On the surface of it, the phrase “never again” doesn’t make sense. How can something that doesn’t exist (“never”) happen again? But in the context of the appropriate predicate (such as a killing) the logic of the statement becomes clear, taking on an urgency of exasperation, a demand for an entire society to examine its collective conscience. Then the implied full sentence, “This must never happen again” is self-understood.
In my lifetime, there have been several of those pivotal moments in history, each one coupled with an exact location: JFK’s assassination in Dallas in November 1963; Martin Luther King’s assassination in Memphis in April 1968; the Stonewall riots in NYC in June 1969; Harvey Milk’s assassination in San Francisco in November 1978; John Lennon’s murder in Manhattan in December 1980; Princess Diana’s death in Paris in August 1997; Matthew Shepard’s murder in Wyoming in October 1998; and George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis in May 2020. Each of these events coupled an exact location with subsequent social uprising, unrest, riots, and, occasionally, real change in behavior, attitudes, even legislation.
I’ve stood on the exact spot of each of these world-changing events – except one. That “one” spot is actually off-limits to the public, with threatening signs seeming to implore that the painful memory of that brutal murder disappear from the collective consciousness. I’m referring to the site of Matthew Shepard’s final, comatose days, as he lay naked, strapped to a fence in the early days of a Wyoming winter. My husband and I visited the area this summer, getting as close as we dared for fear of armed property owners shoeing us away. Thinking and hoping that there might be some recognition of Matthew’s life on the university campus where he had been a student, we scoured the school grounds, on a blistering hot day, only to find an innocuous plaque on a bench with no acknowledgement of the collective pain that his murder seemed to symbolize. 
Yes, it’s a good thing that Shepard’s murder brought national attention to hate crime legislation at both the state and federal level; but in the absence of remorse from the state of Wyoming, as evidenced by the attempt to sugar-coat and erase the awful truth, any attempt at contrition seems hollow. Visiting Laramie, Wyoming as a gay man, I cannot help but think, “There, but the grace of God, go I.” That pistol-whipping could have happened to any person who misjudged how, when, and with whom to be flirtatious and provocative at a bar.
When this story hit the news, in 1998, gay men around the country phoned each other up to comfort each other and say the words, “Never again.” The gruesomeness and inhumanity of the story touched a nerve in our collective culture. A culture still reeling from the devastating consequences of the worst of the AIDS epidemic seemed to be the easiest target for scapegoating the cultural ills around us. Homophobia was the last socially acceptable prejudice.
It’s impossible to change our personal stories, the events and patterns that make up our history and become an aspect of our personality. It’s equally impossible to change our collective story. But Southern elegance and idolization of wealth had an opposite: the brutality of slavery. Northern entrepreneurship and savvy had an opposite: a dehumanizing work ethic. Mid-western hard-working farmers had a dark underbelly: a culture that destabilized the natural rhythms of the land. But by far the farthest reaching piece of American identity, the “Wild West,” encapsulated every aspect of our greatest evil: Manifest Destiny.
Manifest Destiny originates with the Pilgrims, who thought of themselves as the New Jerusalem, crossing the “Red Sea” of the Atlantic to found a Millennial Age in North America, where Jesus would come down and reign for 1000 years. If this idea is new to you, I can assure you that it was more than just a passing fancy. The names of New England towns (e.g. Salem, New Canaan) are examples of how the Puritans saw themselves as a chosen people. The sermons of Jonathan Edwards, and many others, are filled with this theological stance.
“God’s chosen” gave us assurance that we could take over everybody and tame everything that stood in our way. We were isolationists, and we were exceptionalists. Manifest Destiny sprung from this seed. The “shining city on the hill” (R. Reagan) here to fight the evil empire (Russia – again, R. Reagan) sprung from Manifest Destiny. America’s love affair with guns is a very painful example of our exceptionalism. The rugged, poorly educated John Wayne-style cowboy (but with inner wisdom) is an example of our proud isolationism.
No, we can’t change our stories. But we can change our attachments to them.
It turns out that the West was not founded by individualists but by bands of people whose lives depended on sticking very closely together. Today, vast amounts of space in the West allows for Libertarians and Anarchists to find refuge; but they do not represent our past and especially not our future.
America’s love affair with guns stems from the Puritans (again). Owning a gun, in 17th and 18th century Netherlands, was for nobility. (Think Rembrandt’s “Night Watch” and countless other examples.) Couple that to our 20th century anachronistic misreading of the Second Amendment and you have the perfect fuel to augment our self understanding of exceptionalism. (Rules of logic and morals that apply to the rest of the world don’t apply to us.)
Herein lies, I believe, why there is no statue, plaque, or sign commemorating the life of Matthew Shepard. We (collectively, not just the people of Wyoming) hang onto our stories, and we love those stories because we believe they define who we are. We turn a blind eye to the fact that the Scriptures are filled with God’s condemnation of hard-heartedness and absence of contrition. But the path forward, especially as we now have this collective moment of self-examination (called the pandemic), is to acknowledge our story, repent our mistakes, and drop our attachment to continuing to live out their trajectories.
And consecrate these exact spots where lives were lost at the hands of hatred and bigotry!
In Abraham Lincoln’s elegant prosaic way of stating things:
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle field of that war. We come to dedicate a portion of it, as a final resting place for those who died here, that the nation might live. This we may, in all propriety do.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate we can not consecrate we can not hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have hallowed it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; while it can never forget what they did here.
It is rather for us, the living, we here be dedicated to the great task remaining before us that, from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here, gave the last full measure of devotion that we here highly resolve these dead shall not have died in vain.