I’m not sure what I should be talking about. I sometimes let this column sit for a while between posts, to let new links accumulate until there’s enough to make a meaty post. Then sometimes something awful happens and I look at my folder of breastfeeding controversies, jokes about Trump and I’m paralyzed with sadness. How can anything else be important in the face of events so tragic, so hopeless, so inevitable, so damned wasteful?
Santa Fe…
Two days ago, May 18th, a 17-year-old young man walked into Santa Fe High School with a shotgun, a .38 caliber revolver and assorted explosive devices. He proceeded to murder 10 people and wound 13 others before being taken into custody. Both weapons were legally owned by the boy’s father. He waived his right to silence and confessed, claiming that he didn’t have the courage to follow through on his plan to commit suicide rather than be captured.
The suspect, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, 17, who was also a student at the school in the southeastern Texas city of Santa Fe , had evidently been pestering and harassing a classmate, Shana Fisher, 16, for the months prior to the incident. She evidently publicly rebuffed his advances recently. Shana was gunned down in art class.
Also according to CNN, the incident in Santa Fe is the 20th school shooting in 2018.
The survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting in Parkland Florida watched the horror in Santa Fe unfold. Liz Stout, a Parkland senior tweeted…
https://twitter.com/lizardstout/status/997516558950981637
Finally, the most lasting and tragic Image from Santa Fe is likely that of 17-year-old Paige Curry, who responded to a reporters question thusly…
A television reporter, Foti Kallergis of ABC-13, then asked the student for an interview. Was there a part of her that thought this wasn’t real — that this couldn’t happen at her school?
Her answer would shake many across the country.
“No,” she said, without looking directly at Kallergis. “There wasn’t.”
“It’s been happening everywhere,” she said with a shrug. “I’ve always kind of felt like eventually it was going to happen here, too.”
This keeps happening. It’s getting worse. There will be more news to come and I plan to write some more this week about guns and toxic masculinity and the mess we’ve made of our world. I’ll leave you with something beautiful from Texas for now…
Featured Image Credit: (Jonathan Newton / The Washington Post)
I blame the neo-Nazis, personally. We need to remember that many of these were hate crimes. Parkland was a hate crime: 1 in 3 students there is Jewish, and a Nazi chose to open fire on that school.
Santa Fe is just…I don’t know why he chose this school, other than it being his school. But we do again see the same neo-Nazi symbolism. This is truly the era of Trump; all these neo-Nazis are emboldened by the Donald’s ascendancy. (‘Twould be nice if we could’ve somehow prevented it. If only we’d had a competent opponent to challenge him, one willing to offer a solution to mundane problems other than denial.)
By the way, if you’re a parent and a gun owner, PROTIP: Keep your guns locked up. Keep your bullets locked up as well, somewhere separate from your guns.
Apparently he was an incel, so, yeah, right-wing politics at work.