Violent Moments
Last week I got a text from a friend in New Mexico saying she was unable to make a zoom meeting. “There’s been a shooting at our demonstration. Creating healing circles.” Soon it became clear that the shooting had been done by twenty-three-year-old Ryan Martinez. He was part of a small group of men wearing MAGA hats who confronted a peaceful demonstration called by Native Americans to resist the restoration of a stature of Juan de Onate. Onate, the first colonial governor of New Mexico, was a Spanish conquistador whose history of brutality is well documented. In 1599 he destroyed the Acoma Pueblo and killed 1000 people. In 2020 the statue to him in Alcalde, New Mexico was removed because of community pressure. The plans by officials to return it has met with strong resistance.
Statues of Onate can be found throughout the southwest and are often a site of controversy. In 1998 someone sawed off the right foot of a statue, echoing one of Onate’s brutal directives to have the right foot cut off the men who resisted his soldier’s onslaught. Nor was this the first shooting at people demanding these statues be removed.
This shooting, however, has sparked renewed concern about the escalation of political violence. A recent episode of On Point began with the question, “Is Donald Trump normalizing political violence in America? Commentator Meghan Chakrabarti asked, “At what point does this constant avalanche of political rhetoric, violent political rhetoric, effectively normalize actual political violence. Are we already there? Consider what happened just on September 28th in Española, New Mexico.” The discussion goes on to note the shooters support for Trump, conspiracy theories, and stolen elections. His social media held thousands of photos of him wearing a MAGA hat.
It is important to acknowledge that we are in a moment of extreme violence, sanctioned and encouraged by political rhetoric. We should not underestimate the dangers we face.
As the shot rang out in New Mexico, Donald Trump was advocating killing people who shop lift. He explained that when he is president, “if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving.” Just days before this, he mocked the beating of Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer and called for the execution of former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley.”
A persistent aspect of Trump’s campaign for president is the encouragement of extrajudicial killings to deal with people he doesn’t like. Journalists, judges, political opponents, former employees, teachers, immigrants, and local officials are all targets. Much of this rhetoric has become little more than background noise in an increasingly dehumanizing and violent atmosphere. The Washington Post noted:
Trump’s advocacy of extrajudicial killings was widely covered by newspapers and TV stations in California but generally ignored by the national press. No mainstream TV network carried his speech live or excerpted it later that night. CNN and MSNBC mentioned it during panel discussions over the next few days. The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, NPR, and PBS didn’t report it at all. The New York Times wrote about it four days later, playing the story on Page 14 of its print edition.
We need a much deeper understanding of violence in our land. While young Ryan Martinez wore a MAGA cap this week, only a few years ago it could have been a cowboy hat, or a cavalry cap. Or a pointed hood. Or a coonskin cap. Or a tri-corner hat, a pilgrim top hat, or Spanish helmet.
The violence we face today is the result of centuries of choices to kill some people so that others may be protected. Violence has been normal since our beginnings. Today, as violence often denied, justified, and hidden escalates, we face the question of what kind of people we want to become? How do we take this moment to shift our culture from one of violence to one of peace rooted injustice? Such a shift is still possible, but only if we not only recognize the dangers of the present, but the realities of the past that brought us to this moment.