Events like this are seminal. We’ll remember this forever. Or for a long time at least. Maybe it’ll linger only for those of us old enough and plugged in enough to know what happened.
For my kids, it might make a note in the history book for their civics course; maybe not.
I get twisted by stuff like this. All the normal stuff to be sure. The tragedy of the story, the victims that passed away, the victims that lived. Hell, the victim that is the shooter – what musta happened to him to make him wanna do that.
But somewhere inside, I felt we were missin’ somethin’.
I couldn’t help but feel that there were real folks with real grief who were being ignored, passed over. I guess it happens every time this happens. The national outpouring of grief over a tragedy.
I just couldn’t sum it up. Then I came across South Bend via TJIC:
(8) I wish as many people cared when agents of the state take a citizen’s life as they do when a crazy citizen attempts to take an agent of the state’s.
There’s enough sadness and pain all around I guess. Maybe it’s just perspective:
The 68-year-old grandfather of 12 who was killed yesterday by a Framingham police SWAT team in an early-morning drug raid was a retired MBTA worker described by shocked neighbors as the “nicest guy in the world.”
Eurie Stamps was not the target of the search warrant, according to the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office, and his death at the hands of police is under investigation.
You’re right on many levels. In general, public grief over a symbolic individual is an artificial construction, its people empathizing en masse with that individual, and imagining themselves as part of the whole event. Yet when people die in mundane ways, their deaths still affect their loved ones and of course steal a future, but are ignored. I think when the agents of the state err and take lives, people close their eyes because it forces us to question those who are generally honored (same when a member of the military is accused of needless killing). If we really notice and empathize with the victims, tough questions will be asked, and it’s easier for people to look away, or rationalize the mistakes.
I think when the agents of the state err and take lives, people close their eyes because it forces us to question those who are generally honored (same when a member of the military is accused of needless killing). If we really notice and empathize with the victims, tough questions will be asked, and it’s easier for people to look away, or rationalize the mistakes.
Well said.