“So it goes.” The phrase is from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five about Billy Pilgrim, an American soldier who experiences the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, at the very end of World War II while safe in an underground meat locker. At every recording of death in the novel, Vonnegut wrote “So it goes.”
The phrase was called to mind recently by the juxtaposition of two news articles. The first reported the decision of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that California’s ban on the sale of semiautomatic weapons to people under 21 is unconstitutional and the trial judge should have blocked what it called “an almost total ban on semiautomatic centerfire rifles” for young adults. “America would not exist without the heroism of the young adults who fought and died in our revolutionary army,” Judge Ryan Nelson wrote. “Today we reaffirm that our Constitution still protects the right that enabled their sacrifice: the right of young adults to keep and bear arms.”
The second report was on the murders in Buffalo which occurred last week when an 18-year-old white gunman opened fire at a supermarket in a Black neighborhood, killing 10 people in what authorities called an act of “racially motivated violent extremism”. The gunman was armed with an assault-style rifle. You’ve heard the statistics so many times before. The United States suffered 19,350 firearm homicides in 2020, up nearly 35 percent compared with 2019, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in its latest data. But despite the recurring mass-casualty shootings and a nationwide wave of gun violence, multiple initiatives to reform gun regulations have failed in Congress. Vonnegut would look each of us in the eye, take a deep breath, nod ever-so-subtly and softly say, “So it goes.”
Ronald Cheney
Francestown