Thirty-five Years After Lennon’s Murder, What Has Changed?

     Thirty-five years ago – November 29, 1980 – Dorothy Day died at Maryhouse, the Catholic Worker house of hospitality on East Third Street near Second Avenue.

Thirty-five years ago – December 8, 1980 – John Lennon was murdered at 72^nd Street and Central Park West.

The confluence of these two anniversaries – and the grim coincidence of them with horrific acts of gun violence in Denver and San Bernardino – suggests a new way to think about the level of violence in our society and what we should do about it.

After Lennon was murdered, Jann Wenner, publisher of Rolling Stone, set himself against gun violence.  He issued an edict that guns would no longer be featured in entertainment photographs in the magazine. Some years later, he founded Cease Fire, an organization meant to bring about “handgun-free homes and families” and to warn against the danger handguns pose to children in particular.

For many of us, the murder of John Lennon was the wake-up call, the moment when we first realized just how pervasive violence is in American society.   A rock star signs an autograph outside the apartment building where lives, a building he chose for the sense of safety it afforded him – and is gunned down just like that.   I was fifteen at the time, a paperboy, and the next morning I dropped the Albany Times-Union on fifty doorsteps, seeing the news of the murder over and over again.   When I went to New York for college three years later, the sidewalk outside the Dakota was the place where, more than any in the city, I felt the confluence of fame, power, everyday life – and violence.  

More than a third of a century later, nothing has changed – or so we are tempted to say.  In fact, things have changed.  Our society is more violent.   Acts of violent crime are commonplace.   A single death hardly rates a headline unless the person killed is a celebrity.   Spike Lee can matter-of-factly make a film on the notion that living in Chicago is as dangerous as living in Iraq.

And nobody knows quite what to do about it.  Even if strict gun laws were enacted tomorrow, there are something like 100 million guns in circulation in this country, as The Atlantic pointed out with a cover story a couple of years ago.   Even if public places were placed under heavy security and camera scrutiny, there is always some place, thankfully, where scrutiny ends.  

The thing to do, it seems to me, is to set ourselves against violence categorically.  That is what Dorothy Day did with the Catholic Worker, the radical newspaper and movement she founded with Peter Maurin in 1933.   When she died – a week before John Lennon – this country lost one of its great voices of nonviolence.   When Pope Francis, in Congress, celebrated her, along with Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr. and Thomas Merton, as “representative American,” it was notable that three of of the four of them were categorically set against violence.

I think it is fair to say that the best efforts for pacifism and nonviolence in our society have focused on state violence – violence as committed by our armies and police forces, in our prisons and execution chambers.  

Meanwhile, there has emerged a recognition among countless people of good will in our society that violence is a comprehensive problem in our society.  

Imagine if more of all those efforts of nonviolence were directed against the forces of violence in our society more broadly: the gun lobby and Islamic terrorism, the identification of weapons with patriotism and the glamorizing of gun violence in mass media and entertainment.  

Would it make any difference?   It might not; but it might.  In any case, it would be a radical solution: it would go to the root of the problem.  

• 7 December 2015
• 1