Honoring the Ultimate Sacrifice
David R. Weiss – February 26, 2024
All week we have honored “the ultimate sacrifice” made last Sunday morning by three Burnsville first responders—two police officers and a fire department paramedic—killed in the line of duty. There is something profoundly right about this.
Paul Elmstrand, Matthew Ruge, and Adam Finseth were heroes. The officers were seeking to diffuse a dangerous situation when they were shot. The paramedic was seeking to save a life when his was taken. Their deaths are tragic. They died serving the greater good—just as they had pledged to do. So, it’s profoundly right that we make time to honor the sacrifice they made.
But—and this is much harder to write, but also much more important to reckon—there is something profoundly wrong about this. I felt my gut tighten in protest from the opening news coverage on Sunday night, and that tightness has waffled between restlessness and rage all week.
The energy spent framing their tragic heroic deaths as “the ultimate sacrifice” is, at the same time, promoting a larger lie under the guise of noble grief. I am NOT questioning the grief of their families or their work colleagues; for those who knew them, this grief is foremost personal and visceral. But in the news media and among politicians, the public narrative carries a tone of over-the-top reverence. As though these news shows are engaging in an excessively earnest distraction from the plain fact that gun manufacturers and GOP politicians (GOP stands for “Guns Over People,” right?) are busily promoting the very conditions that make such “ultimate sacrifices” inevitable.
As a nation we are AWASH in guns. Not by accident. But by intention. For profit. For power. (And for fear … which has proven very profitable, both financially and politically, to some folks.) As a culture, we valorize violence as entertainment (in video games and beyond)—as though wielding guns is just a playful pastime. And, as a general rule, that same political party that fervently favors unchecked gun rights just as fervently opposes the educational investment, the human services, and the social safety nets that might lesson our (all too profitable) addiction to violence.
I know, this is inopportune. Everyone would rather pause for grief right now. But we dishonor these heroes when we focus only on “the ultimate sacrifice” they made, while keeping feverishly silent about those forces that partner to create the conditions that will continue to require the ultimate sacrifice of first responders (and school children, and shoppers, and multiple targeted minorities).
So, can we please observe, even quietly, that while Paul Elmstrand, Matthew Ruge, and Adam Finseth were killed directly by an angry man with an illegally acquired arsenal, they were killed no less directly by those whose livelihoods gain profit and power by flooding our communities with an endless stream of weaponry? You’d think their sacrifice would purchase at least a bit of blunt truth on the news from those so moved by their deaths.
At some point, it’ll be time to go after the guns. In the meantime, you can bet the gun manufacturers, the game makers, and the politicians will continue to pretend that it’s anything but the guns. It may be a lot of things. But the guns do the killing. They claim the lives. They exact the ultimate sacrifice. Again and again. Until we say, ENOUGH. Until then, we might as well hold our breath for the next time we’re asked to honor the ultimate sacrifice. It won’t be long.
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David Weiss is a theologian, writer, poet and hymnist, “writing into the whirlwind” of contemporary challenges, joys, and sorrows around climate crisis, sexuality, justice, peace, and family. Reach him at drw59mn@gmail.com. Read more at www.davidrweiss.com where he blogs under the theme, “Full Frontal Faith: Erring on the Edge of Honest.” Support him in Writing into the Whirlwind at www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.