We Are Better Than This

I generally reserve this space for fun and games. The games that we play, and the way that we approach them, generally speak to the sort of society in which we live. We treat games as pastimes, diversions from our day-to-day existences, yet we allow ourselves to get wholly absorbed by them from time to time. And that’s actually a good thing, I think. Right now, I’m far more interested in focusing on the Seahawks being in the upcoming Super Bowl and far less interested in dealing with an assortment of personal life issues and quandaries and challenges. Those problems will still be there on the 3rd of February. They can wait.

But sometimes real life intrudes. Real life can be really ugly. And sometimes it gets personal:

COLUMBIA, Md. (AP) — Someone armed with a gun opened fire at a busy shopping mall in suburban Baltimore on Saturday. Three people died, including the person believed to be the shooter, police said.
The shooting took place at the Mall in Columbia, a suburb of both Baltimore and Washington, according to Howard County police.
Someone called 911 at around 11:15 a.m. to report a shooting at the mall. Police responded to the scene and found three people dead, including one person who was found near a gun and ammunition. No details were released about their identities.
Police said they believed that one of the people found dead was the shooter. Two people with minor injuries were transported to a hospital for treatment.
The mall is at the center of the town and typically opens at 10 a.m. on Saturdays. It was busy with shoppers and employees when shots rang out before noon.
Joan Harding of Elkridge, Md., was shopping with her husband, David, for a tiara for their granddaughter's 18th birthday. She said she heard something heavy falling, followed by gunshots and people running.
"My husband said, 'Get down!' and the girl that worked in the store said, 'Get in the back,' " Harding said. That is where they hid until police gave the all-clear.
At a news conference, Howard County Police Chief William J. McMahon said police are relatively confident that there was only one shooter.
"We don't know a motive yet," McMahon said. "We are very confident that it was a single shooter, and there was not another shooter in the mall."
The mall was closed to the public as police went store to store looking for people who might still hiding, McMahon said. He said the shooting occurred at a store on the upper floor.
He said it wasn't clear whether the shooting was random or whether the shooter and victims knew each other.
Witnesses described moments of panic as they heard a succession of gunshots and screaming as people ran for cover into nearby stores and hid behind locked doors.
Tonya Broughton of Silver Spring, Md., was with a friend getting facials for a 'girls morning out,' she said. "The only thing I heard was all the people running and screaming and saying 'There's a shooter! There's a shooter!' " she said.
Wearing a gel face mask, she and her friend hunkered down in a Victoria Secret store.
People were directed out of the mall and into a parking lot, where some boarded a bus and others walked toward their cars. Some people were seen crying. McMahon said detectives were interviewing witnesses as they emerged from the mall to try to get a better picture of the events that had unfolded.
Laura McKinzles of Columbia works at a kiosk in the mall. She said she heard between eight and 10 gunshots, followed by people running and screaming. She ran into the backroom of a perfume store and locked the door.
Allison Cohen, who works at the apparel store "Lucky Brand Jeans," said she always felt safe at the mall.
"I truly never thought something like this would ever happen here," Cohen said. "It's really, really shocking."

My future in-laws live in Ellicott City, Md., which is near to Columbia. They were shopping in this mall at the time. They were apparently at the opposite end of the mall when the shooting began, near an exit. They were able to run from the mall to safety. But 15 minutes earlier, they were in the area of the building where this occurred. 15 minutes. That small sliver of time being difference between safety and potentially being in harm’s way. They are OK, which is a great relief. I am thankful for that. I am very, very thankful.

But I am also livid that I live in a nation where something like this happens at all. That several people have suffered the ultimate loss in this incident – the loss of one’s life – makes me extraordinarily sad. It also makes me angry. Really angry.

This sort of violence is senseless and needless. This is not how a supposedly civil society conducts its affairs. It’s unacceptable. If we cannot ensure the basic safety of our citizens, then we, as a society, have failed. And this sort of thing happens FAR TOO OFTEN. It seems to happen almost every day in one area or another of this country. That we, as a supposedly civil society, have not taken more steps to prevent these sorts of incidents from happening should be infuriating to every person who lives here.

My outrage is genuine. This isn’t me speaking in the abstract. People who are very dear to me were very nearly in harm’s way today. And in recent times, there have been two instances where people that I know have been killed in acts of gun violence. That’s two times too often. Any number larger than zero is too often. It’s not acceptable. In one case, it was a murder-suicide. In the other, it was someone I know who is an attorney and was attempting to mediate a dispute who was in the line of the fire when one of the parties pulled a gun. I mention the situations because violence takes many forms. The end result was the same in both cases, however – a senseless loss of life. Two incidents which have forever altered the ways that I see this life of mine.

The thing is, it should not take personal connections, a personal feelings of loss, to make us care. This shooting today in Columbid, Maryland, should outrage you even if you know not a single person in the greater Baltimore-Washington area. We, as human beings, should not be doing this sort of thing to each other.

And I have ZERO interest in debating the politics of gun control right now. Whether I do or do not favour gun control isn’t really the point. What is the point is that there are an awful lot of gun control apologists out there who will quickly respond to an incident by using an excuse other than the prevalence and easy accessibility to firearms. “People are crazy,” they will say. “Crime is everywhere,” they will say. To which I say this: OK, well if the problem is crime or people being crazy, then what are you doing to solve that problem? Don’t pay lip service to ‘bigger’ life issues. If those are the real problems, then try to solve them. Go on, do it. Make your community and your society a better place. I urge you to do it.

Same for gun control advocates: don’t just bitch about guns. Strive to make change. But what if you cannot make grand societal changes, at least in the short term? Then make small change. The solution is larger societal issues is found in often found in small ideas. Find commonality with people, find common purpose. Surely, we can all agree that a gunman shooting innocents in a mall is unacceptable.

It would be easy for me to be hardened and inflexible, to be cynical, having not only seen three people I know killed by gun violence in recent years, but also having been a victim of a violent crime in the past in which my life was threatened. Yes, it happened to good old, whitebread, milquetoast, middle class me. I was fine, in the end, the victim of an act perpetrated by a couple of junkies who likely didn’t remember they had even done it. It would be easy to call this a random act, but it was nothing of the sort. Two guys who wanted the means with which to get high chose to commit a crime so as to make it easier for them to do so. We should be careful using the word random to describe incidences of violence. It is not random. It is a choice, though not necessarily a conscious one.

And imagine how I felt when, a couple of months after that, I came across one of the perpetrators while walking along Mission St. And I did know it was him. I could never forget that face. I will remember those two faces forever. And there he was – strung out, yellow-eyed and trembling, leaning up against a lamppost near a bus stop. And I stopped in my tracks, I just froze there in place and glared at him, glared right through him, wondering if he remembered me.

But no, he did not remember me. He had no idea who I was. No idea at all.

And in that moment, of course, I was outraged that this scum junky was out on the streets, having evaded capture by the S.F.P.D. All sorts of cynical ideas go through your head in a moment such as that – what a joke, the criminal justice system is in this country. What a laughingstock. Guys like this motherfucking sleazebag are free to just roam about, pickpocketing and thieving and doing whatever the fuck they want. The cops don’t care. No one cares.

It’s when you give in to cynicism that vigilantism suddenly seems like a good idea. In that moment, I could’ve killed him. And I really do mean I could’ve killed him, as in physically, as he was so meek and pathetic and I was so angry that I could’ve beaten the living shit out of him right there on the street, leaving him begging for mercy, but also leaving him wondering why it was that this seemingly random dude was using his face as a punching bag.

But I did nothing of the sort. Instead I just moved on. I pitied him. I felt sorry for him, because I was certain that this guy – who was willing, with an accomplice, to pull a gun and a knife on a guy for $7 and an iPod – had completely lost who he was. He wasn’t a human being anymore. He was a zombi, as good as dead. Me using violence as a response to violence, and doing so at a time of my choosing when I had the upper hand, would have been the easy way out.

What is far more difficult, however, and also far more important, is committing to finding solutions to problems which lead to people behaving in the way this person had behaved towards me. This shouldn’t happen to others. It shouldn’t happen at all. If I can do something to prevent that from happening to one other person, I have made this society better.

I regularly donate not so insignificant sums to institutions devoted to the study of mental illness, something which I care deeply about. I have done so now for quite some time, believing that knowledge is power. We humans are a dangerously flawed species, but we are also gifted with the ability to learn and understand ourselves, to learn why it is that we do the way we do things, and to ultimately change both individuals and the individuals who come after them. While I do not believe that mental illness is the reason that all crimes of the nature of this shooting in Columbia occur, I believe there is often a strong correlation. It seems inherently irrational to me that we, the human race, so easily hurt one-another. I believe that the seemingly soulless shells of individuals who sought to hold me up could have been prevented from reaching that point somewhere in their lives. That behaviour seems preventable to me. There are reasons why this happens. Lots of reasons, some of which make no sense. Me personally, I am not smart enough not well-learned enough to explain this, but that doesn’t mean I should do nothing. If by contributing financially, I am able to enable those who are smart enough to find some answers, then I have made a difference.

And that is what you should do. Make a difference. Care about your community, your society. There are many angles to a story such as what happened in Columbia. There is some aspect the act of a gunman going on a spree in public space which should make you uneasy, which you should want to change so that it happens less often, if at all. So pick one and go about solving it, whatever that might entail. Do not be cynical. Do not just sit there and do nothing. Even small things are enough – acts as small as standing on my soapbox here in this small corner of the internet and imploring others to be involved. It should not require an enormous act of violence to compel us to action, but sometimes we need to be shaken to get off our duffs and act. (And I admit that I am just as guilty as succumbing to inertia as everyone else.)

The cynic would say that another violent act such as this will inevitably occur. I do not share that view. This sort of loss is not inevitable. Losing is only the default in sports and in games.

We are better than this.

Boston

We are having seafood for dinner. My usual impulse when I have an exceptionally lousy day is to combat it with seafood. The day after I was pinkslipped from my job at the University of California, KC and I went to the greatest seafood joint ever, intent on eating 1,000,000,000 oysters. Now, it would take most people decades to snarf 1,000,000,000 oysters, but KC and I can do it in a couple of hours. We wound up only eating about 300,000,000 or so, however, since they had other things on the menu and we decided we would try some of their fresh tombo … which is what I am making for dinner. I call this particular dish Sicilian Tuna Carpaccio since it’s served in a similar fashion to the beef dish. I whip out my light sabre of a fish knife and slice it thin to the point of transparency. Red onions, capers, olive oil, fresh lemon. That right there is the greatest food in the history of foods.

I need these sorts of reminders from time to time of goodness – and few things are better on my palate as an impeccably fresh tuna served raw. And this definitely felt like a bad day, even though nothing happened to me personally. I couldn’t help, however, but be concerned when I saw what was going on in Boston. I have family in the city. I also a number of great friends there, a good number of whom happen to be avid runners, so seeing film of the carnage from multiple bomb blasts near the finish line of the Boston Marathon immediately sent me into disquiet. I worried for all of their safety. Furthermore, a good number more of my friends were in the Boston area over the weekend for a tournament, a good number of whom were likely playing the role of tourist as well as competitor over the long Boston holiday weekend. So I was immediately pretty worried, but I’m pleased to report that, as of this writing, all of the people who I feared for are accounted for.

Days like today were always the worst sorts of days to be working in the media. As dull as a “slow news day” can be, I also subscribe to the adage that “no news is good news.” Outside of elections, the biggest stories you ever cover extensively, frenzily and spontaneously are the bad ones. And contrary to what many of the sock puppets and blowhards on Faux News might tell you, journalists are, in fact, objective in principle. Yes, we do root for people, and will snicker and chortle and personally engage in some schadenfreude, but when it comes time to put out an edition, we’ll refrain from commentary and attempt to be as objective in possible, present the facts as best they can for the public to make sense of what happened.

And that’s where the difficulty comes in. How do you enable others to make sense of what is senseless?

Columbine was possibly the worst. Reading column inch after column inch about bullet-ridden teenagers nearly killed my will to live. I think some of us cried that night in the offices of the New Mexican and afterwards at the bar. 9/11 was an awful day to work in San Francisco, knowing that some of your neighbours weren’t going to be home that day (remember, and never let it be forgotten, that the United 93 which crashed in Pennsyvania was originally headed for San Francisco), but it was also surreal and somewhat jittery – my office was in a complex of Federal buildings and above a BART station (and thus seemed like a potential target for any sort of further terrorist act) and all of us just wanted to get the fuck out of there and go home as soon as possible. Trying to prep an edition for the next day centered on a particularly terrible story like the two I just mentioned becomes a sensory overload, as you plow through story after story on the wires and comb through all of the available information, all of which is bad and a great deal of which saps whatever hope you might have for humanity. Natural disaster stories like hurricanes or massive wildfires at least have an air of awe to the proceedings – “holy shit, mother nature is a fucking badass” – whereas killings just seem needless, seem preventable and unnecessary. Senseless. That’s the word I’m looking for. Senseless.

A lot of these bad days on the desk in previous press offices came flooding back into my mind today. Saying which day and which incident was “worst” is irrelevant, because “worst” implies that somehow something about the others was better. No, they were all terrible. Two particularly terrible days on the job, however – days which I’d not thought about in a decade, if not longer – came into focus again for me. Both were in New Mexico. The first was a fatal shooting erupting on the Santa Fe Plaza during Fiesta de Santa Fe, a harvest festival which has been going on in Nuevo Mexico since before the U.S. was a country. The second was a double homicide, a couple of high school kids shot during the traditional Good Friday pilgrimage to Chimayó, which is one of the most sacred sites in the Western Hemisphere. Both events were precious to the local community of Northern New Mexico, events which were part of what defined the unique community in which I lived. Events which would, from then on, be forever altered. And for what? What was the point of that? What was the fucking point? It was senseless but also selfish – was compromising an entire culture really worth whatever petty squabble resulted in this violence?

Once that culture and community is altered, it never seems to quite return to how it once was. I’m reminded now of another particularly bad day at the office, albeit due entirely to an act of self-inflicted and self-contained violence. I remember hearing on the radio while sitting in my office that Kurt Cobain had been found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. I spoke with a local wanna-be promoter I knew, a fringe hanger-on to the scene much like me and seemingly 1,000,000 other people, and he told me straight up that, “Kurt just killed the Seattle music scene.” The scene which, somewhat confoundingly (the record execs were pretty perplexed by the sales numbers) had come to define, through sound, the collective since of hangover and malaise and economic detachment of the post-Reagan era. I thought that statement was a bit far-fetched but I have to admit that the promoter was correct. After that death, all of the flaws and the warts and wrinkles in the scene were out in the open, were fully exposed, and the seemingly endless stream of northwest bands dominating the airwaves began to run dry. The inevitability of the great run coming to an end seemed more certain with each passing day.

These past incidents I would up immersed in from the supposedly detached and objective perspective of a news gatherer came to my mind today when I watched bombs going off at a sporting event, at a community event on a holiday. I don’t really care who did it or what particular axe they have to grind. I don’t care about their politics. Sport is not political. It is those surrounding sport who politicize it. The people standing at the finish line of the race had nothing to do with whatever agenda the perpetrators wished to further. They may even sympathize, or they may not. It doesn’t really matter. It was senseless. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with people?

My hope is, in the end, that Boston does not let this particular incident take away one of the unique traditions that has come to define it over the years. Rebuild, renew, and encourage thousands to run through the streets next Patriots Day. And leave it at that. And then do it again the next year, and the next. I think I got my sense of civil resolve (one tinged with a stoic defiance) from my time in Britain. Having an IRA bomb go off in London four blocks from your hotel is a little bit disconcerting. I asked someone at the pub about it and he shrugged it off.

“We just go on,” he said to me. “It’s an excuse for another pint of bitter.”

Well I don’t have any bitter ale in the house, but I do have seafood. And I am going to eat seafood with my girlfriend, and eat some of the fresh bread she baked today, here in my comfy little house with my two cute little evil black kittens circling around and attempting to steal the fish off my plate, and I’m going to remind myself of some of the things that are genuinely good in and of themselves. And I hope that you do the same. Some days, humanity loses a bit more than others, and the littlest gestures can go a long way to getting it back on a winning path, little actions that others may never see nor hear nor even know. Let's not lose our minds or any more pieces of our souls. Clearly, some other people who acted out today have already lost theirs.

My heart goes out to those who lost loved ones, and to those who were seriously injured, and my heroes of the week were those first respondents who probably saved countless more than have been lost, the people who do the work I know that I never could do.