Living In The USA

 The numbers and names change, but the hits? They just keep coming.

I considered the idea that perhaps the amount of gun violence in the United States could be traced to lefty bloggers such as myself. Maybe the "alleged shooters" and disgruntled idiots with guns who perpetuate the narrative of this country as a place where the ugliest forms of violence are carried out on its own people are simply trying to prove me wrong. In some horribly twisted way. A way in which children continue to die needlessly so that those on the other side of the political spectrum from me can continue to push their version of reality. The one in which an amendment written nearly two hundred fifty years ago is more important than the lives of three students and a teacher. 

Bend, Oregon joined the club last Thursday when a sixteen year-old forced his way through the locked doors of  Silver Rail Elementary School, killed three small children and a teacher before being shot by a bystander who followed the teen into the building after witnessing shots fired outside before the carnage began. The bystander is now the hero of this story. The person who shot the sixteen year-old. The killer of a child rescued other children. 

Except the five, eight, and eleven year-old who were not as lucky. And the seven year-old and another teacher who were injured. And all the human beings inside and outside Silver Rail Elementary who will be living with those horrible minutes in which an ordinary day was turned into another chapter in America's ongoing love affair with guns. 

And, as Jimmy Buffett once suggested, it could be my fault. If I stopped reporting these events would gun violence slip from that top spot of the cause of death for children? If I held my tongue every time some idiot chose to "solve" his or her problems with a gun, would it wind down the sound and fury. If we simply accepted this as our path, would the allure leak out and a new preoccupation could creep in. 

The day after the massacre in Bend, my school held an assembly honoring not just local author Jerrold Conners, but a fourth grade student at Horace Mann who helped write his own book for young readers. I understand that CNN will not be on hand to document the event, nor will our fourth grade author be interviewed about his creative motivations. 

Because that is not the story in which we are currently living. 

Danger Dead Ahead

 I used to attempt to annoy/frighten the people with whom I was riding on most any carnival or amusement park attraction. Generally, my bit went something like this:

"Wow. Did you ever consider the potential of catastrophe on any one of these rides? How many people a day do you suppose get on one of these things without a care in the world, not knowing that there is a loose bolt or a faulty weld? Some sort of hidden defect that will eventually fail under the stress and strain of repeated use. The kind of breakdown that could only happen when a scheduled maintenance was skipped or a simple check was overlooked."

I would pause, for effect. Then after looking up toward the structure that would soon be hoisting us up and jostling us about, I would continue: "But that type of thing happens so infrequently." A sigh. "I guess that's why they call them 'accidents.'"

Inevitably this would lead to moans and groans from those trapped in the cattle chute that would eventually lead us to our destiny. I am sure that at some level this was a way that yours truly could deal with his own morbid fears and anxiety. Speaking them aloud, especially when the ride was located in one of those dodgy parking lot fairs that seemed to spring up in front of K-Marts, one step ahead of the state inspectors. 

Inspectors like the ones who uncovered maintenance issues, such as a train derailment, faulty restraint bars and guest injuries including dislocated joints and concussions. These concerns were not found in any traveling carnival, but rather at a dozen different Six Flags parks across three states. The latest "infraction" resulted in the death of forty-two-year-old Hassan Jihad Ibn Kariem who fell to his death and several others were injured while riding the Goliath rollercoaster at Six Flags Over Georgia. 

Additionally, the powers that be at Magic Mountain, a Six Flags park in Valencia, California permanently closed their X2 Hypercoaster after more than a hundred riders reported brain injuries after experiencing the flips and twists and high speed turbulent turns generated by this three hundred foot tall beast.  

Whee. Sounds like fun. 

I just like a little vertigo with mine. And when the actual effects of the ride turn out to be more perilous than the ones I used to spout in line, I guess the thrillmeisters have won the day. 

Impressions

 There are days like this past Tuesday when I realize I am making the correct decision to retire from teaching. 

The image I hold in my mind of a classroom filled with expectant upturned faces, hanging on my every word is a fantasy. I should know that this is precisely the reason for the gentleman who interviewed me for the credential program to laugh when he asked why I would make a good teacher and I replied, "Because I'm good with kids."

For the record, I maintain this opinion of myself. In groups smaller than five or six, or one on one, I am able to run rings around the average five to ten year old. These are the opportunities I have begun to anticipate over the course of what we are currently describing as my final days. 

Aside from the concern of being outnumbered, I have surrendered to the idea that my own experience has yet to prepare me for the children I encounter on the mean streets of Oakland. The life they have lead in their first decade of existence makes my own childhood look like a boring fantasy. 

You want complications? How about the looming threat of ICE descending on your neighborhood? How about food insecurity that makes every morning an opportunity for moms to stop by their kids' classroom to see if there is a little leftover breakfast that they can take home with them. It's not stealing. It's survival. How about housing insecurity? We have a large percentage of our students who either leave before a year is complete or show up at our school midway through a term because they had to move. 

Had to move. 

That one sticks with me. "Will I have my own room at the new house or will I still have to share with grandma?"

I am not making this up. 

So I have tried to make a safe and sane landing place for these families. A place where they can feel comfortable if only for six hours a day. Three more if they are enrolled in the after school program. With another meal tossed in for good measure. You don't often get families to come to events like Science Fair unless you promise to provide them with pizza. 

It has not taken me thirty years to come to all these revelations. When I started, after I was able to brush off the mild derision of being laughed at for being "good with kids," I truly believed that I could make a difference. 

Now I believe that anyone who steps into my place will make a difference. It's time to get some fresh blood. Someone who is good with kids. And the lives they lead. 

Frosty

 "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."

Those are the words of Robert Frost, of which there are many. These just happen to be the ones that struck me on this particular morning. 

Probably because the night before I had spent a good long while talking with a very good friend who is in the midst of having to pack up and sell the house in which she and her family have lived for the past thirty years. 

That's a long time. A lifetime if you happen to be either of our sons who happened to be born almost as part of the exercise of their parents becoming grown-ups, real and true. The homes each of us built were on opposite ends of California. We have spent the last three decades making a nest for our brood, a place to settle down. 

An even longer time ago, we were teenagers fumbling through high school together. We had grown up in the same town. Our parents had gone to that same high school together. So many things brought us together that when, after we had both graduated, she decided to move away to the Golden State, it was a challenge to us both to imagine how life could ever be the same. 

And yet, once I settled into the idea of her visits and our connections over the phone lines, it seemed natural. Once had my own love affair that drew me west, we were able to renew our connection. It was at her home that I had my first California Thanksgiving. After dinner, we took a ride in her convertible to the movies. 

In November.

With the top down. 

Once she packed up again to head to the southern end of California, we had another in a series of fond farewells. We made promises to stay in touch. And we did. Our sons became fast friends. Our dogs never fully reconciled their relationship, but it was always nice to have a Canine American to visit on one end of our journey or the other. 

We listened and consoled one another as our parents aged and eventually passed on. We avoided imagining what the next chapter might be. 

Now that chapter has come, and while I sort out my own landing spot in retirement, she and her husband have become victims of an unforgiving economy and the realities of being "of a certain age." 

We are that. Now they are in the midst of downsizing and preparing to move to the other side of the country. Which makes me terribly sad. But I am heartened to know that we will always have a place where we have to let the other in. 

Stupid Is As Stupid Does

 "It's amazing when you stand up here. It's just, like, the love," he told the crowd. "I could say the stupidest things and you clap."

This, my friends, is not the worst thing the convicted felon has said in the weeks leading up to the midterm elections. It would be easy to paint this as desperate, but it seems to be all part of some glorious improvisation that began with a ride down an escalator more than ten years ago. 

Since then he has made a regular habit of taunting not just members of the press, most of them female, but visiting heads of state with whom he felt the need to disagree in front of that same press corps. Even as the legions of applauding MAGAts continues to shrink, he feels emboldened to stay "the stupidest things." He lies about the progress of the war he started and cannot end. He lies about the price of everything and insists that this will all go away after the midterms. He is now asking his red-caps to pretend that he is on the ballot. Because, he will tell you, if you don't then there will be no border and no tax cuts.

And if you don't vote for Republicans, he will be impeached. 

If you don't vote for Republicans, the votes needed to remove him from office might finally be there. 

If you don't vote for Republicans, all that "great work" that the worst "president" of our lifetime or anyone else's might end up in jail. 

That's not so stupid, is it?

I would applaud for that. 

Naturally

 It's artificial. It is a stew made of scrapings from Al Gore's Internet. There is nothing truly "super" about it. Are you ready for the weird part? I've been using something like it for the past twenty-some years to write this blog. 

When I sit down and start to expound on the little things that gnaw at me, or the big things that consume me, I oftentimes turn to the search function of the program most of us know called Google Chrome. For example, if I wanted to know how many gallons were in a ton of diesel fuel, I would do a search for the answer, rather than going to the set of encyclopedias I keep in my office. 

I don't keep encyclopedias in my office. I use Al Gore's Internet. You may remember the Internet. It was a "series of tubes" according to Senator Ted Stevens. When I ask Al Gore's Internet how many gallons in a ton of diesel, the network of computers all tied together in a series of tubes or "a net" gives me a whopping great list of responses, topped off by a summary of those responses labeled "AI Overview." A cursory peek at that paragraph lets me know not only the answer to my question, but keeps me from moving down the list to look for an answer I might have clicked on myself before 2024 when the engineers at Google decided that poring over a list of responses might be too tedious for users. Why bother checking on those thousands of potential links when you could have the answer handed to you on an artificial platter? 

Maybe because of my inherent distrust of machines, first introduced to my by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke. The HAL 9000 on board the spaceship Discovery was not giving the best answers to astronauts Dave Bowman and Frank Poole. Even though HAL kept saying that he had the utmost enthusiasm for the mission, the computer sends Frank out to fix the AE-35 unit only to ram him with a pod and send him spinning off into space. Then, when Dave goes out attempts to retrieve his fellow astronaut's body, HAL refuses to open the pod bay doors. 

I didn't have to look that stuff up. 

It was in my brain from all those years ago. 

But now I feel as though I need to check myself, to verify those tasty bits of infotainment for you, dear reader. I have to consult the oracle of intelligence because I really need to know that there are two hundred eighty gallons of diesel in a ton, and that the "deal" made by the self-proclaimed very stable genius with Russia provides the United States with three hundred thousand tons of the stuff. That ends up being eighty-four million gallons of diesel. Which seems like a lot. I used old-fashioned AI for that one: a calculator. Then I checked with the oracle once again to discover that the United States uses approximately one hundred thirty million gallons of diesel a day. That means that the deal the convicted felon and Russian asset trying to distract us all from the miserable job he's doing isn't going to cover one day's use of diesel fuel. 

I did that last bit in my head. The former game show host is trying to keep the pod bay door closed. Use your own intelligence. You don't need anything artificial or super. 

It's all natural. 

Shocked And Dismayed

 "I have not seen anything like this in my twenty-eight-plus years," Erie Police Chief Rick Lorah told a local news station. "I'm not sure that the city of Erie has ever seen the loss of life and the devastation that we just witnessed."

Why do we keep saying things like this? This statement comes from a guy who might consider himself a "peace officer" who goes to work each day with a gun strapped to his hip and wears a bulletproof vest as part of his uniform. 

Which is by no means a slight on Erie Police Chief Rick Lorah. I would guess that even the Sheriff of Mayberry, North Carolina would expect his deputy to carry more than one bullet in this day and age. 

Meanwhile, back in Erie, the scene described by Chief Lorah was one in which eight people were shot and killed before the idiot with a gun turned it on himself, bringing the grand total to eight. Reports in some quadrants are noting that one of the victims was pregnant, so the math may need to be amended. Additionally, there were children aged one and five years old among the dead. According to reports, all of the victims were related. 

So here's my quandary: SWAT teams were dispatched to the scene after reports of gunfire were made. Authorities said that by the time the heavily armed "peace officers" arrived, all the killing had been done. I wonder what might have happened if an emergency call had gone out to that family for counseling in the days leading up to the shooting? What if unarmed social workers had made their presence felt in the runup to the murders? If a mental health check had been made and the guns in the house had been removed as a precaution?

I'm guessing that's not anything Erie Police Chief Rick Lorah has seen in his twenty-eight plus years. Because we tend to solve our problems with guns. Immigration. Diplomacy. And as an added bonus, we can livestream the firing squad death sentence being carried out after the fact. 

If we do, in fact, hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness then maybe we should check in with the guys who wrote that Second Amendment and see how that squares with the Declaration of Independence. 

I hate to think that Erie Police Chief Rick Lorah might continue to witness mass shootings anywhere int he land of the free and the home of the moving targets.