I recently watched a short film set in the American Wild West by the Coen Brothers called “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.” The main character in the film is Buster Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson), who is a gleeful, musical, kindhearted, but ruthless gun slinger. Scruggs does not go looking for violence but seems to just happen upon it as his sunny disposition and kindness is met with aggression and threats from those around him. His violent behavior is more of a product of Buster’s environment than Buster’s nature. 

In the end, Buster is gunned down in a duel by a younger man (Willie Watson Co-Founder of Old Crow Medicine Show), who challenges Buster because the younger man wants to claim Buster’s title as the best singing shooter in the west.

The film ends with the two men singing a strange, yet catchy duet called “When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings” in which the seemingly relieved spirit of Buster Scruggs leaves his life of violence behind singing “No more jingle jangle I’ll lay my guns down” while ascending to heaven.

In the last lines of the song Buster Scruggs says:

“There’s just gotta be a place up ahead where men ain’t low-down and poker’s played fair. If there weren’t, what are all the songs about? I’ll see y’all there, and we can sing together and shake our heads over all the meanness in the used to be.”

Buster’s life in the west, in which his kindness only runs him into meanness and gunfire has come to an end. The singer/shooter wants to keep singing but is happy to leave the shooting in the used to be.

This song was stuck in my head on Monday when I picked up my daughter from school here in our new home in the UK and I still couldn’t shake it as she convinced me to go on an impromptu train ride as we passed our town train station on the way home. On the train is where I saw the news about the school shooting in the town where I’ve spent my adult life, the town where my daughter was born, a town full of people I love, and I felt many things.

I felt sickened, I felt relieved that I was on a train with my safe and happy 3-year-old in a place where she won’t have to do active shooter drills in schools and I won’t have to try to explain to her why the adults around her haven’t done enough to keep school children safe, I felt disoriented, I felt sad.

While part of the reality of mass shootings (especially school shootings) is now in my direct family’s “Used To Be” it will always hurt because I’ll always love, be connected to, and care about so many of the wonderful things and people that make up the fabric of the country I’ve lived in for all but four months of my life.

The gun violence and the meanness that goes into excusing all of it, like somehow trying to pin this one on the trans community as a whole, needs to be looked at as something that can be and needs to be put into the American Used To Be. The cost is simply too high (and has been for quite a while) to go on shrugging our shoulders then turning our heads to a different topic of interest, leaving the bullet riddled school hallways and the bodies of school children out of sight and mind until the next tragedy strikes.

Plausible ways to make it harder for people who want to go shoot a bunch of strangers need to be investigated and acted upon. Plausible ways to repel some of the meanness and neglect that drive people in the American society to want to go shoot a bunch of strangers needs to be investigated and acted upon.

I don’t know the answer to how this all can be solved, but I do know that like Buster Scruggs, most people in America, even people who live by the gun, would much rather spend their time singing together than shooting.

So maybe one thing Americans (both at home and abroad) can do is sing in the way we can. Sing with our lives and actions. Sing together of a safer and more peaceful America for children, work to soften hardened hearts that stand in the way of that becoming a reality. Be tough when standing for what needs to be stood for, but with a measure of tenderness and grace. Bring kindness into unexpected situations and hope to unlikely people.

Hurt and anger are natural and appropriate in reaction to another murder of school children, but love and grace must be present as well lest we contribute to the meanness that drives all this madness.

Like many issues in America, school shootings won’t ever be a full part of my Used To Be until it’s a part of everyone in America’s Used To Be. I don’t know when that time will be or if I’ll ever see it, but until then please take care of one another and be as gentle as you can with one another on your side of the pond and know my family and I are hurting with you and loving you over in our little part of the UK.

Looking forward to the day when we can sing together and shake our heads over all these shootings in the Used To Be.