The Terribly Joyous Sounds of a Last Gasp

The indelicate arc from status quo to change.

Photo by Stephen Harlan on Unsplash

Last gasps sound like the membrane of life itself bursting. Agonal breaths are by nature frantic, desperate, and alone. They are the sentinel of the dying. And that makes them hard to watch and unnerving to hear. The body does not want to give up what it knows it was put on this earth to do; breathe, communicate, love, and live. We can all appreciate and respect that lopsided effort to survive in the face of finality. Listening to someone fight to breathe makes your breathing harder. Just hearing it transfers the struggle, making the listener feel like they are doing the dying. Last gasps can be contagious in that way. But they are not only the purview of the dying physical body.

Last gasps also exist in the dying of the status quo.

I can hear those tortuous agonal breaths of this country’s ills, and most recently, in the ills of my home state of Tennessee ringing in my ears. As many around the country and around the world now know, the Tennessee legislature recently expelled two young, democratic black lawmakers from the legislative body for breaking parliamentary rules and norms of decorum. And they tried to do the same to a third democratic member, an older white woman, Representative Gloria Johnson, who, along with Representative Justin Jones and Representative Justin J. Pearson, dared challenge the status quo of old white men.

In the days after the tragic school shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville, where three elementary school students and three adult faculty and staff lost their lives to another assailant armed with an AR-15 and a mental illness, the legislature sat on its hands. It used its moral feebleness to exert the power of its ideology. Thoughts, prayers, and oppressive decorum hung in the air like those inefficient agonal breaths when deep, productive breaths and substantive action were required. The authoritative majority silenced these three lawmakers as a gallery full of angry and grieving constituents looked for answers. But there would be no talk of the tragedy in terms of solutions and certainly no talk of meaningful gun legislation as a response. Instead, the old boy network, the old-white south, cut off the representative’s microphones to protect the status quo. These lawmakers dared approach the well of the state house with megaphones to protest the body’s anemic response and spoke, anyway. That did not cost the two young black legislators a censure. It cost them their seats. Representative Gloria Johnson, who stood alongside them, survived her expulsion by the curious margin of one vote.

The body, more concerned with putting people in their place, revealed the ugliness of racism, intractability, and the dying of the status quo through its awkward survival-mode respirations. A body more concerned with putting people in their place. A body more concerned about how it looks than how it functions. A body insulted and rendered impotent by one of life’s cruelest indignities, the murder of children and faculty in their school classrooms and hallways.

 Like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and other too-common maladies, school shootings have become normalized.

Mass killings are something we accept as the cost of doing business, the cost of having a second amendment, and the acceptable loss of not having to change. As a state and country, we do not fear the death of elementary students via 5.56x45mm or.223 Remington automatic ammunition. We learned that much after our collective inaction in the wake of the twenty children and six adults who perished in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012. When we let that specific tragedy go by without meaningful change, we justified inaction to the degree that seems pathological, like a psychopath or sociopath. We don’t fear the world’s scorn or nauseating hypocrisy publicly exercised to protect outdated and misinterpreted laws and ideologies.

What we fear is change. Change is the great threat. Change is the frightening condition of being in flux, the shifting of political power so wrapped around our organs like a tumor that we choke off good sense and moral decency.

“They are coming to get mine.”

That phrase encapsulates the change we fear, even when we can’t explain with any understandable clarity who “they” are or what “mine” is. I suppose “they” is anyone who sees the world unfolding differently than our grandparents and parents did or a group we think threatens our personal family traditions. And “mine” must be an assortment of everything we collect. Every bit of the good, the bad, and the ugly along our journey. Unfortunately, we often give equal weight and substance to the good, the bad, and the ugly. That’s a mistake. We protect the past as if it needs protecting and leverage the future as if it matters less.

For example, Tennessee representative Tim Burchett (R) said about the Covenant school shootings in a stunning display of tone deafness, “There’s no way to fix gun violence.” He explained that his solution to keeping his daughter safe is to homeschool her. And followed that with a “they’re coming to get mine” argument.

He said, “My daddy fought in the Second World War, fought in the Pacific, fought the Japanese, and he told me, ‘Buddy if somebody wants to take you out and doesn’t mind losing their life, there’s not a whole heck of a lot you can do about it.’”

Pride in where we come from cannot be at the expense of where we are going.

And here is the good news. In the long run, it never is. Change happens to society, culture, and most hearts and minds. And just before that change occurs, we wince at the death rattle of one thing ending on the eve of a new thing beginning.

Agonal breathing is the near-immediate harbinger of death. Once that sound is made, it cannot be unmade. The dominos fall, and time ticks at an unsustainable pace. Change is hard for everyone. It requires much of us, like effort, re-tooling of ideology, standards, political stances, spiritual clarity, and all things we think should be unmovable rocks. But just like water carves the stones of ancient canyons, new pathways form irrespective of our readiness and comfort. Justice and equality, like the slow drip, drip of water seeping into and expanding the cracks of granite, will not be denied. It is a matter of when not if.

So, we lean in, and we listen to the grating sounds of desperate clingers-on and the push-pull of protecting what is already gone.

That rasp is present in the daily attacks on the LGBTQIA+ community in need of allies and in veiled bygone-era tropes like Goodlettsville Republican Johnny Garret’s purposefully demeaning question to representative Justin Jones, “Do you understand to speak from the well as you are speaking today, you are able to speak because Speaker Sexton recognized you…?” And Sevierville Republican Representative Andrew Farmer’s attack line to Representative Justin Pearson, “Just because you don’t get your way, you can’t go to the well and throw a temper tantrum with an adolescent bullhorn.” That rasp is also present in the choking malice of the phrase “I’m fighting to protect our children” as it morphs into a weaponized dog whistle for Christian nationalism instead of a promise of affirmative care.

Those guttural yelps sound ugly because they are.

But understand that these statements and beliefs are the last gasps of misplaced righteousness and the paralysis that accompanies it. They inflict unnecessary pain through their faux moral superiority. But last gasps are required before we enjoy the deeper breaths of something new. Last gasps are the terrible closing sounds of recalcitrant ignorance. But they are also the joyous opening sounds of enlightened change. Remember that good days follow bad, and morning follows night. And remember to breathe deeply.

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I would love to hear what you thought about this essay and if it brought any personal memories or stories to mind. Please feel free to leave a comment. I’ll answer all of them. I would love to strike up a conversation about this piece and your thoughts. Please consider sharing this newsletter with a friend.
Thank you. - Mark