Just another high school massacre -- just another day in modern America -- just another 17 lives gone in the flash of an automatic rifle wielded by a crazed man.
Or, you know, what we call Wednesdays nowadays.
Here's my personal challenge -- within me is an optimist who feels that the right words at the right time by the right people can inspire and motivate others to make a difference -- even if it is just one step at a time towards a better world. Also occupying that space, though, is an A-1 top-notch catastrophist (the we-are-living-in-apocalyptic-adjacent-times Jekyll to my glass-is-always-half-full Hyde).
Powering that Jekyll in this scenario is the fact that our collective inaction actually *caused* this -- that inability to do anything which implicitly gave our approval to the deaths of twenty six and seven year old a few years back in their elementary school -- the place where they should have been eating glue and staying safe from catching cooties on the playground -- instead of bleeding out next to their desks. Once we all shrugged that off as a society, we signed our own death warrants and converted our souls into expendable avatars in the world's worst video game of unending -- and almost completely randomized -- violence.
That Jekyll wants to grab the microphone to tell people that nothing will change, that everything will be argued and memed and shared throughout social media land ... and then forgotten until the next massacre registers, and that anything proposed to make any kind of headway won't make it into law. That Jekyll wants to advise modern day parents to be certain to not have only one child seeing as how families need to have some spares in the mix since schools (and concerts and movie theatres and malls and workplaces) aren't safe. That Jekyll wants to scream at Trump just like that high school girl did this weekend to tell the porn-star-stained-little-dicked-mistake-of-a-President to stay the hell away from the scene, as he is increasingly irrelevant and sure-as-shooting doesn't have the compassion/comforting gene in his constitution. And yes I damn straight said "sure-as-shooting" as the phrase seems all the more relevant since "random" shooting is precisely that any more -- an oxymoronic SURE thing.
That Jekyll gets angry and frustrated and wants to check out and to start building the compound for him and his to live in that will keep the insane world on the outside.
Then that Jekyll starts to get humanized by the heartbreaking stories like the one told by a former co-worker who said her young child explained to her that he prepares for tornado drills if a tornado ever strikes and active shooter drills for when the next madman arrives (note the choice of IF with regards to potential bad weather and WHEN with regards to the inevitable danger lurking nearby). Or the mother who learned that some active shooter training instructs students in the classroom to act a little crazy, throwing books at a shooter when being confronted face to face because causing a scene will buy time to give their schoolmates a better chance at having extra seconds to run away -- the assumption being that those in that first confrontation are already headed to death so why not prolong it by creating confusion in order to spare more people potentially in the path.
We can't give up on finding a solution.
We can't let the conversation die in the comments of the trolls on the web.
We have to "Hyde" this thing as best as we can.
We have to learn from the mistakes made (and if ever there was a case full of mistakes crying out for some learning -- where all the signs were there with the shooter giving every kind of advance notice that things would end this way -- this mass killing is it).
We have to support the children who survived who are planning to walk out on March 24th ... and who will hopefully keep on marching right into the leadership roles of those who are currently bribed to keep silent and stay inactive by the all-powerful lobby -- those for whom job-security has replaced any obligation to lead.
We have to find ways to do something to make progress on resolving the myriad of messy issues ... and if that means kicking people off the bus who jump immediately to the extremes and who are brainwashed into reciting talking points and who see "reasonable" as something bad ... then so shall they be banished to the land where they can just sit the f*ck down and shut the f*ck up -- all the damn day.
We have to do this.
And if we can't do this, then we have to step out the way and let the youth get it done -- or at least the ones who didn't get shot in the stomach during Algebra.
'Cause *that's* what happens now in this America we created. The America that the below 17 people left suddenly and tragically this week.
We have to do it for them (and for the hundreds that have now come before them for which we did nothing to date):
Alyssa Alhadeff, 14
Scott Beigel, 35
Martin Duque, 14
Nicholas Dworet, 17
Aaron Feis, 37
Jaime Guttenberg, 14
Chris Hixon, 49
Luke Hoyer, 15
Cara Loughran, 14
Gina Montalto, 14
Joaquin Oliver, 17
Alaina Petty, 14
Meadow Pollack, 18
Helena Ramsay, 17
Alex Schachter, 14
Carmen Schentrup, 16
Peter Wang, 15
THE FRUSTRATION:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/us/politics/congress-inaction-guns.html
THE MARCH:
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/broward/parkland/florida-school-shooting/fl-florida-school-shooting-students-on-sunday-morning-tv-20180218-story.html
THE VICTIMS:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/15/us/florida-shooting-victims-school/index.html
