Something Happened

I've been resisting writing because I haven't known how to say that Something Happened. Several big Somethings have gone down this summer, actually, but if I am ever going to blog again, I have to start by pointing back to the end of the Jewelry Shopping post, when I mused that I hoped I wasn't intuiting evil headed My way. 

Well...

It turns out there was a guy from far away in My neighborhood, and he brought guns. He hung out for a few months, in the small storefront businesses where I go in My little downtown, at the dog park where I go, across from My drug store. And not long after that post, he shot the place up. He's dead now.  And beyond just saying that happened, connecting those dots, and marvelling uninterestingly at the general bizarreness of life, I want to say that I don't think of these any more as "mass shootings" or "lone gunman" situations. That's wholly inadequate for what is happening. I think they are more than death by cop. I think we should understand them as kamikaze missions. I think it would help us. These people who do this, they generally believe they are making a statement, and they want to go down in flames. In America, we do guns, but really, these mass shooters are functionally interchangeable with suicide bombers. We need to recognize that. We need to understand why more than a few people - more than a few white men - in our society are choosing to be suicide bombers in their own land, for no reason that makes any sense to Me.