This Tuesday, less than three-quarters of a mile from my front door, employees of Hartford Distributors, Inc., their friends and family, emergency vehicles and personnel, and members of the press gathered at Manchester High School, on the lawn and parking lot, and across the street, because some three miles away from my front door, a man had opened fire on his co-workers. The attack, which I am certain felt far longer than the hour-and-a-half it lasted, claimed the lives of eight people—Victor James, Douglas Scruton, Craig Pepin, Louis Felder, William Ackerman, Bryan Cirigliano, Francis Fazio, and Edwin Kennison—before the gunman, Omar Thornton, killed himself.
It is the third time in my life that I have been within mere miles of a shocking act of violence.
On March 6, 1998, immediately behind Newington High School where I was attending classes as a junior, Matthew Beck walked into the Connecticut Lottery headquarters and proceeded to shoot and stab four fellow Lottery employees: Otho Brown, Linda Mlynarczyk, Frederick Rubelmann III, and Michael Logan. As police arrived, Beck turned the gun on himself and ended his life before they could arrest him.
On September 11, 2001, terrorists hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon. I was living in DC, taking classes at American University, and working at the DSCC. (Please see a list of those killed on that day in the Pentagon attack at http://www.inmemoriamonline.net/missing_Pentagon.html and http://www.inmemoriamonline.net/List_AA77.html)
All three events happened so close to me and yet did not take my life or the lives of my friends or family. I knew no one killed in the lottery shooting; some people who my father had worked with died, and a close friend from my current church lost her husband, on September 11, all in New York; and the list of those who died on Tuesday included a man who was softball coach to a friend’s younger sister. These were horrible events that came so close to me and, yet, missed me entirely.
Except they didn’t.
They didn’t because, clearly, I still think about them. I ponder how these things could have happened, what could have been done to stop them, how the people who suffered and died felt in the moment it happened, and how I might’ve reacted under the same circumstances.
And I think about Batman.
I admit that that sounds stupid. And childish. And stupid again. I think about Batman in part, I am sure, because I am a comic book nerd and comics are great places to escape to when one feels powerless. After all, I am nowhere near a Batman expert—my friend Tim surely owns more Batman comics, and then there is noted Batmanologist Chris Sims, to name just two whose knowledge trumps my own—and I have seen Batman triumph over deadly viruses, a broken back, being framed for murder, and an earthquake (yes, you heard right, Batman, in essence, beat an earthquake). That’s an impressive resume for anyone and a great testament to the idea that nothing can’t be overcome. So I think of Batman and wonder how things would go down if he existed beyond the CMYK world of the page. I let my mind wander and imagine and hope.
But, in the end, I always run up against this: there simply are things that cannot be overcome. Cannot be stopped. Cannot be beaten. The fact is, even in a world where Batman exists, a man with a gun who decides spur of the moment to attack and kill others can and will take us all by surprise and will claim victims. Batman or no, there are some acts of violence that no amount of planning, or detective work, or martial arts skill, or fancy gadgets can prevent from happening. They are, to paraphrase from The West Wing, acts of madmen. Not madmen with frozen smiles or with a skin condition that makes them look like reptiles or in bright green suits covered in question marks. Madmen who look like you or me or a random passerby. And, simply put, there is no cure for madmen. We can and should do our best to acquire intelligence, to pay attention to the behaviors of those around us, to limit access to objects that can increase one’s ability to kill, but at the end of the day, there are mad men and mad men do horrible things.
Which is God damn bleak, I can barely stand to write it. I hate the idea of it, the idea that there are moments that make you realize that some days bad things, horrible things, happen and there was not a lick I, or anyone else, could have done about it. I hate it, but there it is. It is reality. I don’t understand the thinking behind picking up a gun or a knife or using a plane like a missile. I…for the life of me, I can’t get into the mindset where it is okay to kill one person, nevermind four or nine or 154 and sure as hell not for a lost promotion or being fired or because you don’t like what someone else’s country stands for. But there it is, it is reality. Hard as it is, I accept it because, well, what the hell else can I do? Sometimes we need to yield before the immenseness that is unfortunate reality.
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What I cannot and will not accept is hateful ignorance, which brings me to the second part of this already overlong piece of self-indulgent catharsis. I made the mistake of reading a few articles about the shooting on Tuesday on the USA Today website and on the Yahoo News website, and continuing to read into the comments. In the comments, I read people linking the shooting to the fact that Thornton was black because, as we all know, white men have never shot and killed coworkers (you know, except Matthew Beck and too many other examples to count). I saw someone who suggested that Equal Opportunity Employment and “diversity” was the cause, which, is really another vote for “man, black people love to kill, don’t they?” Of course, someone mentioned Barack Obama and the Joker (I guess I’m not the only who thinks of Batman during these times, eh?). Then there was a bit about the Jewish-controlled media. Oh, and something about how Black people are not the only people enslaved in history (yes, Jewish people, for one, also were). And so it goes for pages and pages. Hate spewed upon hate.
As powerless as I felt when I learned about the shooting…I felt two, three times that after reading those comments. Because I know some of those comments were provocateurs giggling about their outrageousness. I know that. But not all of them. Some of them, statistically, must have believed what they were saying. And that makes my head hurt. And my heart. Because, it seems to me, there is one thing we can all agree on and that that the loss of human life is a horrible tragedy, regardless of the race of who was killed or who was doing the killing. And that, when such a horror occurs, the right thing to do is express sorrow for the victims and their families and hold our family and friends all the closer to remind them how much we love them. The thing not to do is to use the moment to advance some theory about race you have or express your distaste for the President, or the media, or whomever. Nine people died. Nine lives, gone. And their deaths echo through their friends, their families, and beyond. If these commenters don’t get that, don’t see why a little decorum is called for, then I cannot help but question their humanity. In therapeutic settings, I have worked with drug dealers, child molesters, murderers, all manner of criminal, so I am familiar with, to borrow that awful phrase, “the evil that men do.” I am not naïve to people’s capacity to hurt one another. But, mad men do horrible, violent things, but at least they are “mad.” What the hell are these people, these trolls’ (to use the proper parlance) excuses?
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Lest I leave it on that note, let me just thank you for reading this if you did. I almost didn’t write this piece because I hate the idea of taking a tragedy and making it about me and I fear I did that here. But…I don’t know. No excuses, I just couldn’t let it sit in my gut unsaid. So if I am out of line, if I did make this all about me, I’m sorry. I hope you all understand that I was trying hard not to and that there was still something good about it.
Finally, to put the focus back where it belongs, think of the victims of the Manchester, CT shootings. Think of their families and friends. Pray if you’d like, if that is your thing, but more than anything just spend a moment or two thinking on them. Then pick up the phone or drive down the street or write a letter or send a fax or whatever and tell the people you love that you love them. Tell them what they mean to you. Because why not today? And if not today, then when?
First of all, I see nothing inappropriate in what you have written.
Secondly, there is such a thing as crazy. Crazy people do crazy things.
Thirdly I strongly agree with your dislike of people using tragedies to promote issues or for political reasons.
Fourthly, as a general issue I agree with your desire for decorum. However, it has to be pointed out that the murderer’s family immediately thrust race into the conversation.
Come on gahrie. His family said he was complaining of racial harassment, which he was. They didn’t say, “he was being harassed and therefore was justified.” AND, even if they had, they are people trying to make sense of their loved one doing something horrible that they never believed him capable of. Mentioning race does not give anyone the right to say, oh, I don’t know, “subhuman should have been nailed to a tree upside down, and skinned like a catfish. if sombody descriminated against him, they didnt do it quick enough.”
Tim:
I am not arguing the facts of the case (although I am not going to automatically believe the word of a thief and mass murderer).
I am merely pointing out who was the first to interject race into the conversation about the crime.
And I do believe that people have the right to make disgusting statements, even as I believe they should have the courtesy not to.
Allow me to suggest that perhaps we ought to give the immediate family of a man who 1) died yesterday, and 2) took 8 innocent people with him — both of which have to be awfully upsetting facts to members of his immediate family — a bit more leeway, in terms of how charitably or uncharitably we choose to read their comments, than random trolls on the Internet.
And by “a bit more,” I mean, like, somewhere between 80 billion times more, and infinity.
Srsly.
Brendan / Tim, I don’t disagree, but the comments from “random trolls on the Internet” can almost definitely be directly tied to what they heard the family say. Had the family not brought up race, the vast majority of “random trolls on the Internet” wouldn’t have felt the need to rebut it and come up with their own bizarre theories.
Also, Tim, I couldn’t help but do a double-take when I read this:
I studied at AU that semester also — I interned for Newt Gingrich at the American Enterprise Institute. Who was your teacher that semester? I had Dr. Lowenthal, with whom I still keep in touch (she lives in the same city as us actually). Small world; I had no idea you were at AU as well.
Well said & well done, Tim. Don’t worry that you wrote anything inappropriate, because you didn’t. And thank you for all that you did write.
Local news media have reported that relatives of Thornton have told them that while he did complain of racism at the workplace, (a) they have no actual Evidence of such and (b) they know that nothing can excuse or justify what he did. (Which logically means that his actions were inexcusable whether or not there was any non-paranoid basis for his perception.)
Newspeople were
houndingquestioning the family re what could have motivated the killer’s rampage. They answered. They were not Playing the Racecard. They were answering the question.And, it would seem, answering it Correctly. Today it was revealed that in the interval between completion of the killing of the co-workers and his own suicide, Thornton called 911 from the workplace. The tape has been publicly released. The killer got a State Police officer on the line, said he imagined the cop would like to know Why he’d done the murders, and proceeded to explain that it was because “this is a racist place,” on which theme he then Elaborated somewhat before hanging up. (The trooper, very professionally & non-argumentatively, tried to talk him into a peaceful surrender, but to no avail.)
So there, from the man’s own lips, is the much-sought-after Motive, at least in part. (Of course he had also just been fired for stealing the company’s beer & then selling it freelance; but it’s plausible to presume that this would have played into his Racism belief.)
All of which says Nothing whatsoever about Black people, or about Hiring practices, or about anything else that I can think of — except, just as Tim says, about human Madness. / And it Certainly says nothing about the killer’s innocent & broken-hearted family, surely stricken with grief not Only for their own loss but also by the knowledge that their relative took 8 innocent lives away from 8 other families before dying by his own hand. All they were doing was trying to Answer the Question.
PS to Andrew & Tim: on an Unrelated note, AU sucks. Hoya Saxa. 🙂
I walked over 100 blocks of Manhattan on 9/11, and was there for a week after. From which I would observe:
1. Nobody understands massive tragedy. Except jackasses. Those guys seem to understand everything for some reason.
2. Human nature runs the gamut. There were cowards who just wanted off Manhattan, and there were endless lines to donate blood. For every terrorist crashing into the towers, there were a dozen firemen racing up to save innocent people. The worse that the worst of us behave, the better that the best of us behave.
3. Seriously, f**k mass murderers. If life is so bad, just shoot yourself in the head. Don’t mess things up for the rest of us.
Gahrie, my professor was Semiatin. Despite the timing, I have fond memories of the program. It is where I met my wife after all.
As to the right to say disgusting things, as a big First Amendment guy, I agree that they CAN say such things and would never call to ban it. That said, I surely wish they wouldn’t.
Gahrie, that first part was meant to be addressed to AMLTrojan…sorry.
AMLTrojan, sorry to you as well. That first part was meant in response to you not Gahrie…sorry.
That said, I surely wish they wouldn’t.
me too.
Joe, I have .01% of AU alum pride in my blood. Overall I had a good time in the AU program, but I am still annoyed that they killed the USC @ DC program and mine was the first semester that went through AU. Turns out that only lasted for 3-4 years, then USC went back to running their own program.
Venerable Loy #6 – is it unreasonable to perhaps offer that, given the circumstances, the killer/suicide’s family could have chosen “No comment” or the more emotional “Get the ^%# outta our face at this time ! Please !”
Yes, it is unreasonable, given the circumstances, to presume to second-guess or nitpick the family’s response. Barring their saying something completely out of line, such as, “Those racist bastards deserved what they got,” which of course they did NOT say — nothing of the sort — it is not for you or me to judge what they say under such extreme circumstances. There but for the grace of God go we. If a member of your immediate family did something similar, would you want some stranger on the Internet suggesting that perhaps you should have phrased your response to the media a bit more sensitively or properly? Gimme a goddamn break.
If a member of your immediate family did something similar, would you want some stranger on the Internet suggesting that perhaps you should have phrased your response to the media a bit more sensitively or properly? Gimme a goddamn break.
If a member of my family had committed such a crime, I would have spent my time apologizing to the families of the victims.