Uvalde Followup: The Sound of Shameless Cowards (w/ Update)

The ongoing terror and ongoing shame in our nation regarding the plague of mass shootings and widespread sorrow of gun violence just keeps getting worse.

Back in late May, the community of Uvalde Texas suffered the unimaginable loss of 19 children and 2 teachers killed by a gun-wielding angry guy. Ever since then, there had been questions about how the school security and later how the local police mishandled the situation. For months, stories kept dribbling out about how the police waited for minutes during the most critical moments; how the police detained mothers who heard the screams and wanted to rush in to save their babies; how the local police chief failed to understand the severity of the situation to the point of criminal negligence; and even how one of the cops at the scene had to be restrained because he was getting text messages from his dying wife who was one of the teachers killed.

Well, this past week, a video recording from security cameras inside the school leaked out. And while the mayor began screaming about going after the leaker(s), everyone else was horrified by the visual evidence that police did nothing (via Justin Peters at Slate (paywall)):

Though the video does not include any gory footage, and though we do not see inside the classrooms in which Ramos shot and killed 21 people, it is nevertheless hard to watch. (You can hear a lot of gunshots in the video; an “editor’s note” appears periodically informing viewers that “The sound of children screaming has been removed.”) Almost exactly three minutes after Ramos enters the school, three police officers enter and head down the hallway toward him. A minute later, after receiving fire, they retreat. More and more police officers show up. For over 40 minutes, as the video makes irrefutably clear, they more or less just stand there...

The one thing every viewer and pundit focused on when the video got out: The inhuman line "The sound of children screaming has been removed." Stephen King could never write a line more horrifying than that.

On Wednesday in Slate, my colleague Rebecca Onion nicely captured the excruciating experience of watching over an hour’s worth of footage of officers sanitizing their hands, checking their phones, standing around, and doing pretty much everything but intervening to stop the shooter...

It’s one thing to read about the police inaction at Robb Elementary; it’s another, much more viscerally maddening thing to see it with your own eyes. The written accounts that I’ve read of the police response have contained excuses and rationales and official statements; they’ve left room for doubt over what happened and why, and for the prospect that the police on the scene actually acted heroically after all. But the video has no bandwidth for  such shades of gray. It is an indelible partial record of what happened that afternoon. It sticks in a way that the stories I’ve read did not...

And when the video leaked, what was the official response from Uvalde officials like the city mayor?

On Tuesday, Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin announced that the news outlets were “chicken” for publishing the video before the victims’ families had had a chance to see it...

The mayor’s response, in which he appealed to emotion in order to criticize the media for doing their jobs, is worth analyzing. On its face it sounds reasonable, even humane. The victims’ families have indeed been through enough, and it’s natural to want to spare them additional gratuitous trauma. But this plea to consider the families’ emotional welfare reads as smarmy and self-serving when uttered by the mayor of a town whose first responders failed the students and teachers of Robb Elementary on the day of the shooting, and whose authorities have been trying to duck responsibility for their own behavior ever since then...

More than an hour elapsed between when the first police officers arrived on the scene at Robb Elementary and when the police finally confronted and killed Ramos. This gap was not initially public knowledge, and in the aftermath of the shooting, Texas Department of Public Safety director Steve McCraw announced that “the bottom line is that law enforcement was there, they did engage immediately, they did contain him in the classroom.” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, meanwhile, praised the police on the scene for showing “amazing courage by running toward gunfire..

The video proves that Abbott's praise is absolute bullshit. Even when the cops had body armor, helmets, even those bulletproof shields clearly visible on camera, they waited like chickens for the gunman to finish his bloody agenda.

Every goddamned Uvalde and Texas law officer who failed to act on that day, and every goddamned Uvalde and Texas elected official all the way up to the goddamned Governor who tried to cover up this shame, should have the phrase "The sound of children screaming" tattooed to their foreheads for the rest of their gutless miserable lives.

This is, by the by, absolute proof that the Far Right wingnut fantasy of "Good guys with guns" is a goddamned lie. We had a platoon, nay an entire police force of "good guys with guns" and even they were too terrified to go after a lone gun nut who just happened to carry assault weapons with enough firepower to scare them.

The widespread availability of military-grade assault rifles - thanks to the blind and inhuman misreading of the goddamned Second Amendment by conservative wingnut justices and politicians - is a serious problem for law enforcement across the United States. You wanna know the excuse for why every police department is stocked with riot gear and firepower that even our own military thinks is excessive? The excuse is that the cops want to be "prepared" to face off against any large-scale riot where the rioters may have these AR-15s and similar semi-auto (and illegally converted full auto) firearms.

But even that excuse is a lie. Watch how the cops behaved at Uvalde - when there was just one gunman - and how they cowered behind their shields for a full hour. Then watch how these cops behaved at Black Lives Matters protests: Where most of the protestors were waving signs and carrying water bottles, and where the cops responded with rubber (and real) bullets, smashing in heads with batons and the butt of their own rifles because the cops fucking knew they held all the firepower on those streets.

If our nation's law enforcement were truly honestly serious about protecting themselves in dangerous situations, if they truly wanted to live with the belief that they should "go home to their families at the end of every shift," you'd think every sheriff's department and police union out there would be fighting tooth-and-nail to pass assault weapon bans to make their lives easier. 

But they don't. You barely hear a peep from police unions when it comes to debate for assault weapon bans or any other gun safety option.

Part of cop rationale is that they want that excuse of mad gunmen running around so they can play soldier with overpowered gear of their own. Part of it is that the cops are on the same page with the National Rifle Body Count Association when it comes to ensuring the goddamned White Nationalist Christianist "Rapture Is Coming" Gun-Worshipping wingnuts are locked and loaded for the Second Civil War vs. bleeding heart liberals.

The anxiety cops have with every traffic stop could easily go away when the open-carry prevalence of guns go away. But no: they would rather live with the fear, all because it lets them impose their fear and firepower on the ethnic minorities they deem to punish and harass.

In the meantime, the shameless cowards in Texas will keep bleating the same excuses and the same lies until they are held accountable. Until each and every cop who failed in their duty, each and every official who failed to be honest and upfront, each and every demagoguing politician who blustered and lied are either in jail or out of office.

The sound of children screaming should haunt them forever.

Update 7/18: Am waking up this morning to reports that there were 376 officers that eventually showed up at Uvalde. All those cops, and they STILL could not work up the nerve to apprehend a single gunman. All because the gunman had AR-15 murdersticks with him. /rage 

IT'S THE GUNS

IT'S THE GUNS

IT'S THE GODDAMNED GUNS.

Get rid of the assault rifles and maybe just maybe the cops will stop being cowards and bullies.

It Was Going to Be a Beautiful Day

It's a beautiful day, the sky falls/
And you feel like it's a beautiful day/
It's a beautiful day/
Don't let it get away...

- "Beautiful Day," U2

The first thing I remember about September 11 was how clear the skies were, how blue it was that morning even in South Florida. I had gone to the Main Library in Ft. Lauderdale for a meeting with other tech lab librarians to set up training materials for a new interoffice email/calendar software (Groupwise) the county library system was signing up to use.

One of the librarians came late to the meeting. She brought word about a plane crashing into one of the World Trade Center twin towers in New York City. We immediately thought it was a tragic accident. I considered the weather up in the northeast might have been foggy or rain-filled for something like that to happen. As librarians we all knew our trivia, and noted there had been a plane crash hitting the Empire State Building back in World War II due to bad weather.

I didn't find out until later that the entire Eastern seaboard of the United States had clear blue skies. I found out after that training meeting that a second plane hit the second tower. We all found out what was going on as the day got worse.

It was going to be such a beautiful day...

The Irish have been coming here for years/
Feel like they own the place/
They got the airport, city hall, concrete, asphalt/
They even got the police/
Irish, Italian, Jews and Hispanics/
Religious nuts, political fanatics in the stew/
Living happily not like me and you/
That's where I lost you...

- "New York," U2

That day remains such a gut-punch to those who lived through it that the emotional scars won't ever go away for us. One of those national traumas - like hearing about the bombing of Pearl Harbor - that cut across everything: If you were an American, regardless of gender or age or ethnicity or religion or even politics, you felt the blow in some way.

From Bob the Angry Flower webcomic, by Stephen Notley

Sad thing was, whatever that moment of grief was that united us as Americans, it didn't last. A number of us turned right back into our partisan (and racist, and sexist) opportunistic ways. We had the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson pin the blame of 9/11 on "abortionists, gays, and feminists" to fuel their culture war bullshit.

We had the Neoconservatives jump up in eagerness to send us all off into their interventionist wars in the Middle East. While going into Afghanistan made sense - where the 9/11 culprit Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda cohorts were hiding - in our rage and revenge we got dragged into another quagmire of a decades-long occupation that only ended last month to tears and further political recrimination. And by 2003 these Neocons made it worse tricking us into an Iraqi invasion/occupation that shredded our international standing and broke our military.

Saddest of all, in spite of the moment's call for us all as Americans to unite as one nation, our racism and fear created an increase in anti-Muslim anger that led to increasing persecution and violence towards anyone even looking Muslim. That rage fueled the rise of trumpist-backed anti-immigrant bashing that is tearing apart our national heritage of immigration as a global beacon of opportunity and liberty.

Whatever unity we had in the wake of the Twin Towers falling was gone the second our rage got the better of us.

We haven't seen many beautiful days since 9/11, have we...

And love is not the easy thing/
The only baggage you can bring/
And love is not the easy thing/
The only baggage you can bring/
Is all that you can't leave behind...

- "Walk On," U2

Recovering from the trauma of 9/11 is an ongoing thing for a lot of people. Many of the survivors from Ground Zero itself - and the families who lost loved ones there and at the Pentagon plane attack and those on Flight 93 - have to carry their guilt and sorrow to the end of their days. The rest of us who stood on the sidelines watching the tragedy unfold have to come to terms with the unresolved anger we've felt that has now branched out into waves of violence and recrimination towards ourselves.

The culture wars that Falwell and Robertson and others had been pushing on 9/11 have pretty much consumed the mental state today of a Far Right evangelical Republican Party, to the point where the biggest threat to our nation's safety isn't overseas terror groups like ISIL it's homegrown groups like Proud Boys. Our rage has gotten, is getting the better of us as Americans, and even in our remembrances of that tragic morning it's going to take a lot of letting go for us to move on into days that could be beautiful again...

Leave it behind
You've got to leave it behind
All that you fashion
All that you make
All that you build
All that you break
All that you measure
All that you steal
All this you can leave behind...

(Requiem to those we left behind)

(With thanks to Infidel for adding this to his Sunday blog wrap-up)

I Read The News Today Oh Boy: 40 Years Later

I read the news today
oh, boy
About a lucky man
who made the grade...

- "A Day In the Life" The Beatles

I was a wee lad of ten years in 1980, one of those groundbreaking years where a lot of crazy things happened. We had Soviets in Afghanistan, hostages in Tehran, a Presidential election that was about to shift the political landscape ever after, we found out who Luke's father was, a college-level team of amateurs upset the best team in Olympics ice hockey.

My family had recently moved to Florida, so we paid attention to things like the Mariel boatlift turning Miami crazy, we had the Skyway Bridge disaster in the Tampa Bay area, and Disney World suing a lot of local day care centers for unlicensed use of their characters on the buildings (this is when I learned "don't fuck with Disney").

We had Mount Saint Helens erupting in the Northwest, we had a heat wave throughout the summer.

On a personal note, my family went on a long road trip that summer to visit our great-grandmother Kinzer in West Virginia, my first time seeing mountains (my last time seeing fireflies) and finding out about the Hatfields and McCoys. We made side trips to Asheville to see the Vanderbilt estate (my brothers made a game of spotting all the hidden servant doors), and to swing through Alabama to visit more family (finally watched Empire Strikes Back in an Auburn movie theater with my cousins). Poor mom had to do all the driving.

That autumn we had an election that November 4, Reagan winning over Carter. At Palm Harbor Middle, however, we were... one of the students had gone missing. It didn't end happy. Not for her family, not for her friends, not for a school full of traumatized kids. It made things feel colder than they normally would in central Florida that end of the year.

I'm talking about all this because it all builds up to one of the bigger moments at the end of 1980. At the end of an era in popular culture. It was something that cut across everything - Politics, religion, music, gun control, social ills, cults of celebrity - affecting us then and now.

The assassination of John Lennon. 

I saw a film today
oh boy
The English Army had
just won the war
The crowd of people
turned away
But I just had to look
Having read the book
I'd love to turn you on...

We usually call the single death by gunshot a murder. But in Lennon's case, it felt like an assassination. If you understand what an assassination does, it's the death of a key figure of a moment in history, someone who could affect or had affected the flow of events to go in a direction that the forces of darkness would rather not go. 

Lennon was a cultural and political icon. One of the Fab Four - the Beatles! - whose appearance on the world stage defined a decade of the 1960s, during which the band's influence on fashion, youthful ideals, and even political agitation covered everything from UK's economic upheavals to the U.S.'s quagmire of a Vietnam War. Lennon himself had faded from the public view after the breakup of the Beatles in 1970, and had only returned to recording albums that year with Double Fantasy after a five-year retirement, but his messages about world peace along with the possibilities of a Beatles reunion kept him well poised on that stage. He had just done an interview with Playboy magazine (yes, people DID read it for the articles). He was planning a world tour, which by the 1980s for major rock artists was a huge fucking deal. 

And then a madman shot him. (NEVER SAY THE SHOOTER'S NAME)

Global media was still in its infancy in terms of word getting out by radio and television. The shooting happened Monday night, during which another cultural icon - NFL's Monday Night Football - made the announcement live that Beatle John was officially declared dead at the hospital. The impact went global. Peace rallies sprung up everywhere, noticeably in the Central Park area outside of the Dakotas apartment building (there is a memorial there now). For weeks afterward, the rock n roll stations would play nothing but Beatles songs (including John's solo works, as well as Paul McCartney's and George Harrison's and Ringo Starr's).

There was this horrifying sense that something had gone wrong. Even though it was just one man's death in a world full of violence and hate and madness. The kind of things John Lennon preached against. Maybe that was why. Just the senseless of that kind of violence in the world...

So that was me, waking up Tuesday morning to the news that day, about John Lennon's death. On top of what had happened to my school to the loss of Elisa Nelson... and then the following March with a shocking home invasion/murder that took the lives of a mother and daughter in the Spanish Oaks neighborhood near Dunedin... and then President Reagan getting shot later that month... Seriously, by the time the forces of darkness made an attempt on the Pope for God's sake, I had come to the conclusion that there was something fundamentally wrong with humanity. If there was a point where any interest or desire to hold or own a gun was in me, it was gone after John's murder. All my anti-gun sentiment started here.

I read the news today
oh, boy
4,000 holes
in Blackburn, Lancashire
And though the holes
were rather small
They had to count them all
Now they know
       how many holes
            it takes to fill
                the Albert Hall!!!

I'd love to turn you on...

Lennon would be 80 today pending good health. Maybe would have seen a Beatles reunion or two by now (the surviving bandmates were convinced that the Band Aid/Live Aid efforts in 1985 would definitely seen a reunion set). There's entire works of literature and film that posits what the world could have been like if the madman hadn't pulled the trigger.

Elisa Nelson would be 50 today. Like everyone else from our student class, she'd be working somewhere. If she married, had a family... her kid(s) would be getting into college by now.

The five students I never met in Gainesville, that was ten years after all this but still, it all tied into my mindset, my view of the world... I promised I wouldn't be like that...

what if there were no madmen, no rapists, no angry guys with guns? 

I think of them often.

What if Beatle John had survived after all? It wouldn't have ended all the violence and madness, all things considered.

But we would have had a brighter light shining us on to be better than all that.

I'd like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition. - Beatle John, having a laugh at the end of the Rooftop Concert

DAMN YOU 2020 (RIP Eddie Van Halen)

GODDAMN YOU 2020 WITH ALL THIS CELEBRITY DEATH, MAKING 2016 LOOK LIKE A PARTY RIGHT NOW.

No. No no no. I saw the news while wrapping up things at work this afternoon. Eddie Van Halen died of cancer today (via Stephen Thompson at NPR). NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

In a band known for its instability — due in part to a rotating cast of lead singers that most notably includes David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar — Eddie Van Halen and his brother, Alex, remained constants, appearing on 12 studio albums that reached across five decades and sold tens of millions of copies.

No matter the singer, Eddie Van Halen's high-flying guitar sound — heavy on tapping, with both hands on the neck of the instrument — was deeply influential, but also hard to imitate. He grew up obsessed with Eric Clapton, only to himself become a lodestar for generations of guitarists.

To explain how hard this hits: Dudes, I am a wild white boy who grew up in the mean streets of suburbia, off the shores of the Gulf Coast in North Pinellas County, where 98 Rock was our oracle and hard blistering guitar noises our tonic.

I am not exaggerating to say in my day, in that place, the bands you listened to were Led Zeppelin and Van Halen. The Tampa Bay area was/still is a heavy metal Mecca. Half the garages between Palm Harbor to Gulfport had 15-year-olds teaching themselves "Eruption."

My teen years was spent listening to that music, between Halen and Hendrix and Zeppelin and AC/DC (and also Bruce Springsteen, the Beatles, U2, the Police, the Hooters (yes, they were a band)... I have diverse taste). Driving back and forth on Gulf-to-Bay, windows down, blasting "Panama" or "Everybody Wants Some!" Well, okay, I didn't cruise all that often, but I knew guys and gals who did.

Christ. CHRIST GOD NO. This has been a shitty year for celebrity deaths just like 2016 and now I'm getting sick just thinking of the similarities...

In the meantime, I need to regroup. I was planning on a Bruce Springsteen album ranking this month but now, forget it, I gotta give my respects to Van Halen... (breaks out the CD collection) Huge heads up: I may be one of the few people who ranks Women and Children First as the band's best album.

I leave you with this legacy of the Van Halen juggernaut:

Whose side did you take, Halen or Roth? A shibboleth for a generation. I took the diplomatic approach: I bought and listened to Van Hagar (5150 and OU812) and Roth (Eat Em and Smile and Skyscraper). I have no idea what Van Halen was doing from Balance onward, but I ended up siding with the band. 

Oh crap, just watching that Airheads clip... Lemmy died a while back. Oh GOD HAROLD RAMIS DIED TOO. DAMMIT I'M CRYING HERE.

In Memoriam: Thirty Years Later from Gainesville

I wrote this five years ago, about what happened in Gainesville at University of Florida:

We shouldn't forget the lives taken that didn't need to go.  There are so many of them taken from us every day across the globe, and the sorrow of it is how much waste and loss and pain there is when that happens.

If the killer had never been, right now Sonja or Christina or Christa or Tracy or Manuel would be my age or close to it, in their 40s.  Likely married or with kids of their own.  Kids old enough to be attending UF themselves by now, twenty-five years later.  All five of them could be working somewhere, as doctors or engineers or teachers.  Writing books, or painting, or composing music.  Creating, adding to the world.

We are them and they could have been us.  Maybe doing better, maybe not.  But we'll never know, we'll never see.  

All that loss during a cold week in August 1990.

In memoriam.

The anniversary didn't make a lot of national news and the pandemic forced any public gathering to cancel, but the local paper Gainesville Sun covered the look back in sorrow (by Cindy Swirko):

...At other anniversary points of this pivotal tragedy, the Gainesville community has gathered for vigils or services of commemoration. This time, with the coronavirus pandemic preventing that, the anniversary might seem overlooked.

The University of Florida stopped anniversary recognitions such as tolling the carillon bells of Century Tower five times after the 25th anniversary. There are lasting reminders on campus, however. There are also five palm trees planted in the median near the wall in memory of the students, as well as five trees on campus near Library East...

New students to Gainesville might see the memorial of trees and placards in the median of Southwest 34th Street south of Second Avenue and not realize who it’s for.

Or they might see the center panel on the graffitied wall beside the road and not realize it is a sacred spot...

Photo by Sam Thomas for the Sun

The locals defend that spot. Anybody tries to paint over it, within hours the spot is repainted so the five names - Sonja, Christina, Christa, Manuel, Trudy - and the hearts are put back up.

The sin and sorrow of murder is the void we endure when the lives are gone. They could be doctors, teachers, parents, artists, travelers, thinkers, dreamers... All that potential gone.

And it's just these five lives. There are so many others killed in acts of rage and lust all across the world, all that pain and sorrow to endure more and more.

Just want to live in a stronger loving world, can't we just have that, someday...?

The Buildup To When It All Explodes

On top of all the nightmares - the pandemic, the mass unemployment, the escalating decay of America's global standing, the purging of federal oversight to curtail corruption, probably even the arrival of freaking Murder Hornets (thanks a lot, 2020) - one of the darkest yet consistent patterns of these trumpian years has been the public displays of racism. The blatant cruelty towards immigrants and the intentional separation of families as punishment. The demeaning and derogatory language towards Muslims, towards Chinese and Asians, towards Blacks.

All of it building off of a Far Right, conservative-backed Culture War that had been raging years before trump showed up on the political stage to make it worse.

As Adam Serwer noted, for all historians to document forever: The Cruelty Is the Point.

And this week, after months of outrage after outrage, it all exploded across the United States.

The buildup started earlier this year in February, when a black man Ahmaud Arbrey jogging through a mostly-white neighborhood in Georgia was shot and killed by two (further investigation upped the number to three) white men who claimed Arbrey was a suspected burglar. When their story fell apart (there were no burglary reports filed to back up their claim), the local law enforcement still refused to pursue the matter even as the outrage went national. In early May, a video made by the third suspected killer - released by him hoping to prove his buddies' argument - was shown demonstrating Arbrey was unarmed, tried to run around his attackers, got "boxed in" and was still shot to death. Within days, the state of Georgia took over the investigation and arrested the shooters. There is still anger and outrage at how slowly the justice system even responded to the matter, with serious allegations of how at least one of the shooters having ties to that justice system implying privilege and protection for them.

And while all of that was going down, earlier this month in Minneapolis things got worse, when George Floyd got arrested over a possible counterfeit $20 (I originally heard it was a bad check bouncing) and it led to his death-by-cop (via Catherine Kim at Vox):

The death of George Floyd, 46, was captured on video and was later widely shared on social media. In the footage, an officer pins Floyd’s neck to the ground as Floyd is begging, “Please, I can’t breathe” — a moment that closely resembles the pleas of Eric Garner, a black man who died from an officer’s chokehold in 2014. Another police officer watches the scene unfold as bystanders voice their concerns for Floyd. One person comments that Floyd has a bloody nose while another yells, “Bro, you’ve got him down, let him breathe at least, man...”

Although the video doesn’t capture the moments leading to the arrest, the Minneapolis Police Department said they were responding to a call that a man was trying to use a $20 counterfeit bill, according to the Star Tribune. In a statement, the police department said officers arrived at the scene to find Floyd — who matched the description of the suspect — sitting on a car and appearing to be intoxicated. They added that Floyd physically resisted the police and seemed to be “suffering medical distress,” which is why they had called for an ambulance.

The police’s excessive use of force seemingly has no excuse: The department does not permit the technique that was used to pin Floyd’s head to the ground, according to Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. Four officers involved in the case were fired by Tuesday afternoon, and the FBI has now opened a civil rights investigation on the incident...

Just to point out: The knee-to-neck method is specifically prohibited by the police department as policy, and the cop violated that policy. The cop kept his knee on Floyd's neck for eight minutes (from the probable cause filing), and Floyd was clearly dead five minutes in. He kept his weight on Floyd's neck for three extra minutes to make sure.

And from there, our nation went into the cycle of protest, and police crackdown, and shockwave of more protests to where stores have been smashed, building set on fire, and thousands hurt with rubber bullets, batons, and worse.

Right now nearly every major city has seen its marches, and several of them reporting serious destruction and harm.

Making things worse: Reports of "outside agitators," of people - a good number of them white folk - are intentionally causing the arson and damage as a means of escalating the rage and hate. At a moment our nation needs to calm down and avoid bloodshed, we're instead racing towards street war.

This feels different than the last big wave of protests against police brutality, back when Ferguson ripped apart communities and forced an ongoing debate between "Black Lives Matter" and "Blue Lives Matter." But when you watch that video clip of Floyd's murder, of his gasping "I can't breathe" in a dark echo of Eric Garner, how can you accept the argument that there's not a campaign of intimidation and force by law enforcement upon the minorities of our cities?

We had different political leadership back in 2014, when Obama was there to speak to our better angels and prevent the spread of violence. But this is the Darkest Timeline now, with trump in the Oval Office, and trump has been busy sending out more tweets to threaten "thugs" with lines like "when the looting starts, the shooting starts."

Christ help us. trump's not working to mend the wounds, he's looking to rend us further into violence against each other, so he can steal a little more, cheat a little more, ruin this nation's future a lot more.

This does feel like a civil war this weekend, the divisions not by state line but by cultural obsessions and willingness to spill the blood of men and women who are marching for the sheer simple call of "No More Police Brutality."

This year 2020 just gets worse all the time.

From the Battlefields of World War I, A Small Red Flower

From Flanders Field, this.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
    That mark our place; and in the sky
    The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
    Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
        In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
    The torch; be yours to hold it high.
    If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
        In Flanders fields.

poem "In Flanders Field" by John McCrae

CHEWIE! What a WOOKIE! RIP Peter Mayhew

Just as I was getting off work tonight, I heard breaking news that Peter Mayhew passed away.

You might remember him as this:

CHEWIE NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

Let us all now remember the Wookie With the Lookie.

It's Official. The 2016 Is Killing Everybody We Like (RIP Gene Wilder)

Whoa! WHOA! I was at a training session at Winter Haven Public Library when I saw a tweet go out. Gene Wilder died?!?!

DAMN YOU 2016!

I am serious about this now. This HAS to be The Rapture after all. Why else would people like Bowie and Prince and Abe Vigoda and Kenny Baker (R2! NOOOOOoooooo) and Harper Lee and George "Boys Are You Buzzing" Martin and... and... oh man, this year just SUCKS for celebrity deaths.

The only good thing to say about this is that at least Mr. Wilder is with Gilda Radner now. Otherwise this is sucks-to-be-us type of news.

And now, back to wars, floods, insane politics, and an unending cycle of Anthony Weiner d-ck pics. DAMMIT.

Added: from The Little Prince.

"...And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye..."

Anniversary: The One That Started It All

Today is August 1st, and I've been reminded that today is the 50th anniversary of a major tragedy in our nation's history.

From the memorial website - Behind The Tower - that has popped up to recount the tragedy:

On August 1, 1966, a twenty-five year old University of Texas student named Charles Whitman went up to the observation deck of the UT tower armed with guns, ammunition, and canned food. For 96 minutes he held the campus in a state of terror. Whitman killed 14 people that day and wounded more than 30. One of the wounded died a week later and one died decades later of injuries connected with his bullet wounds. Austin Police officers Houston McCoy and Ramiro Martinez (and two other men) made their way to the top of the tower, without knowing who or what they would find. They cornered Whitman and then shot and killed him. Later it was discovered that Whitman had murdered his mother and his wife in the early hours of the morning before his rampage. The shooting was broadcast on the radio and on television and it became a major national and even international news story.

This isn't the first mass shooting in our nation's history. There was actually a mass shooting in Philadelphia back in 1949 that the Smithsonian points to as the first. And if one considers them, we've had massacres and lynchings throughout our history that could fall under this rubric.

But the University of Texas shootings seemed to hit our nation's psyche in the worst way. It was a harbinger of a growing trend towards violent gun deaths in our nation where a singular person could go on a shooting rampage with little reason (well, we've figured out there is a reason: a shitload of anger at the world and access to rifles to start a body count). It happened at a moment of political and cultural turmoil of the 1960s, and added to the chaos of the day.

When we count mass shootings today, 1966 is the starting point, because Whitman's rampage is so memorable and still relatively recent - even at 50 years! - for survivors to still be among us to document the horror. When you ask someone about a campus mass shooting, you may get Virginia Tech or Columbine High or Umpqua Community College if you ask in the Northwest or even Ecole Polytechnique if you ask in Canada. But the odds are pretty good you'll get someone saying "Well there was that one in Texas with the tower, was that in Austin?"

Yeah, it was. And that was 50 years ago. And we've been counting the mass shootings ever since.

Whoa. WHOA. PRINCE DIED?!?!?!

So I was helping a library patron with his laptop syncing to iPod when the patron's phone blinked.

News flash: Prince died.

Just to let you know, yes that cat Prince could indeed ball (was an above-average high school b-baller).

JESUS.

I ain't joking about this right now, but 2016 (actually at some point around December 2015 it really became noticeable) is turning out to be one of the worst years for celebrity deaths since 2009. I may be biased, it may be a thing about my Generation (Xers) being more attuned to the media and being on the Internet moreso that earlier generations, but this sh-t is upsetting man.

I mean, here's the list off the top of my head, now with Prince and Chyna (if you followed wrestling in 1990s like some of my co-workers in Broward County Libraries, you'd know who that was) today.

Lemmy

David Bowie

Alan Rickman

George Martin (Beatles producer)

Natalie Cole

Angus Scrimm (Phantasm movies)

Dan Haggarty (Grizzly Adams)

Glenn Frey (Eagles)

ABE VIGODA! I mean, seriously God, when Abe died that was the literal f-cking end of a meme.

Paul Kantner (Jefferson Airplane)

George Kennedy

Maurice White (Earth Wind and Fire)

Larry Drake (I will always remember him as Durant from Darkman)

And those are the ones I can recall off the top of my head (I had to be reminded of Frey on Twitter awhile ago).

I grew up to all these people, as actors in my favorite movies, as musicians for my favorite songs.

I don't want to think it has to do with getting old. I can't. It just doesn't seem right, does it.

Anniversary for Nine Eleven 2015

It pains me that I can't remember the names of the two ladies I was working with at the Broward Library's technology center that Tuesday morning, going over the new training materials for the Groupwise email system we were deploying for our county library system.  I am lousy with names, and I didn't work with them often enough to retain that knowledge.

I do remember Barbara's name, my former supervisor at North Regional, who was also at the Main Library in downtown Ft. Lauderdale that morning for a different meeting.  I bumped into her on the Second Floor lobby area where they set up a television with lousy antenna reception to broadcast the news about the planes hitting the Twin Towers.

She was the one who told me about the second tower.

The rawness of that day remains with me.  So much has changed since then but I still remember where I stood, how I felt, what it was like to drive back to Northwest Regional to await more bad news, the parking lot of the blood bank at night where a hundred people stood with me waiting our turn to donate blood because there was nothing else we could do but cry and pray.

I feel bad still because this is all I can do, just sit here and repeat the same story, unable to change the past and in no position to fix the present outside of my own meager rants and political activism.  I'd like to be able to take the rage and sorrow I have and convert it into solutions and salvation.  But 9/11 is a reflection of a human sin that both saints and tyrants struggle against with no honest solution in sight...

In Memoriam: Gainesville 1990

There is a wall on 34th Street in Gainesville Florida reserved for graffiti.  Technically, it's illegal to vandalize walls, but the locals have decided it was easier to let the kids and University of Florida college students tag it with their work over the years rather than cope with the hassles of stopping it or repainting over it.

According to local experts, most sections of the wall have over 250 layers of paint now.  In some places they had to replace concrete blocks because the weight of all those layers were weakening the stone.

It adds color to the scenery, in a way.  It's gotten its own Wikipedia page.

There's also a memorial there that the city and the college students honor.  It's rarely painted over, and when it is there is someone on hand to quickly repaint the memorial back in place.

1990 was my third year at UF.  Studying towards a Journalism degree, although my middling grades were telling me I would have been better off going into Political Science or something.  That August I started trying to do stringer work - freelance - for the school paper the Alligator and had gotten an article about the Harn Museum published (it would be the only one the Alligator would ever take from me, and I moved on to work for a local alternative monthly instead).

Classes were starting back up.  The college town was packed with young men and women returning or arriving for the first time.  Bicycles and cars everywhere.  Apartment complexes surrounding campus packed with 35,000 students.  Football season with Coach Spurrier starting up for the first year.

I had recently moved in with my twin brother.  I went first year to live in a dorm whereas Phil went to apartment living, and the second year my dorm roommate and I tried a year at Gatorwood Apartments before Phil needed a replacement roommate for the third year.  So there I went to Oxford Apartments on Archer Road while Mike moved on with some of his marching band-mates (funny story: if you ever watch the Florida-Notre Game bowl matchup (1992?), you'll see Mike being the one photobombing Coach Lou Holtz during a halftime interview.  The Irish went on to beat the crap out of the Gators during the second half, so yeah, the loss is totally Mike's fault.  But I digress).

That first week back in college... in my mind, I keep remembering it as being cold that week.  A chill wind for some reason, even though it was Florida in the late August month.  Maybe I'm remembering it that way because of what happened.  Because of the sorrow.

A serial killer had arrived in Gainesville and began killing students that weekend.

The first day killings shocked the campus.  The second day confirmed there was a serial killer on the loose and targeting young women.  Rumors got out about what the killer did to the third victim's body.  That weekend nearly every woman that could fled the city.  My brother and I stayed.  I have to admit, it was because as guys we wouldn't be targets.  We were worried, obviously.  Our female friends were threatened, but the ones we knew had fled to safety and they were going to be okay.

The third day of killings had a couple - girlfriend and boyfriend - dead in their apartment at the Gatorwood complex.  I remember biking by the apartments - it was just down the block from Oxford - and all those cop cars, all that yellow tape, and I feared the worst.

Everybody - even the guys - panicked.  Some of Phil's fraternity brothers came over to crash at our apartment that night.  The thinking was "safety in numbers" although fear was rampant.  Classes were cancelled for a few days.

Things calmed down once there was no sign of continuing atrocities, but things didn't fully return to normal.  Every apartment building went through massive security redesigns.  Some of the departed students never came back.

The police finally caught a suspect who used the same tools to commit burglaries elsewhere, and the man confessed.  He was executed by lethal injection about ten years ago.  Never say his name.  The sonofabitch wanted to be remembered as a mass murderer like Ted Bundy.  Screw him.

In time, memorials popped up.  Five trees planted outside of Library East.  The 34th Wall Memorial began that winter, and for all intents remains to this day and for as long as there is a wall there.  Five palm trees bearing signs of the victims names - Sonja, Christina, Christa, Tracy, Manuel - are planted along the street median where the Wall Memorial resides.  There may be others.

Gatorwood was bulldozed down years ago.  It had been an aging complex when Mike and I lived there.  There's a fancy expensive apartment tower there now.  Oxford Apartments was still there last I visited Gainesville with my brother Phil and my nephews for a football season opener.  Some of the places in town have changed.  Places always do.

The memories and memorials never should change.

We shouldn't forget the lives taken that didn't need to go.  There are so many of them taken from us every day across the globe, and the sorrow of it is how much waste and loss and pain there is when that happens.

If the killer had never been, right now Sonja or Christina or Christa or Tracy or Manuel would be my age or close to it, in their 40s.  Likely married or with kids of their own.  Kids old enough to be attending UF themselves by now, twenty-five years later.  All five of them could be working somewhere, as doctors or engineers or teachers.  Writing books, or painting, or composing music.  Creating, adding to the world.

We are them and they could have been us.  Maybe doing better, maybe not.  But we'll never know, we'll never see.  

All that loss during a cold week in August 1990.

In memoriam.

An Introvert's Thoughts About Valentines

Yeah, time of the year again, when thoughts turn to love and single people look out at the world surrounded by couples hooking up and saying all "what the hell are we doing wrong?"

It's not sitting here whining about the unfairness of the day.  It's not anyone else's fault - well other than the kids who inflicted the emotional scars of getting publicly humiliated throughout middle school and high school - that I ended up here in my mid-40s lacking the needed social skills to go out and date.

It's just not knowing what the hell to do to learn those social skills.

I'm surrounded by books in the library about "oh do this, do that, do this other thing" about dating advice, social advice, etc.  But book learning doesn't help.  There is something intuitive, something gained from experience and insight (like wisdom), about being sociable.

There is a nature, not a trained skill, towards being extroverted.  There is a confidence within the soul and the heart.

To me, I dread "faking" confidence because it feels like a lie, like being arrogant or foolhardy.

A lot of this ties back into my not being good at making friends or keeping them.  I am a geek, then and now.  Never fit in well with the other kids growing up.  I tried being noisy and clownish and eager and angry and foolish.  Still didn't figure it out.  Tried being friendly and polite and quiet and helpful.  Don't think I did well.

I tried dating here and there in high school.  There were girls I liked, but it never worked out, they never liked me that way.  I started failing at picking up on other people's vibes.  There's all this stuff about body language, being in sync with people, picking up on cues in conversations.  I found out - sometimes in the worst ways - that I wasn't picking up on them.  I fell out of sync with everybody else.

I developed the fear of doing something wrong.  I know fear is irrational.  I still feel it, an unwarranted guilt that I've done, am about to do, something that will (not might) make things worse...

Looking back now, I screwed up big time in college.  Never joined much of anything.  I was terrified of joining any frat because I didn't want to go through another round of hazing rituals like the crap I endured in high school.  The problem was the frats were the social centers of the campus 'verse.  Basically knee-capped myself right there.  Rarely went out at night.  Didn't make many social acquaintances, not even really socializing much with my college roommate (nice guy, he had a social life compared to me, ended up normal).  I put myself in a corner, did my studies, and ended up the way I am now.  Lacking the social skills to connect with anybody else.

So here I am, Valentines Day yet again.  Struggling once in awhile to force myself (yeah, saying that sounds so wrong) to using dating services, speed dating, singles groups, etc.  I go to these gatherings and immediately find myself unable to socialize, unable to start up a conversation or join one in progress, the awkwardness starting up and sending myself off to the side somewhere to stay out of the way.  Kicking myself afterwards on the drive home wondering why I spent 50 bucks to go to a night club where I don't drink and can't dance and won't fit in.

I'd like to develop a social life, but I honestly don't know how.  It's not the brain knowing (my awareness that I am missing something that matters), it's not the heart knowing (I can feel the pain of the void), it's the soul not knowing that hurts the most.

A Winter Grayer Than Before

And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said:
 "For hate is strong,
 And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"
- "Christmas Bells," Longfellow

Thing about Christmastime, of December and the coming of winter.  It's a season of falling into the Gray Mood.  They call it the Winter Blues but it's really all Gray: the sky is gray, the ground is dead, the people are dour and burdened while the pressure builds to be festive and light-ful.

This year feels grayer than before.

Part of it is due to witnessing yet another disastrous midterm election.  Getting stuck in a state full of partisan morans voting that damn MEDICARE FRAUD back into the governor's office.  Banging my head against the desktop as voter turnout dropped to its lowest level since World War II.

Part of it is watching any semblance of justice in my own nation - land of the free and home of the brave - get flushed down a toilet as violent cops get let off for shooting unarmed teens and using illegal choke holds on guys whose only crime was not submitting to another round of public humiliation.

Part of it is realizing that the current political and economic landscape is about to get darker and nastier.  There's been buzz about a shutdown over Obama's attempts to reform immigration policy via his executive order powers.  There's concerns of a shutdown if there's a fight over a budget proposal that's top-heavy with corporate tax cuts and public sector spending cuts.

There's the growing realization that no matter the injustice of it, the insanity of it, the criminality of it... the Republicans will not rule even if they have the political power, they will ruin all.  They will twist the laws of the states they control to make it harder to vote, harder to complain, harder to stop them commit acts of graft and corruption.  Why listen to the critics or even the experts when there's no accountability for the sins they commit?

It's gray outside right now.  It's going to get darker, and I worry we won't see the sunshine any time soon.

Personal: Tehya the Pretty Kitty

As I'd mentioned to my friends on Facebook, and through postings on other forums and on my writer's blog, last night I had to let go of a pretty kitty.

There's not more to say about that.  The apartment right now feels empty.

I've been digging through all my photos now.  I took so many and then left so many of them in boxes.  There's a bunch I took before I got digital cameras, old film photos that need to get scanned or something.

I had this at my office.  It was the best photo of Tehya and her adopted sister Page sitting together on a window sill (that was rare, Tehya I adopted first and she never got along with Page when I adopted her a year later).

Page has this pleasing "How May I Help You Kind Sir" expression on her face.  Tehya's arm is stretched out with her paw next to Page's.

Page passed away two years ago, before Thanksgiving.

I miss them.

In the Navy Yard Shooting, These Are the Facts You Need To Know

Today was a bad day all around - even without considering the flooding disaster that is Colorado - when we found our nation handling yet another shooting spree... this time at a well-guarded Washington DC Navy Yard.

These are the facts as can be confirmed (EDIT 9/26/13, I feel the need to add a little more for those Google searchers pulling up this article, SEE BELOW):

1) Early reports of multiple shooters proved wrong, as usual: there's always confusion during these mass shooting incidents, with survivors and eyewitnesses confused about where and when the violence takes place.  There was just one guy.

2) The shooter brought with him just a shotgun, but used the fact he was shooting up a military installation to secure additional firearms - handgun and rifle - to continue the shootout.

3) The shooter had his own access card to the grounds.  Working for a private tech firm supporting the Navy Yard, he would need some form of access to get into work areas as part of his job.

4) The shooter was involved in a previous shooting incident in 2010 when he lived in Texas, when he was charged with shooting a gun he claimed he was cleaning when it accidentally went off.  Those charges were dropped.  He was also charged in 2004 shooting out a car's tires in Seattle.

5) The shooter had a background as a military reservist from 2007 to 2011 when he was discharged.

6) There are reports that the shooter had undergone - and maybe still undergoing - psychological treatment for sleep issues and anger management.

7) The shooter was African-American.
7a) The identities of the victims have not been established yet.  The authorities are most likely talking to victims' families first.
UPDATE: The identities were released to the public, Washington Post created a memorial site.  By the looks of it the shooter did not discriminate, he shot at White, Black, Hindu Indian, male, female.  Most of the victims were middle-aged or near retirement age.

8) There are currently 13 dead, with 8 wounded.

These are the speculations:

1) Would the current needs for universal background checks as supported by a broad majority of Americans stopped the shooter from getting a firearm?  Probably not in this case: since that Texas gun charge was dropped it wouldn't have shown up on the background check.  And I'm not sure if the 2004 charges would have expired otherwise, or if the psychological treatment would have been a red flag under the rules.

2) Would the shooting have been less tragic if there were more people at the workplace with firearms / conceal permits?  You have to be kidding: this was the Navy Yard.  There's supposed to be armed guards, fences, barricades, defensive systems across the place.  And yet I won't be surprised if we're gonna get gun enthusiasts arguing for conceal-carry and more gun permissiveness at a military base (again: they said this crap after the Fort Hood shootings).
UPDATE: This did not stop LaPierre of the NRA from declaring the shooting wouldn't have been as bad if there had been more "Good guys with guns," the blanket NRA excuse against sensible gun safety laws.  Never mind the fact that there were armed guards on the site, the cops responded within 2 minutes, never mind the possibility of a "good guy with a gun" getting confused at who to shoot, and then having the cops shoot at him thinking he might be a second shooter (refer back to the earlier point of the reports of multiple gunmen).

3) What motivated the shooting?  The shooter did not leave behind any obvious clue like a letter or a death threat on a website.  There is no evidence as of yet what triggered the shooting.  (any further speculation based on race would really be in poor taste until we get specifics)
UPDATE: Huff Post has an article that the shooter left a note, indicating the shooting was a twisted case of a mental breakdown.

4) The shooter is someone with a serious track record of gun ownership.  This was not an overnight impulse to buy a gun and shoot up someplace: he's had guns before.  And he's used guns before...

5) The more obvious point about the shooter is the anger management (lack of).  A huge red flag in any shooting spree.  Any kind of terror attack, really.  The patterns still all point to one thing: an angry guy lashing out at a supposed injustice and taking it out on a lot of people who had nothing to do with causing that anger.  Mostly the shooter is an angry white guy, but we've had angry black guys as shooters before, there's been angry Asian guys, there's been angry ethnic guys across the board.

But the common link is there: Anger.  There are a lot of gun owners in the United States, I will grant you that.  Most of them never pull the trigger outside of legal usage such as practice ranges and/or licensed hunting.  But you get the gun owner with the persecution complex, the rage against women/the job/next door neighbor who leaves the flood lights on.  It's the combination of rage and access to firearms that ought to be of concern.

It'd be nice to have a debate on the matter, on the problem of guns and anger.  But David Frum is right: we're never going to get a debate on guns at all anymore, are we...?
UPDATE: Still don't have a serious debate on gun safety.

Richie's Got a Telephone in His Bosom And He Can Call HIM Up From His Heart

As a student of history and a student of the Sixties, I do my bit to write about the '69 Woodstock Festival once every year on its Anniversary in August.

Today's an exception, and a sad one at that:  Richie Havens, the opening act of the Woodstock, has passed on.

Havens was an important reason for why the festival turned out the way it did: all the disasters and accidents that made the opening hours a near catastrophe were dispelled once the performers got on stage and worked the growing crowds.

He was only meant to play about a half-hour's worth of stuff.  But due to traffic snafus and such many of the bands hadn't gotten to Max Yasgur's farm, so the organizers kept asking Havens to add a few more encores.  When he ran out of material, he went to calling up a blues spiritual "Motherless Child" and mixing his own improvised lyrics to it.  He came up with "Freedom" right there on the spot.

His signature moment.

There's not much else to say but he's at home now.