A little before posting Aimee Mann's “Fourth of July” video to this space yesterday I had been texting with a friend of mine in Chicago.
Someone his son knows was killed in the shooting at Highland Park.
My friend and I have both long shared an affinity for Mann's music generally and that 4th of July song specifically. And, as it happened, his text reminding me of the song came my way just as I was wondering what to post for the day.
As you can perhaps imagine, it is both rewarding and slightly anxiety-producing to write something seven days a week. (Well, almost seven.) And at this moment in history, I am especially torn between two impulses, two divergent feelings: one to offer hope and the other to rant about why everything is hopeless.
On that score, then, maybe the last few days have been cop-outs, my posting the work of folks far more eloquent than I.
In any case, I had spent some part of my day before texting with my freind watching live streams from places in the United States. I'm not really sure why these Livestream cameras became part of my YouTube feed, but obviously clicking on one led to others appearing and soon I was bouncing around watching ports and crosswalks and railroad crossings. For a few minutes, I looked over the main street of Telluride Colorado which was lined with people. What are they doing? I thought. Oh right, of course, it is July 4, and people are lined up for some parade.
And I need to post something for today.
And then the texts with my Chicago friend and posting the Mann song.
And then the shooting on a street that might well have been the one I was looking at in Colorado.
Naturally, I text my buddy to see if he knows what is going on. For a little while, our back-and-forth is about guns in America. We share our despair and cynicism. He tells me he knows lots of people in that town, including his son’s best friend.
In a few minutes, he will learn that young man’s grandfather has just been killed.
Before this news comes him, though, I am reading insane comments online.
While you would not want to judge a person by the things they say after they suffer a stroke or take some kind of major hallucinogenic, it is difficult not to judge America by the flippancy and cruelty of a forum like the chat that scrolls down your screen during a mass shooting. “The shooter must be a Democrat.” “Biden’s America.” “Democrats love this.” “False flag.”
That last comment, I came to realize today, means a significant group of people assumes this shooting is something planned by the government. They will see the fact that law enforcement knew the shooter not as evidence of the police doing their job while getting zero help from gun control that might have limited his access to weapons, but rather as evidence that the FBI is training such people on behalf of the left and its gun restriction agenda.
For the record, this makes me one of the 100 million people who love, in the view of these online chatters, how the FBI kills innocent citizens because then I can argue we should limit everyone’s access to guns. I wish these folks knew I don't need the FBI to do this clever political work on my behalf. I am already happy for all the jackbooted thugs my tax dollars can hire to take every gun from every person who has one. I require no more false flag operations to convince me that a tyrannical state is better than a psychotic one.
But back to Independence Day . . .
Learning the news that the grandfather of his son’s best friend has been killed, my friend must get off line to attend to his family. Even across text messages from 8000 miles away I can feel the shockwaves.
An old man who I would never have known about, the grandfather of a young man I am likely never to meet is now dead. But more than dead. He is killed, murdered, part of a ritual to celebrate American pathologies rather than confront them.
What will this do to my friend? Not as much as it will do to his son. And that will be less than his son’s friend. The trauma ripples out. The center does not hold.