Thoughts On The Most Recent Schoolhouse Massacre

​I’m writing this about today’s Texas schoolhouse massacre. 

I was in the ferry line at Anacortes.

Going to Lopez Island, if the ferry didn't break and if the crew showed up.

I knew that was not a given confluence of factors.

So I was already stressed.

The "Breaking News Posts" were just beginning to flood my iPhone home screen.

Fifteen people dead this time. 

They said.

For those into body counts that was above average. 

I thought to myself: "Any minute now we should be able to begin hearing all the standard post massacre chagrin, dismay, gnashing of teeth and demands for gun control". 

Let's face it.

We keep going through this.

At least weekly.

This for now is pretty much a scripted exercise for the next few days; the script is getting so worn and so torn that somebody will need to make a copy before long. 

But by the time this copy of that script completely disintegrates we won’t need it anymore; we’ll have it memorized; all we’ll have to do after each new massacre is all run in circles and shout in unison “Oh chagrin and dismay, et cetera”.

There is nothing wrong with that script; it says all the right things; it’s just that the majority of anybody with time on their hands and guns in their house, or in their car, or under their bed, or gun lobbyists among their campaign doners, really don’t think a few dozen men women and children being shot to death most weeks of most years is any kind of reason for denying the right to keep and brandish implements of destruction. 

And there are more guns than people. 

And there is more faction-driven hate than guns. 

By the time I got to Lopez the body count was twenty one.

And later President Biden said what needed to be said in the manner in which it needed to be said.

But nobody of consequence - the imminent red wave being imminent - cared; he was just being theatrical, they all said.

And the next morning Ol' Mitch said whatever it was that everybody who cares about ongoing mass murder in America knew Ol' Mitch and the Boys would say until the next massacre, when they will say it all again.

He looked more like a turtle than a crocodile; but the tears were crocodilian. 

So shut up, hunker down and wonder where and when your number is going to come up.