The shooting of nine Black leaders in a historic church in Charleston, South Carolina, this week was simultaneously shocking and unremarkable.

It’s a scene that has become all too familiar, as have the ensuing conversations.

John Stewart on The Daily Show proclaimed it an act of racism, pure and simple. It was most definitely an act of racism. But it’s not simple.

Fox News tried to make the incident about religion because the attack took place in a church. “It was an attack on Christianity,” they said – all day long. No. If the actual legitimate news I heard is correct, the gunman did not say “I want to kill Christians.” He said, “I want to kill Black people.” The rightwing media won’t acknowledge racism in America. They might have to accept the legitimacy of a Black president, or even the need for immigration reform. There are more than two races residing here now.

The left, like Stewart, tries to simplify the issue and often blames race for more complex problems of limited social and economic opportunity.

The left immediately called for gun control. The right immediately bristled at the thought. God forbid all those young girls in small-town America make a trip to the local Casey’s store without a cute little pink pistol in their purse.

The political machine that promotes fear as a means of controlling votes and campaign contributions won’t allow common sense firearms management to happen. There’s money in them there guns.

The left won’t face the reality that limited access to guns won’t solve the problem of a society obsessed with the glorification of violence. And the media and entertainment industries won’t back off the sensationalism of carnage as long as they’re making hefty profits from it.

We the people will keep plopping down our dollars for ever-increasingly violent movies, video games, automatic rifles and cute little pistols as long as the collective marketing machine keeps telling us that’s what we should buy.

And then there’s our lack of a realistic approach to mental health. That conversation might include health care reform, another topic we as a country don’t want to approach for fear one side or another might score a political victory.

So, Stewart is likely right that once again we will be appalled by such an incident and yet take no action.

Can we, as Americans with a social conscience, stand up to those who hold the purse strings and political power in this country and say, “We aren’t going to play this game anymore?”

“We aren’t going to buy your implanted fear of everyone else around us. We aren’t going to buy your man-created insatiable appetite for violence. We aren’t going to buy your mind control in the name of political and financial advantage.”

Do we as a people have the balls to say, “This is WRONG, and we just aren’t going to live this way anymore?”

History will look back on this time. Will it see a people who stood up and proclaimed every person, regardless of race, creed, color, political or economic status, to be of equal value; and accepted the responsibility for setting a new future stage based on that presumption?

Or will it see a society that succumbed to the sickness of greed, hatred and fear?