Trendng

Here is the thing that I took away from the April 3 shooting at YouTube Headquarters in San Bruno, California: The hospital. Not the thoughts and prayers, though of course that was the response from anyone who might have done something other than the traditional hand-wringing. Not the fact that the shooter was a woman, which we have been reminded makes her an anomaly among nuts with guns. Nope. It was the hospital where the victims were rushed: Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. Named for  the founder of Facebook. The wounded employees of one tech giant were taken to the emergency room funded by another.
I suppose that you could dismiss such a thing as coincidence, given the preponderance of tech companies in Silicon Valley. Google this and Yelp that and it's not like Mark Zuckerberg was actually on hand to help treat anyone. He was busy somewhere getting ready to defend himself and his company against claims that they had aided and abetted the Trump campaign by being loose with its handling of user data. This is a world where individuals are rarely mentioned as dollars and users show up in millions. The incident at YouTube headquarters involved four people: three victims and one shooter who ended up being the only fatality. This means it doesn't technically qualify as a mass shooting. No matter that everyone who clicked on a link that said "active shooter" last Tuesday feared the worst. Thoughts and prayers were online before matters had been settled on the scene. Like the President's son: "You think there’s any chance whatsoever that a mass shooters hateful Instagram and YouTube channels would be pulled immediately if they were NRA members as opposed to liberal Vegan PETA activists? Asking for a few million friends in the @NRA." So much for thought or prayers.
Nope. We live in a world of instant media and even swifter judgments. Why wait for someone to chew up all that raw footage and the comments that pile up underneath. Nobody is going to suffer from the paralysis of analysis here. Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and Snapchat and so on lit up like a War On Christmas Tree with theories and rumors about just exactly what happened. Not that it really matters. Something else will be trending soon enough. Something with a gun, no doubt. 

These Aren't The Droids You're Looking For

Get your news right here: biased and poorly researched news, but at least I am honest about it. This puts me in a league, I believe with such media stalwarts as Fox and Friends. Though I don't think the crew over there are quite so open about the biased part. Fair and balanced? Who cares? If you want news that makes you feel good about what you already thought was going on and needed and needed affirmation, pick the biased kind.
Why challenge yourself to check out different points of view? Changing your mind is a sign of weakness, unless you do it in a very careful, "Presidential" way. If you find yourself tipping onto a point of view that might cause others to question your leadership capacity, take that course correction to the straight line and speed up. Even if there is a brick wall in front of you.
If you are reading this blog, you probably already know about Sinclair Broadcast Group. They proudly announce on their web site that Sinclair is the leading local news provider in the country. Which may or may not be true, but it is that last bit about being a "news provider" that makes me itch. I thought that news existed, and humans felt compelled to report it. Or not. I remember learning back in sixth grade that journalists were required to be objective. Not encouraged. Required. This is why I chose not to become a journalist. I didn't imagine that I could stray from my own opinions on things for very long. I am happy to feel that I bend people's positions, from time to time. Lawn darts: not as dangerous as you might have imagined, for example. 
Which is pretty much what Sinclair does, but with way more money and political capital at stake. Still, they recently felt the need to respond to criticism about promotional announcements made by their local affiliates: “We aren’t sure of the motivation for the criticism, but find it curious that we would be attacked for asking our news people to remind their audiences that unsubstantiated stories exist on social media, which result in an ill-informed public with potentially dangerous consequences,” commented Scott Livingston, Sinclair’s Senior Vice President of News. “It is ironic that we would be attacked for messages promoting our journalistic initiative for fair and objective reporting, and for specifically asking the public to hold our newsrooms accountable. Our local stations keep our audiences’ trust by staying focused on fact-based reporting and clearly identifying commentary.” And that would be great if local stations were not acting as a robotic chorus for the thoughts of their overlords. 
Hey kids: Fake news is fiction. Find your news where you can, because there isn't a lot of objective fact-based journalism going on right now. That is not the time in which we find ourselves living currently. Keep that five pound grain of salt nearby for each and every time someone tells you they are going to give you the straight scoop. Do keep this in mind: It takes a lot of money to run a newspaper or television station, just ask Charles Foster Kane. What makes the headlines is exactly what pays the bills. How do you suppose those news guys afford all those snappy blazers? 
Just promise yourself to think about it a little bit.  

Going Somewhere

I get a visceral twinge whenever a kid calls me "coach." Not because I don't enjoy that particular epithet as applied to the job that I do running a weekly physical education program at an elementary school. I like the sound of it: "What are we going to do today, coach?" Or "Can I help put out the cones, coach?" That's fine. It's the echo that it sends through my head as I remember all the times I used that same moniker on my typing teacher.
The reality of public education started becoming clear to me in junior high school when I went out for wrestling and showed up for my first day of practice and found myself sitting on a mat across from my typing teacher. He was there, in part, because of his love of the sport, but also because it meant an additional check each month during wrestling season. And why he was also the middleweight football coach. And the boys' track coach. This is what he was doing to invigorate that part of his life that thrived on athletic competition. That and those extra checks to supplement his typing teacher's salary.
Not that I was fully aware of all those economic realities at the time, but I knew I was on a slippery slope when I showed up for typing class and responded to "Good morning, Caven," with "Good morning, coach." The switch had been made. Somehow "Coach" had superseded "Mister." The home row key drills started to make sense more as physical tests than mental. I learned touch typing in the same fashion I learned how to shoot a double leg takedown. Repetition and reward. Here was a place that there really was an A for effort.
I learned a lot from the coach. I use those keyboarding skills every day, the ones I learned in the classroom. The wrestling moves have faded into the past, but the rigor remains. I know that every lesson learned requires some effort on the part of the learner. I try and dial down my exhortations to the kids in my room, but I want them to have expectations of themselves. It's about potential. I was eventually coached to second place in the district's B Mat wrestling tournament. My coach got me to a place that I never thought I would go. Which is what teachers should do. And coaches too. Good teachers and coaches. Without that little twinge.

Point A To Point B

Sliding down highway Five through the middle of California, I was granted a little time to consider all of my options. Not that I was up for any change. Change is bad and scary, or at the very least messy. I was thinking about the twists and turns that my life had taken bringing me to this long, straight strip of  asphalt. I was reminded of the long, straight strip of asphalt that connected me and  my freshman dorm to my hometown. A straight line north and south, with the slight bend up near  the top to keep me from rolling on into Wyoming. That was a trip that I took weekly for nine months, preferring the  relative safety of the place I left behind to the place where I was going. So much so that when my sophomore year rolled around, I gathered up my things and set about learning all my college stuff in a school just down the street from where I was born.
By thirty, I had strayed only the slightest bit. A trip to Key West with some friends had made me believe that it was possible to leave Colorado and return, much in the way road trips that  had connected  me with Arizona and Oklahoma. It made me think about the time I spent in the back of a station wagon, barreling along as my father drove us to exotic locations like Chilicothe, Ohio and Niagara Falls. My dad was perhaps as mired in Boulder as anyone, having landed there when he was just a lad himself. That long stretch of highway called I-70 that would connect the east with the west in case nuclear weapons from here to there was just a plan.
Which is another tangent from that straight line.
That line that takes me north and south, the one I drove with the girl who would become my wife. The highway that we drove together as we started to imagine making a life together. Which is what we did. And all that time we made trips up and down the state, eventually including a car seat for our son in the back. For a few trips our son drove us. Then we started coordinating cars and where we would meet up. Driving those long less than winding roads all this time has made it easier to move up and down, north and south. The miles that we travel are the miles that we chat and catch up on all the time that we have not been able to find the time to sit down and talk. About the old times. About the things we still want to do.

Unsatisfactory Resolution

I understand how romantic the thought of resolving a problem with guns can be. Bruce Willis has made a career out of it. So much so that in one particular installment of the Die Hard series, his computer hacker partner, played by Justin Long, is awestruck when Bruce's Detective John McClane "kills a helicopter with a car." To which a rough and tumbled McClane replies, "I was out of bullets." Over the course of five films, Bruce has amassed seventy-three confirmed on-screen kills. Most of them with a gun. Is it little wonder that once Hollywood decided to reboot the Death Wish franchise that they looked to Mister Willis to take over for Charles Bronson? In our time, revenge is not a dish best served cold. It's served with hot lead.
Which brings me to another tangent. The relative satisfaction of punching someone in the nose. There are plenty of movie moments that end with someone getting bopped in the schnozz. The bopped tend to fall in a heap, and the bopper squares his or her shoulders and walks away with a sly grin as others look on impressed. Not as impressed as they might have been if the bopper had launched a car into their antagonist's face, but impressed nonetheless. A somewhat recent addition to this scenario has the bopper shaking his or her hand as they walk away, giving some veracity to the notion that human beings are not rubber bags but dense bags of flesh and bone that have much more resistance in real life. Dropping someone with one punch is a pretty unlikely scenario, with the reality making it much more likely that the assaulted party would most likely choose to hit back. The surrounding crowd would, most likely cheer for the continuation of the fight, not its abrupt end. 
All of this to land in the Wild West, where a Colorado man, Michael Kourosh Sadeghi,  recently shot his neighbor, Dustin Schmidt, in the head five times because he believed Schmidt was abusing Schmidt's dog. The circumstances are currently being unwound, but it seems as though the dog had been leaping aggressively into Sadeghi's yard, which prompted Schmidt to install a higher fence, and when the tied up dog jumped the fence, and was hanging by its collar, Sadeghi chose to take matters into his own hands. By killing his neighbor. 
With a gun. 
I would not expect that a fistfight between the two of them would have settled the matter, but a sore hand and assault charges would have been a problem that would have left at least one more person alive to solve the problem with the dog. 

Compulsion

It makes complete sense that I would spend the first couple of hours of my Spring Break doing what makes my mother laugh: I worked. Not at the job from which I was taking the aforementioned break. I repaired my electric lawn mower. Once that was done, I did exactly what came naturally after that. I mowed the lawn.
The combination of a March that dropped a good deal of rain into a spring that had been drier than most of us had hoped for and a few weeks waiting for a part that had to be researched, ordered, and replaced gave us a pretty wild mess of a yard. It was the kind of green sea that my wife has pined for since we have lived on our little patch of land. I don't do well when I see a lawn that is less than manicured. This is probably because I have been cutting grass for as many years as I care to remember. Lugging my family's lawnmower to the trailer park where my piano teacher lived to trim the tiny plots of barely lawns for a great many elderly clients was how I made my first fortune. The one that helped me buy my water bed. And helped pay for my first speeding ticket.
You could say that I've got lawn mowing in my blood.
Or you could say that I have an unnatural compulsion to see all those green blades cut to a nice level plane. And you could say that I don't know how to relax. Both of these assertions would be accurate. You could also say that I build my self-esteem by attempting to master nature.
Attempting.
Because I know that this is a passing thing. The grass is going to continue to grow. And the bridge rectifier I replaced might very well need replacing again at some point. That's why I bought two. I sort of expected that I would fail miserably in my first attempt and therefore I purchased a backup so that I could still appear clever in the face of the encroaching emerald wave.
But I got lucky the first time. I fixed the mower and I was back to work.
Wait a second.
I could have set that package of bridge rectifiers aside and let the grass grow. I could be on vacation. I could relax.
After the lawn was mowed.

Rules And Regulations

It is an interesting thing that a call for commonsense gun laws tumbles into the echo chamber of the National Rifle Association and turns into "They're coming for our guns." It is sad that a friend or family member of a victim of gun violence is immediately turned into a level one threat on the Constitutionally Guaranteed Right To Bear Arms. As I have pointed out here a few times before, it is interesting that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness did not make the cut when it came time to make the Bill of Rights.
Quick: How many of the first ten amendments can you name? In order?*
How about the ten commandments?**
There was quite a dustup in the constitutional community recently when former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times in which he suggested that the Second Amendment be repealed. Not just the common sense restrictions on automatic weapons or raising the age limit to purchase guns from eighteen to twenty-one. He wants to dump number two completely.
Them, as they say, are fighting words. And while it is important to note that this is yet another moment of battling amendments, number one versus number two, the one that seems to stir the most fuss is the suggestion that unfettered access to unlimited firepower be restricted gets a great big noise started. Until those who don't like guns are shouted down by those who do. So much so that contributions to the NRA have tripled since the Parkland shooting. Any perceived threat is turned back by shouting and large wads of cash. Which doesn't mean that the other side doesn't see their share of donations to further their agenda of limiting the access to instruments of death.
All of which makes that tired refrain of waiting a respectful amount of time before discussing the matter which has been splattered all across our headlines rings so hollow. It will take lifetimes for the healing to be complete in Parkland. In Aurora. In Newtown. And every other community that experiences one of ninety-three deaths by gun violence ever single day in America. There is no time to wait.
So let the war of words rage on. Be glad that this battle is being fought with facts and rhetoric and sarcasm and rants. And not bullets.
*Bill of Rights
**Ten Commandments