I don’t even know where to begin.
Little Bit was wonderful on the flight. Fortunately, she didn’t experience too much ear pain and dealt with what she did endure like a trooper. We arrived bleary eyed but safe into New Orleans to find my patient father waiting for us. I’ll go more into the journey later.
This past couple of weeks have seemed a bit unreal. Maybe it’s the jetlag that I’ve just shaken off but the national reaction to current events seems so muted considering the inflamed rhetoric that accompanies so many other actions large and small. Especially small.
The attack in Pittsburgh was one of three acts of violence last week, each allegedly perpetrated by middle-aged white men who were in various ways motivated by political and racial hatred.
In an act of domestic terrorism a terrorist sent out pipe bombs to a wide range of people that he didn’t agree with. Sending them through the post, he put hundreds of people at risk as his dangerous packages made their way from his hands to his would be victims.
Then there was the attack on a synagogue in Pittsburgh. I have seen headline after headline about how these people were killed. They were not killed. They were murdered. Their lives taken with malicious forethought and hateful intent. Holocaust survivors slaughtered for being Jewish. In America.
In-between there was the white supremacist accused of murdering two people at a Kroger.
What strikes me about recent events is not that they happened so much as how casually accepting of violence everyone here has gotten. Perhaps people would be more outraged if any of the bombs had caused physical harm. Instead there has been a collective ho hum combined with the declaration that they are not my elephants, not my circus.
Any one of the acts of hate and rage that have occurred just since I arrived last week would have brought either of the countries I’ve lived in outside of the US to its knees in shock and horror; to its feet in united outrage.
Here it’s just another day to the point that it’s got to be a certain kind of violence, a certain kind of death, a certain type of victim, to get any reaction at all.