A Few Miles, A Few Years, or Some Intangible Separation

Excuse the dramatic title. I've been feeling a little gloomy. There are many reasons for this, but one of the main ones revolves around the latest school mass shooting in the U.S. You may be thinking, that has nothing to do with Martinique. However, I really feel it does. As a young person, I left home at a to go to public boarding school, which, while it was still small and in Alabama, was much more diverse in a lot of ways and was where I first started to confront ways of thinking substantially different from those of my parents. From there I moved to New York City, which may very well be the single place on Earth with the most variety of origins, without even mentioning my time at Columbia, which was basically spent learning stuff, forming ideas about it, having those ideas ripped to shreds by my liberal arts-savvy colleagues, being bombarded with their own ideas, and then repeating. More or less immediately I found a way to study abroad, which I did twice before graduating and coming to Martinique. These experiences have given me a chance to learn from a lot of different people's perspectives, but also to see that another way of life is possible. There are many people in the world who do not fear getting shot, neither at home, nor in the street, nor at school. There are many people who never fear that a property line argument will result in a violent death. There are many places on Earth where violent death is a widely-condemned anomaly, universally considered unacceptable and the job of the government to prevent. I have studied and, now, worked in school in such places, and I think those people have gotten something right that we in the U.S. have by and large gotten wrong.
But when I call home, my parents just drum on about loading bullets, buying and trading guns without background checks, and about neighbors getting shot. It's the way they live, and they, like so many others in the U.S., have been fooled into disbelieving that another way of life is possible. That all talk of change is just liberal nonsense.
I don't know how to make them understand that's not true. I don't know how, in the stagnation that is U.S. politics, a change in gun policies might happen.
Realizing that I can't make them understand what I've learned really makes me worry that I'm not fit to help anybody learn.

What a Difference it Makes to be 2,344 km from Miami

On my way to one of my schools, walking through a particular quartier chaud (here, "hot neighborhood" absolutely does NOT mean trendy real estate), I always pass a mysterious monument on the plaza in front of the church.

The back, more interesting side of
the bland monument, which reads,
"Martinique remembers its
children, victims of violence,
November 22nd, 2014"

The front side of the bland
monument, referencing those who
died under the occupation during
WWII

While one side of the particularly boring monument references those who died under the occupation during WWII, the back side referenced victims of violence and the 22nd of November, 2014, a date that didn't ring any bells for me. So, since I've been feeling down lately, I assigned myself a research project to figure out what it was about.
The results were disappointing to say the least. Basically, I have failed my Histoire urbaine de Paris professor; I can't read monuments! The 22nd of November was just the date that they put up the plaque; nothing of particular postcolonial importance happened on that date.
However, my otherwise useless digging did turn up something else of interest. The cable news headline from the 22nd of November, 2014, did reference a different sort of violence. "Fifteen Dead and a Terrible Tension!", reads the title of the segment. Apparently, the night before, the 15th victim of homicide in Martinique in 2014 died. That's right, on this island of nearly 400,000 at the time, only 15 people had apparently been murdered by the end of the year, and people were scandalized! The FBI  estimates that, in that same year, there were 4.5 murders per 100,000 people in the U.S., or about 18 per Martinique-sized sample, and notes that was down from the year before!
I'm thrilled for Martinique that it's still shocking here to hear of guns coming out and people being murdered. What does it say about the U.S. that I find their attitude about it so naïve? (By the way, as of three days ago, the U.S. has had eleven schools shootings alone this year. But, yeah, we're the country of freedom or whatever.)