Tag: #terrorism

just another mass shooting…

Snapshots of ChadLeave a comment

texas-shooting

Yesterday, I got word about another mass shooting. This one, in a Christian church. In a small unincorporated township in rural Texas. Eight members of the same family died. The pastor and his wife were on vacation, and their 14 year old daughter was killed. A one year old child is among the victims. A pregnant mother and three of her children are among the victims. The grandmother of the killer’s wife is among the victims. The shooter was an angry white man with a history of domestic violence and mental illness, with military training and mysterious motives.

It wasn’t the first shooting this month. It wasn’t the first shooting with victims in the dozens in the past few months. It wasn’t the first shooting in a church. It wasn’t the first murder of children. It was just… another shooting. And somehow, this time, that’s all that I’m able to process.

Weeks ago, when that man opened fire on the country concert in Las Vegas, I spent three days obsessively searching for information about the victims, wanting to honor them. I felt duty bound to remember them, and to not click on a single headline about the killer. I posted over 50 photos with synopses about their lives, and I took detailed notes. I even wrote a blog about holding vigil about them.

But this time, I’m numb. Again. (Still?) Vegas hit me more personally. It’s closer to home. It’s a place I have spent lots of time in, on the streets of. Virginia Tech, years ago, and Columbine before that, they hurt be deeply. Though they were places I’d never been, they are academic environments, a college and a high school, and I know the culture there. Sandy Hook hurt me more. As a father, the idea of waiting helplessly there to see if my child is among the living, the images of artwork and bulletin boards and school lunch menus and tiny desks, the idea of that becoming a place that is no longer safe, it hurt me on a primal level.

And the Pulse shootings. They haunted me for weeks. I’ve been in so many clubs in so many cities, there for a relaxing drink, some music, and some conversation and dancing, or entertainment. The idea of someone with that much hate.

I just, I’m numb. Today, I’m out of outrage. I’m out of fear. I’m out of pain. I’m out of hurt. I’m out of anger. I eek clicking back on the news website to see an update, and then not clicking on it. I don’t want to feel it again.

I don’t want to jump on social media and see the Conservative/Liberal debate over gun control laws (we need them!) and how the media is biased toward whites by calling them misunderstood and mentally ill while railing against people of color by calling for immigration bans. I don’t want to read posts about the corruption of America. I don’t want to see the statistics of how gun violence is increasing. I don’t want to see the charts with pink and blue and red lines that grow up and up and up. I don’t want to talk to relatives about how humans have always been bloody and vile, with their atomic bombs and concentration camps and war machines, and how assault rifles and rented trucks and car bombs are just the latest worries of our generation, not the most corrupt just the most current. I don’t want to realize that social media and news outlets will be outraged and titillated by this for about 72 hours, until the next horrible news drops.

I don’t want to explain to my children why there are people in the world who might hurt them, who might be so full of anger that they went to inflict as much pain on them and the world as possible before they remove themselves from it. I don’t know how to tell them to be afraid enough, nor do I want them to be afraid. I don’t want them to walk around in perpetual fear that someone could speed at them with a car or enter their school with a gun.

Yesterday afternoon, I went to hear a choir sing. In Latin. About death and remembrance. I sat on a hard wooden bench. There were easily 75 people in the room. As a male baritone sang words that I didn’t understand, his beautiful voice hit my heart, and I wondered what would happen if that man entered this room. Would there be warning? Who would be hit first? Where were the exits? Would I scream, fall to the floor, play dead, shield my loved ones, rush toward the exit, try to disarm him? Would my loved ones be among the dead? After the service, I crossed a crosswalk and I realized how swift it would be if a car careened toward me, trying to take out civilians.

I don’t know how to feel these feelings. I do grief for a living, yet I can’t process my own. I’m desensitized. I’m exhausted. I’m wounded and it can’t stop bleeding. Words like ‘massacre’ and ‘bloodbath’ and ‘terrorist’ and ‘mass casualties’ leave my fingertips and my lips far too frequently now.

And so, I’ll do what all humans do, what I would tell others to do, what I am growing accustomed to doing myself. I survive. I wake up and I make my coffee. I read my book. I see my clients. I process through how I’m feeling. I walk and feel the cool air and the warm sun. I exercise. I buy a T-shirt. I open my computer and I blog about being numb. And soon, another day has passed, and I’m still here, and I keep finding ways to fight for a world that I refuse to lose hope in.

That’s what the families of the victims have to do. And the law enforcement officers who responded. And even the loved ones of the killers themselves. And if they can get up, so can I. I’ll fight for a better world for me, and for my sons.

 

refugee

Snapshots of Chad1 Comment

Muslim1

Look, I get it, I get it. You don’t need to explain. The refugee camp was bad, I know, I’ve seen the reports. But you’re wasting your breath here.

Things are bad here, too. We have religious freedoms being attacked by homosexuals, and traditional families being threatened by very definition. We have cops being attacked by black people. Our political parties are at war. We have poverty, unemployment, people are divided on the most basic issues. Immigration is out of control. And terrorism! Our current political climate is divided between Hillary Clinton, a known and proven liar, and Donald Trump, who is just plain crazy. I’m losing sleep over this stuff. I can barely afford my house payment and my medical insurance for my kids. I had to cancel Cable and my gym membership in order to survive.

You’re still here? You want to be heard, I know, I heard you. We all want that. Will I just review your report? Okay! Okay, fine, but if I review it, then you’ll leave me alone? Okay, deal.

All right, let’s see. Born Muslim in Somalia. Grew up with your mother, brother, and sister since your father left your mother for a younger wife, and you were being bullied by your older brother, who couldn’t be punished because he was male and had authority over his mother and sisters. At age five, your grandmother had strange men come into your home and hold you down so they could cut off your clitoris without anesthesia, then they sewed up your sex organ, so that even though the procedure could kill you and would make it hard to urinate for the rest of your life, this would make sure your husband would know you were a virgin when you married after he forced open the scar tissue on your wedding night. It would also make sure you didn’t experience that particular  type of sexual pleasure in your life again.

It says here that you heard about women who were raped returning to their families who were ashamed of them. Many of these women were killed by their families because they were impure, and some of them chose to commit suicide. It says that women were considered less than men and that Allah created them to be so. It also says that you grew up knowing you must keep yourself completely covered at all times, as the exposure of any hair or skin could tempt men and give them impure thoughts, and that would be all your fault.

It says you grew up with barely any education, except that of the Quran, and that you had only rudimentary nutrition, and barely any medical or mental health services available. No clean water, often isolated for weeks at a time, regularly beat by your mother and sometimes locked into rooms for days for being undutiful.

Says here that when your government went to war, you started hearing even more terrible stories, like your friend who was brutally raped by multiple soldiers, and how she became pregnant, and how after the baby was born one of the soldiers tossed it into the fire and forced the woman to watch it burn alive. You say many starve to death and many others die from superficial wounds because there was no clean water or first aid available. You nearly starved to death.

Okay, let’s see, what next. Your father tried to force you into a marriage with someone you didn’t know, even as some of your friends were being married off to first cousins.

I’m sorry, but I have to skip to the end of this, I have other people waiting. You got out of the war zone and made it into the refugee camp. Some of your friends have been raped by the soldiers here, and now they have been disowned by their families for being unclean. You’ve been waiting for a Visa to another country for five years. But you have basic food and medical care, so that’s something new, right? Oh, you still have family in the war zone. Well, tell them to come here to the refugee camp! They’ll be safer here!

Okay, I read your papers, are you happy now? Look, I don’t mean to be unsympathetic. You’ve certainly had an ordeal. But I have to think of the big picture here. If I started helping everyone who has a story like yours, America’s shores would be flooded with refugees, and we are already stretched to our limits as it is. Come back for your check in in another 90 days, and maybe we’ll be able to help then.

In the meantime, though, here is a copy of the Bible. Seriously, your religion sounds crazy. Maybe you should consider changing? Good luck to you. Oh, grab yourself a chocolate candy on the way out, there is a bowl there on the desk. American chocolate is the best. I like it a little too much, you can probably tell from the cushion around my waist. Haha. Anyway, have a nice day.

Next!

**Thank you to Ayaan Hirsi Ali for sharing her powerful story in her book, Infidel.

 

 

Pulse

Snapshots of ChadLeave a comment

pulse

What is happening today will be the history we talk of tomorrow.

Truthfully, America’s history of full of brutal attacks, so many that we can barely remember some that happened only weeks ago, no less ones that happened years ago. But some are so terrible, so bloody, or so unique that they find a way of imprinting on our long-term community consciousness.

You may not remember Ruby Ridge, or the Washington DC sniper, or Haun’s Mill, or Fort Hood, or the Green River serial killer, or Andersonville, or even Trayvon Martin, but you do remember…

9/11.

Pearl Harbor.

Matthew Shephard.

The Challenger explosion.

Stonewall.

Sandy Hook.

Added to that list, those events which will imprint upon our community consciousness I believe, will be the Pulse.

With all of the horrible mass shootings that keep taking place, with it being almost commonplace, we just grow accustomed somehow to the terrible. It isn’t that we don’t care, it isn’t that we don’t feel, it’s that it is too much. It is too much for our brains to process.

Picture your day-to-day routine. Pick any place. In line at the grocery store, with your children at a public park, dropping your daughter off at school, at the movies, sitting at a table waiting for the food you ordered at your favorite restaurant. In any of these places, a man with a gun could walk in, his only intent is to kill as many people as he can. He ignores cries for help or people cowering in corners begging not to be seen, he just shoots and shoots and shoots.

We watch violent movies all the time. That violence is okay to our minds generally because we know it is fake. We know it is makeup and special effects. In a situation like this, though, there is blood and brain and bone and body.

Those lives that were cut short. Boyfriends holding hands, sons texting their mothers goodbye, people rushing for every exit. This is the world we live in right now.

Gun violence is happening in every corner of this country. California, South Carolina, Florida, the northeast and southwest and every place in between. It is horrifying. It is terrifying.

It’s only been about 60 hours since the Pulse shootings. We’ve attended vigils. We learned about the attacker. We’ve seen the names of the victims. We hugged our friends and shed some tears and lost some sleep.

But this time, this time something must change. How could we have let this continue after Virginia Tech? And Fort Hood? And Sandy Hook? How can we have let all this happen without changing things?

The country seems divided politically, as it always does. One side is crying out for stricter immigration reform, going so far as to suggest a ban all Muslims from American soil. The other side is calling for gun reform; not for taking guns away but for making mandatory background checks, mental health evaluations, and perhaps waiting periods before gun purchases.

I don’t understand why things aren’t changing. I can’t comprehend it.

In Salt Lake City, I work as an on-call crisis responder. Since the Pulse shooting, I have been called out twice, in my own city, to respond to the scenes of robberies where guns have been drawn and lives have been threatened. Twice. Since the Pulse. Angry men pointed guns at innocent people and made demands. No one was killed, but in both of these cases, the victims went home with deep emotional scars that may take years to recover from.

As I type this, several survivors of the Pulse shootings are fighting for their lives in hospital beds. Mothers are going to their sons’ apartments and cleaning up their belongings: their laptops with unfinished projects, their journals which now have a last entry written in them. Bosses are cleaning off the desks of their dead employees, putting their family photographs and coffee mugs into a cardboard box. Funeral directors are preparing coffins and urns, and memorial halls are being booked out.

It’s Tuesday and tomorrow is Wednesday and my heart still hurts and I don’t know what to do to make sure this never happens again.

Joe America

Snapshots of ChadLeave a comment

american-flag

I’m an American, and I have an opinion about everything. 

I live in the greatest country in the world. We have the strongest values, the biggest military, and the best schools. We are the country that the other countries want to be like. Here, we fight for what we believe in and everyone has an equal shot. 

This is the home of the American dream. That means it doesn’t matter who you are, what color your skin is, if you are a man or a woman, that you can be anything you want if you just work hard enough. Even if you grew up in the poorest city in the world, you can come here and grab yourself by the bootstraps and work and work and work and become a millionaire or a doctor or a lawyer or anything you want. 

America is the land of freedom. Everyone is free here. We don’t have to fight for it. We are free to be whatever religion we want. We are free to say whatever we want. We are free to vote. I bet you can’t name another country where that is possible. Yeah, I can’t either.

It’s not all sunshine and roses here for me, though. I got a wife and two kids. We both work and go to church. We are hard-working Americans. But I can’t pay off all my student loans, and the mortgage is a little bit too much. We can hardly afford vacations, maybe just one big one per year, and we only have two credit cards. We have two cars and a truck, but we don’t own any other property. We have health insurance, but it’s expensive for a family of four. My mom always told me I should be thankful for things like running water and electricity and Internet and that, but I work hard to pay for that stuff, why would I be grateful for something I work hard for? My wife got her Masters degree. I barely finished high school and she’s frustrated that I make more than her, but that’s just the way things are. 

I just want what every American wants. Lower taxes and the right to do as I please. I want paved roads, public parks and buildings, a good police force, a good school for my kids, a fair legal system, libraries, and all that, sure, but I shouldn’t have to pay so much in taxes. And I especially don’t want to have my taxes to go toward taking care of other people. Medicaid and Medicare, Food Stamps, feeding people in prisons, bailing out poor people in other countries–use someone else’s money for that. I’m trying to take care of my family. They can take care of themselves.

I live in a place where there is mostly white people. I’m so sick of all the political correct baloney that goes on. People keep saying that someone of another race doesn’t get the same chances as someone white, but I think that’s crap. We all have an equal chance. We need to focus less on this stuff and more on making life easier for regular American families, families like mine. If the police shoot someone of a different race, it’s probably because that person deserved it. Okay, we had slavery way back when, but I wasn’t a slave owner, and we give Native Americans their own lands to live on. I’m sick of hearing all the complaints about stuff that happened a hundred years ago or more. 

I keep hearing about all these topics in the news, like gay marriage and abortion, and I’m so sick of it. We need to get focused on the real issues again. Look, if someone chooses to be gay and wants to be gay with other people, that’s fine, I just don’t want to see it. Go live together and do what you want, but me and the rest of the world believe in the Bible, and it says you shouldn’t get married. And abortion is just wrong. If a woman is gonna let herself get pregnant, she should have the baby, don’t abort it and give it to scientists who are gonna do terrible things to it. Planned Parenthood needs to go. 

I don’t really like Donald Trump, but if he gets the Republican vote, he’ll get my vote over Hillary Clinton. Trump comes on strong, but he has the right idea. I deserve the right to own guns without interference. Muslims aren’t all terrorists but they should at least wear badges so we can see them and be prepared. And Mexicans need to stop crossing our border and taking our jobs–they can immigrate properly just like anyone else. Hillary is just gonna Email all the American secrets to everyone from her home computer again. 

And that stupid war on terrorism needs to end already. Just wipe out the Taliban and ISIS and get our troops home. I’m so sick of hearing about American troops over there. Get the hell out of those countries and let them handle themselves. We have plenty of problems around here to fix. Some lady was trying to convince me that problems over there are problems here. But it isn’t my problem that ladies in Saudi Arabia aren’t allowed to drive or that gay people in Russia can go to jail for years. Those are foreign problems, and we have enough to worry about here. 

I miss the 1960s. Things were perfect back then. Everyone had jobs, everyone was proud to be an American. We landed on the freaking moon back then. Why can’t America be more like that now. 

So anyway, I’m a normal American. I believe in God and Jesus. I love my kids. I work hard. And all I want is for the government to make my life easier, but stay out of my affairs. I’ll take care of me and mine, you take care of you and yours. It’s time to get Obama out and get someone new in. 

Sincerely, Joe America