Enough

Aurora. Not in Colorado this time. They have had their share of trouble like this. Instead this Aurora is in Illinois. I recognize this place as a place where AllSteel office furniture is spawned. Five days a week for about four years, I saw that address on multiple cartons and crates as I opened them, emptied them, and eventually recycled them. I didn't work for AllSteel. I worked for a third party installer servicing the Denver metro area. Not far from Aurora, Colorado. It could be that I went with a crew to put in some chairs or some desks in this suburb of the Mile High City. Aurora meets Aurora.
I was also amused to find, mostly by coincidence, that Wayne's World was located in Aurora, Illinois. Wayne's World was a very popular series of skits on Saturday Night Live starring the very popular Mike Myers. Driving around town in an AMC Pacer, singing along with Bohemian Rhapsody, these cartoonish teenagers weren't installing furniture, they were making their way to the big time after being discovered on community access Channel 10. There was a lot of air guitar, but no gunfire.
That image of Aurora, Illinois ended this past Friday when the city joined the ever-expanding list of cities that have experienced a mass shooting. A factory employee who was on his way to being fired chose instead to kill five of his co-workers. With a gun a previously convicted felon such as himself should not own. Then he was either killed by officers who arrived on the scene or he killed himself. Six dead, an additional factory worker injured along with five responding officers in the gunfire.
So ends the amusing anecdotes and coincidences.
If there was an eerie link to the factory, like that it manufactured steel office furniture, then this story would take some sort of personal turn. Nope. The factory that was shot up manufactures water distribution products. And no connection to TV funnyman Mike Myers. No Bohemian Rhapsody. No laughs. Just another senseless waste of human life at the end of a gun.
The connection? Maybe that this all happened the day after the one year anniversary of the massacre in Parkland, Florida. Teenagers were killed there. Like the character played by Mike Myers in Wayne's World. Or maybe it's just another in a series. We humans long for connections and try to make sense of the way chaos interferes with our well-planned lives.
Enough is enough.