When young white women are being shot?
America today is like living in a zombie movie. Except it’s the zombies who have the guns.
Daily Beast from Tuesday night:
Four cheerleaders involved with the competitive program Woodlands Elite Cheer were in a parking lot after practice when one of them accidentally tried to get into the wrong vehicle, Bastrop County sources close to the investigation told ABC13.
According to cheerleader Heather Roth, she had just jumped out of her friend’s car when she opened the door to what she thought was her vehicle. When she saw a man on the passenger side seat, she thought a stranger had entered her car, so she got out and jumped back into the friend’s car.
The man in the vehicle then got out, approached the friend’s car, and as Roth wound down the window and began to apologize, the man “threw up his hands, pulled out a gun, and started shooting—he fired multiple shots at the group,” she said.
Roth was grazed by a bullet and treated and released at the scene. But teammate Payton Washington, 18, was hit in the leg and back.
“Payton opens the door, and she starts throwing up blood,” Roth said. Washington was flown to a nearby hospital in critical condition. Washington was born with one lung, per one account, and likely shot in it.
Police have arrested a suspect, 25-year-old Pedro Tello Rodriguez Jr.
A gunman killed Kaylin Gillis, 20, after she and some friends drove up the wrong driveway after dark in rural Washington County, New York on Saturday. Kevin Monahan allegedly opened fire on the vehicle (BBC):
Washington County Sheriff Jeffrey Murphy told CNN that Mr Monahan had “not shown any remorse in this case”.
“They were turning around, they were leaving… so there’s absolutely no reason for this man to come out on a deck and shoot at the vehicle,” he said.
Americans sacrifice their own on the Second Amendment altar day in and day out. Mass shooting after mass shooting. In shootings large and small.
We sacrifice young Black men and barely blink. We saw a young Black kid in Missouri, Ralph Yarl, 16, shot though the front door when he rang the bell of the wrong house last week while looking to pick up his younger brothers.
We saw two more kids killed and 15 others shot in Dadeville, Alabama last weekend at a Sweet 16 party. All Black, by available reports.
But when young white women are being shot and killed, will that be enough for gun-fetish America to do something about gun violence? Finally?
A wrong house, a wrong driveway, a wrong car. It could happen to any one of us as easily as rounding a corner. There, zombies await. With guns.
“Anonymous trust” is breaking down
And isn’t that fear what the extremist right is feeding the monsters daily, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes asked last night before news broke of the Texas cheerleader shootings.
“This idea that danger lurks behind every corner and the child who rang your doorbell is obviously there to murder you—this is the implicit, and sometimes explicit, message that plays constantly in right wing circles.”
Anand Giridharadas spoke to that rampant paranoia in his Substack on Tuesday morning. An Indian scholar friend had mentioned one of modern societies’ greatest achievements being — perhaps not in these exact words — “anonymous trust.”
In so many of the places our ancestors lived, all around the world, you knew a certain small number of people. And people you didn’t know were danger. People from another village: danger. People from another caste: danger. People who didn’t look like you: danger. And it’s easy to forget that the great accomplishment of so many modern societies has been to build institutions and sources of security and safety so that people don’t have to know other people personally, or know their grandmother, to trust each other. We are human, so we continue to fail at this all the time, and some groups bear the brunt of this mistrust. And yet, more often than we even think about, it works in ways that would have befuddled our forebears. We write checks to people we don’t know, share our addiction stories with people we don’t know, hire babysitters we don’t know from websites, eat semi-cooked meat and raw fish prepared by people we don’t know, live in houses engineered and built by people we don’t know, fly in planes and leap down from bungee platforms led by people we don’t personally know.
Or we did. Anonymous trust is breaking down under the daily pressure of relentless fearmongering from MAGA politicians, from the NRA, from propaganda outlets like Fox News, Newsmax, OAN, and InfoWars, and from QAnon and MAGA internet superspreaders.
We are not merely divided; we are un-developing. We are — not all of us, thankfully, but many in this country — reverting to those eras of history in which anyone outside your circle had to be murdered if they came past your moat, because the presumption was that they would destroy you if you didn’t destroy them. Reverting to the purity-and-contamination framework of caste societies: my people are not just of similar mind and values and history; they are clean and safe, and others imperil me. Reverting to people getting their information from charlatans and god men and people they happen to know, not from empirical reality. Reverting to where the default assumption many people would make about why a strange person would go up their driveway is that they are coming to attack them.
Referencing just the Missouri and New York shootings, Giridharadas continues:
In these two incidents, perhaps isolated but also emblematic, there is a certain vision of the world: Nothing and no one can be trusted, you and people like you are self-deputized law enforcers, and everyone in the world from beyond your moat is a suspect. This, I think, helps explain the spread of the thin-blue-line flag across much of the country. People aren’t just supporting the police. No one reveres anyone else that much. They are telling you that, in their own minds, they are the police. They are flying the flag of themselves.
So we are becoming a nation full of a distinct modern form of uncontacted tribes: at once hyperconnected and cut off, addled by propaganda and starved for human contact, convinced that the only good person you don’t know is a dead person you don’t know.
Another irony here — confirmation of Giridharadas’ tale — is a lesson I learned after finding a lost Great Pyrenees puppy behind the rural farmhouse we own. (The neighbors raise sheep; it was one of their dogs’ pups.) The little guy’s fast-growing head was caught in an old bed spring and wouldn’t come off. The neighbor’s wife suggested we go up the road to see if “Billy Ray” had a tool for removing it.
When we got to his house, we parked across the road from his fenced yard. (He had dogs.) She got out and instructed, “Honk the horn,” then shouted at the house, “BILLY RAY!!”
Billy Ray came outside but did not have a tool in his shed that would cut the spring steel.
Next, we rode down NC 209 to see her brother-in-law. I stopped partway up the driveway like the young girls did after dark in Washington County. She insisted I pull around back to the carport and honk the horn.
Aha! That’s the protocol. Don’t knock someone’s door out here without alerting them to your presence first (from a distance) if you don’t want them coming to the door with a shotgun.
Her brother-in-law came out the back in socks and was able to cut off the spring with a Dremel tool.
We are, as Giridharadas suggests, becoming a nation of uncontacted tribes.
Also notice that in our obsessive self-reliance and in the absence of universal health care, our first reflex in our wealthy country is to set up GoFundMe sites. Pathetic.