Addressing the nation in the wake of Wednesday’s Florida
school shooting, President Trump told the victims they “are never alone.” He
offered to do “whatever we can do to ease your pain,” while committing “to working
with local leaders to tackle the difficult issue of mental health.” In a
tweet, he had this to say:
So many signs that the Florida
shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled from school for bad and erratic
behavior. Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always
report such instances to authorities, again and again!
Other “true
friends and champion[s]” were quick to add their two cents: Rick Scott called
the shooting “pure evil.” Marco Rubio tweeted that the attack “was designed
& executed to maximize loss of life,” but said it was too early to discuss
gun control. The BBC reports that Rubio told Fox News "You should know the
facts of that incident before you run out and prescribe some law that you claim
could have prevented it.”
I’m not entirely sure what facts Rubio is waiting on here. We
know that the FBI was notified twice that this individual might be planning
such an attack, and we know the school was aware of the individual. We also
know the shooter attained his AR15 (every gun nut’s favourite toy) legally.
When Mr. Trump asks people to report the “mentally
disturbed,” I really don’t understand the logic. All the arguments for gun
control are already out there, so it’s not hard to understand why this tweet is
complete bullshit. Mr. Trump’s clear misunderstanding of mental health is the
most obvious place to begin. Though the “mentally disturbed” argument is the
common fallback of Trump, the GOP, and the NRA, few have ever really given an
adequate definition for what they mean when referring to a “mentally disturbed”
individual.
This is dangerous. Mr. Trump never defines exactly what he means
by the terms “mentally disturbed” and “big problem,” and he never defines what
he means what he means when he asks (who, exactly?) to “report such instances
to authorities.” I guess President Trump is unaware that the FBI was already
notified about this particular individual. Twice.
The president’s lack of clarity in this tweet leaves far too
much room for individual interpretation. Given the continued prevalence of
toxic stereotypes which are can be easily debunked with five minutes on the
internet, it is not unreasonable to ask the President of the United States to
qualify his statements.
Because right now it seems to me as though the President of
the United States is aligning mental illness with white supremacy and mass
murder for the express political purpose of backing
the private interest group that paid over $17 million to GOP candidates in the
2015-2016 election cycle.
As someone who’s dealt with a lifelong struggle with
depression and severe anxiety, I take personal offense to this. As someone
who’s struggled
with a health care system that can’t seem to provide answers for myself and
others close to me, I’m angry that this kind of rhetoric is not being more
widely questioned.
For a relative summation of my position here, I’d recommend
watching John Oliver’s
excellent segment on the subject. Mental illness – a health issue that
effects an increasingly vast segment of the western society in a variety of
ways – is the favoured scapegoat scape goat of gun lobbyists and the
politicians who gladly accept their money. It happened after Las Vegas, and it
happened after Orlando: these politicians and lobbyists are contributing a dangerous
rhetoric to mental health discussions in order to avoid dealing with the
political reality that the right has lost the gun control debate on all rational
and intellectual grounds.
In practice, this means that politicians like Trump and
Rubio consistently focus on the fact that the attacker can be broadly labelled “mentally
ill.” Meanwhile, the systematic factors that contributed to the shooting –the
killer’s background in foster care, his ties to white supremacists, the AR15 he
was legally allowed to own despite
multiple tip-offs to the authorities that he was potentially homicidal – are
ignored.
The standard Republican response also allows sweeps
politically inconvenient talking points under the rug – like the deleted Instagram
account in which the shooter showed off his Make America Great Again swag.
After all, he was disturbed.
Why dig deeper?
When mental illness is only just beginning to lose its
stigma in the west, it is the responsibility of moral individuals to question
the narrative Trump is setting. By consistently aligning the experience of
legitimately “sick individual[s]” with the fraction of mentally ill people who
turn violent (almost always due to other factors such as, I stress again, white supremacy), Trump and others like
him are hijacking a growing
awareness over an
important issue for political purposes.
To my knowledge, Mr. Trump has not once publically mentioned
mental illness outside the context of gun control.
Since this rhetoric has an impact that echoes far beyond
the borders of the United States, the responsibility to criticize the
precedent set at that country’s highest level also falls outside those borders.
That’s why I’m writing this piece. That’s why I’d like to see Prime Minister
Trudeau do more than give his “deepest
condolences” in between his Team Canada tweets.
In the future, I’d like to see the Prime Minister and other
Parliamentarians directly question the toxic narrative that is consistently being
spread in our southern neighbours. At the very least, this would be a good time
to bring up the issue of Canada’s
chronically underfunded mental health system.
One final note. About a year ago, I wrote a post in which I
pointed out the value of history in interpreting the new Trump presidency. I
asked readers to be vigilant, using an example from the historical moment most clearly
comparable to today’s America, 1930s Germany. I attempted emphasize how Hitler
utilized public apathy as a key weapon in Germany’s slow move from democracy to
dictatorship.
The mentally ill were one of this dictatorship’s first distinct
targets, along with Jewish and Romany communities.
In addition to Nazi Germany, Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, Imperial
Japan, and Communist Cuba all explicitly utilized the mentally ill for
political purposes, often to delegitimize political opponents. The list goes
on. In the west, a time when mental illness was a primary fallback for those
who opposed female suffrage remains in living memory. Though as a culture we
seem to have forgotten this.
I’m angry. Gun lobbyists and their political allies are
using the lived experience of millions – my
lived experience – to justify their blatant corruption and inaction. We
should all be angry.
