in a dormitory a few minutes distant from the river and dreamily lay shoulder to shoulder with a red-haired farm girl, who would become my bride and grow to love the university and its icons with an expansiveness mostly unmeasurable. The fact is that sleepy river, which drains 460 square miles of mostly farmland on its 51-mile meander to empty into the Grand River, seems to change everything it passes. In large part because of the imagery of the Red Cedar, you can leave that university, but it never leaves you. I have clandestinely scattered the ashes of one of my college roommates on the riverbank near the stadium because, as he told me in his last moments before passing, “It’s the only place I have ever been truly happy.”

And for most of us, it is also the only place we have felt truly safe.

The shooting on MSU’s campus has killed even more than innocent students. Our sense of security has also been mortally wounded. We were not naïve to the risks of guns, but East Lansing has always felt far north enough to be on the perimeter of danger and even the risks of fools with firearms. Silliness, I suppose, to have such thoughts. Our campus was open and idyllic. My guess is no one ever imagined the idea of a gunman walking into a classroom and opening fire even though that scene is constantly repeated in American culture.

According to data collected by the Washington Post, 948 school shootings have taken place since a gunman opened fire at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012, and guns are the leading cause of death among American children and teens aged 19 or younger. One out of every ten fatalities caused by guns is someone younger than 19. The statistics are hard to read, and even more difficult to process. There has been a total of 2,032 school shootings since 1970 and after the Columbine High School slaughter in 1999, more than 350,000 students have been on a campus during a school shooting. Every day, 12 children die from gun violence in America and another 32 are shot and injured.

If these numbers don’t change the political will in this country, we will be dooming ourselves to live with senseless slaughter because our population has decided the feel of a trigger on an index finger is more precious than a beating heart. We can end this; other nations do not suffer such horrors with predictable regularity. They have changed their laws to fit the times. Americans, too, have readily altered our Constitution, both legislatively and by legal ruling of precedent since it was first drafted. The words protecting firearms and ownership, however, have been treated as sacrosanct, as though a deity handed an automatic weapon to every citizen and told them to guard it closely.

A ban on assault weapons came before the U.S. House of Representatives last year and passed, even though every Republican in the chamber voted against the measure. The law failed in the Senate due to the filibuster, an outdated rule that allows any member to stop consideration or passage of new legislation simply by sending an email to the clerk that says they want to filibuster. Overcoming such opposition requires a two-thirds majority. The National Rifle Association (NRA) and gun lobby has such control over U.S. politicians that on the same day students and teachers were slaughtered at Uvalde, the governor of Texas spoke to the NRA’s annual convention via video. Low travelers like Texas Senator Ted Cruz were more than willing to stand before the gathered gunners that day and imply the tragedy was caused mostly because the school doors were not locked. Guns are never the problem. They are how the West was won, and many Republican elections.

There are at least two great universities in the state of Michigan. The one I have loved was created by the land grant trend that arose prior to the Civil War. Michigan State University was the first institution of higher learning founded by a grant from a state government in 1855, a concept that later became federal law when signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1862 during the Civil War. The act set aside federal lands to create colleges to “benefit the agricultural and mechanical arts.” MSU has since become a global leader as a research institution and still has managed to produce three of the greatest writers of English letters in my generation in the personages of Jim Harrison, Richard Ford, and Thomas McGuane. As was the intent of its founding, the sons and daughters of factory workers and farmers, waitresses and plumbers, carpenters and truck drivers, blue collar and white, come to the open doors of a campus that helped to change the course of Civil Rights and the lives of people whose economic conditions might have condemned them to a lesser existence.

I was one of those.

In recent years, the university’s reputation has been marred by a failure to manage a crisis caused by a sexual predator within its ranks. Leadership has changed, consequently, but we are still doing penance. My thought, though, is that MSU’s recently adopted brand tagline, “Spartans Will,” might serve every interest group that wants to help pass gun reform and safety laws. The force of will has been missing from the masses of voters, even after various victims’ groups have fought the headwinds blown with the money of gun manufacturer lobbies and the NRA. How do we even have a debate, though, on the issue when we have officeholders elected to congress that find it appropriate to wear AR-15 lapel pins into the peoples’ house, and what, exactly, is there to debate? We have all the data needed to justify more stringent gun laws.

I hope the river that runs through the most beautiful campus in all the land will never stop flowing and each new class of students will be drawn to its banks as a place of quiet safety and inspiration. We cannot surrender our sanctuary to guns and violence and politicians who lack courage. Our task, I believe, is to lead a movement that changes gun laws and begins on the banks of the Red Cedar River. Let Americans look back someday and see that when the horror came to us, we gathered a chorus of voices to force change, and our words were heard across the country. Way too much has already been lost.

And it's past time for more political courage to be found.

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