Voices in Ramah, Tom Milton, author
Emma is the main character of this book. She is portrayed as an almost perfect super-human being who is "just a teacher". Yet Emma has powerful friends and relatives that enable her to organize and actively lobby Congress for gun control. She is also able to comfort all those who suffer from the consequences of too many guns in the hands of too many people. The tragedy of the school shooting that took her own daughter has had repercussions throughout her Dominican Community in the relatively safe community of Belhaven.
All the characters are portrayed as law-abiding, faithful citizens who simply want the government to protect them. Although they are all mostly American born descendants of immigrants, not refugees, and they consider themselves American, they seem to have created a little Dominican Republic for themselves in Belhaven. They have not completely assimilated, though, since they often speak Spanish when together, they prepare their native dishes, and they seek advice and services from their Dominican community members. Their doctors, service people, religious leaders etc., all seem to be Spanish speaking Dominicans in this novel, so although they hold themselves as native born Americans, they do hold themselves apart to some degree, and some even gave up the American flag after the shooting in their school, since Emma decided it was the flag of the white supremacists and their awful leader, Trump. They no longer wanted to fly it and flew their own Dominican flag instead.
Emma lives her life in perfect harmony with Democrat values, protecting the environment, supporting the immigrant, advocating for women, and healthcare, educating the youth and caring for her friends and relatives with an abundance of compassion, as opposed to the way she believes the Republicans and conservatives live.
When Emma appears before the committee in Congress to lobby for gun control, she blames the Republican committee members in Congress for its failure. The description of their appearance and approach to the questions is decidedly hostile and negative, while the female and left-wing members are described positively. Using Emma’s voice, the author disparages Republicans and former President Trump with abandon, but it is with such a partisan approach, that I actually found it disturbing. If only one party was to blame, gun control would have been enacted by now, because Democrats have even had control of both Houses of Congress and have failed to pass many laws to establish better gun control, other than those that require better background checks. They are more interested in the votes of their gun-loving constituents, than in saving lives, apparently, but that is not discussed. Instead, it is a given that one party is responsible for the lack of gun control, the party of the racists, according to the author’s character. Emma blames all the deaths on the weapon, and not the mental state of the shooter. She identifies them all as White Supremacists or Republicans. When she herself harbors evil thoughts and dreams of murdering people using guns, her pastor says even her thoughts are sins so she must go to confession.
In this novel, all the evil in the world is due to Trump and his MAGA supporters. If only they had no power, life would be so much better. Emma laments the closing of schools during Covid, but puts no blame for any of the restrictions on the left, instead, that is glossed over. She promotes the falsehood that the left has promoted about Trump supporting white supremacists and racists. An occasional question appears in the narrative which indicates that there is an over-the-top negative reaction to the one political party, but it is quickly dismissed as pretty meaningless, since the reactions of those on the left are always better and more appropriate. The right is radical and violent because they are not only anti-immigrant and racist, but they are violent and love their guns.
The NRA is trashed as if there are no Democrats in the organization. Emma compares oxycontin deaths to gun killings. Both drug users and shooters make their own choice, however, to fire a gun or to do drugs. Emma excuses the choices made and instead focuses on the fact that oxycontin kills the user, while guns kill others. Do we ban cars, planes, boats, weather, fire, knives, etc., because they cause death? Why do we only blame the gun or the manufacturer?
This book was a disappointment, I am sad to say. I thought it would be more thoughtful and less political. I know a family with a daughter who as a teen survived a school shooting. Her family life and her parent’s marriage struggled to survive because of it. The father still wanted guns and the mother and daughter wanted gun control. I found that this book oversimplified everything to do with the issue in order to promote its progressive agenda. It treated the reader like a blank slate, like innocent students that were unaware of how dangerous guns could be. It attempts to teach them, to lecture them, about the laws governing guns and the incidents of mass murder using guns, but it is with a 100% left-wing point of view. The author set out to prove that gun control is necessary, which is an admirable endeavor, but then he went on to use the book to trash alternate opinions to promote progressive policies. All the women in Emma’s discussion group, of the mothers who had lost a child, were democrat supporters who voted for democrats, as with their representative, Carol Logan who arranged the Congressional committee meeting. All of the women seemed to prefer women to be in office, but all universally suffered from the terrible trauma of the loss of a child.
Emma organizes groups, speaks to experts, reads detailed laws and background information. Emma comforts women whose children are not masculine enough to please their husbands, women who are depressed, women who can't become pregnant, and women who drink too much. Emma turns to the pastor for advice in all things and then to her doctors. She tries to do everything right. She cannot understand how G-d or the government allowed this to happen.
So, in conclusion, at first, this book brought me to tears. The description of the wanton, brutal murder of innocent second graders, a teacher, and a guard, was heartbreaking. Then the dreadful disdain for Republicans and the distinct effort to blame all shootings on them, as racist becomes a central theme. It turned me off from the important message. As Emma sees the murder of her daughter Marina and the other second grade students as the deliberate murder of the children from her background by a white racist, she completely ignores the murders occurring daily in the racist, Democrat run cities like Chicago and St. Louis. As I continued to read, I hoped to get a more nuanced, unbiased view of the school shootings and crime in general, that not only blamed guns or White MAGA supporters, but others as well. It never happened.
We are often urged not to judge all by one rotten apple, but this author has judged all of the people on the right with the criminal behavior of a few mentally disturbed individuals. We don’t condemn all Germans or all Japanese for their behavior during the Holocaust, and we should not rush to judgment now, either.