Summer of the Shark

I'm neither shocked nor horrified. I certainly have no trouble getting my head around it. I no longer spend any time on assimilation or confusion when asked to metabolize the initial sketchy reports. Even in the long aftermath, the profiles, the interviews with family members, the search for context and the always ultimately elusive search for "motivation," I don't indulge in any of it. Not that any of it is an indulgence really; I'm talking about what should be natural human responses to horrors on a social, cultural, national, physical and even existential level. "What would possess anyone to do something like that?" is the right question to ask for any group of decent people with a reasonable expectation of safety in an advanced, sophisticated modern society.

But we don't have any of that in America. We haven't for a long time. "Expectation of safety" I mean. And that's not even the part I don't get. There have been 355 mass shootings (as I type this), more than one per day in the United States. It's gone past crisis or tragedy and into the realm of mundane reality. Like traffic or ants. Like gas prices or cloud cover or interest rates. Things you notice, things you remark upon, things that tickle the edges of your attention, but are really just the background hum of noise that resonates under everything else at a frequency just loud enough to register, but droning enough to forget most of the time.

Where are they coming from? What's different now as compared to before? The thing is, I don't know if there are more or if it's different. Sometimes it seems like there's an epidemic of shark attacks, but if you look at the statistics, you might find that the number of attacks are flat while media reportage just happen to spike because the news cycle is slow until something actually newsworthy pushes them away, like that time those guys flew those planes into those buildings.

This doesn't really feel that way, but I'm not sure. I'd look up more statistics, but I'm about 90% sure that a) I know exactly what they'd say and b) it would affect my ability to sleep.

Why now, though? Is it post-Cold War, where we don't have an organized enemy outside to direct our human animus toward? Is it the nature of modern terrorism, where we see the enemies all around us in the faces of our neighbors and coworkers? Is it the sad coincidence of stateless asymmetrical terror tactics amongst radicalized Muslims coinciding with the death-spasm of America's white supremacist roots in the wake of the successful presidency of an insufficiently apologetic black man?

Yes, no, probably, who gives a shit at this point? The thing I can't un-know is that there's a group of people in this country who have decided that the mass deaths of their countrymen on a regular basis is an acceptable price to pay in order to protect their right to own not just guns, but the kind that are designed ONLY to kill other humans in large numbers very quickly.

I live in Riverside. For those of you who don't know, that's about 10 miles from San Bernardino. Together we make up the twin poles of the Inland Empire, the massive and mostly empty subsection of the Greater LA area made up of fringey exurbs bordering a vast swath of featureless nothing people drive through on their way to Las Vegas. We even get to be our own separate metro area according to the Census Bureau. In Riverside, we're used to being dismissed and ignored as hinterlanders and pretenders by Orange Countians and Angelenos. And in turn we turn to our east and heap the same derision and condescension on San Bernardino. It seems mean, but I also (solidly into my forties) still refer to my sister as "stupidface" more than by her given name. The internal logic of it is our business. But the affection and cross-identification is deep and real enough to preclude comment, let alone explanation.

So for me, this stings a bit more than others, though really it shouldn't. Each death counts the same regardless of point of origin. But make no mistake: I hear the rhetoric (on all sides) and I am impervious to hope. I thought I'd never see movement on the issue of the Confederate flag which I was happy to be proved wrong about in the last year or so, so I'm open to being surprised I guess, but remember: even that was precipitated by a mass shooting. The flags were pulled down, but the guns were not addressed, not once. And they won't be after this.

Sandy Hook didn't change anything. All those children, and it didn't change anything. How could this?