How did we become a country that inflicts itself on people the way it has on Zoe Weissman?
She has popped up on TV in the aftermath of the murders at Brown University in Providence. She is a sophomore there. In 2018, she was in a middle school that was attached to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when Nikolas Cruz and his very large gun came to call. On Saturday night, she was in her dormitory room when another shooter with another very large gun showed up on campus.
How did we end up with two of our children at the same university experiencing the second mass shooting of their lives? In 2019, Mia Tretta was wounded by a mass shooter at her California high school in which her best friend was one of two people killed. And on Saturday night, on a campus in Rhode Island, she was sheltering in place. And Tretta was asking all the right questions. From NBC News:
“No one in this country even assumes it’s going to happen to them,” Tretta said. “Once it happens to you, you assume or are told it will never happen again, and obviously that is not the case.”
Obviously.
Obviously?
Obviously!
It was a brutal weekend around the world. Brown. Bondi Beach in Australia. The murders in Brentwood, California, of Rob and Michele Reiner. The news reminded me of the dispatches from World War II. There was insupportable violence on many fronts in many places.
He discusses the right’s reaction to all this, led by the president which I’m sure you’ve seen by now, and he concludes:
There is a cost to the sickness that has been unleashed on the world. The current president, with his merciless predator’s instincts, recognized not a soul-deep crisis but a golden opportunity. There is a price to living on the edge the way this country has been and the uncertainty we’ve unleashed on the world, a mortgage on the body and a lien on the soul, as the old bluesmen sang. For those of us on the outside of these cascading tragedies but fully immersed in their effects on our lives, we have heroes to follow. We have Mia Tretta and Zoe Weissman, double survivors giving witness. And we have Ahmed al-Ahmed, an immigrant from Syria who ambushed one of the shooters at Bondi Beach and disarmed the bastard, taking several bullets for his trouble. One small step back from the cliff and the abyss below.
We do have heroes, famous and obscure. We need to remember that.
Happy Hollandaise everyone.