This weekend saw two mass shootings.
You don't need for me to tell you why those shootings happened, or describe the tragedy of what occurred and what was taken from families, friends and communities. Or that it didn't always used to be this way.
But it sure is now.
The pair of shootings seemed to have stemmed from the politics of the shooters, one far right, the other far left, each running to extremes. At some point those divergent points of view seem so far apart they, in fact, curve back toward the same point. (Look, the El Paso shooter left a manifesto and was taken into custody, and is far less of a mystery to me than the misogynist antifa fan in Ohio who was dead within a minute of opening fire. But "making sense" is not usually something I associate with mass murder). It leaves us with some common traits between the shooters, not the least of which is the ability of anyone off the street to arm themselves like they're storming Baghdad and pop off if they're having a bad day and feel misunderstood.
I'm tired of men who can't handle their shit or that life wasn't what they expected turning their self-loathing on others, their shame metastasizing into a need to prove their place in the world with juvenile fits and the tools of a soldier.
Once again, a lot of politicians made bland statements, the media conglomerates handled it within their brand standards, and the paid spokespeople took to cable. Horrified and mourning people were treated like exotic animals on safari by national news.
I had a whole lot more written, but I deleted it. I'm just done. This is impossible to write.
We're exhausted. Exhausted from knowing something could be done and, for some reason, won't be. And exhausted because every time you open your mouth about how obvious it is that this situation is insane, there's someone there who cares more about middle-school debate club needling and badly reading a single sentence than they care about piles of dead people. And there's no other way of looking at it anymore.
I'm tired of knowing people want to run for office and tell people how to live who don't care if the people they're supposed to represent live at all.
We can do better, if we want to. But I don't see anyone who wants to do better, and I can't begin to understand why.
