See Me Squeegee

Today, I am an American.

Sure, I was born in Pennsylvania, grew up in Michigan, and now live in California.  Okay, I’ve been to over 40 states and about ten national parks, I’ve gone to the polls for five presidential elections and I’ve worn the red, white, and blue at two different Olympics.  But on Friday I truly became an American:

There was a school shooting / gun massacre 15 blocks from my apartment.

Can’t get any more American than that.

This post isn’t about me, it’s about us.  Yeah, this particular shooting happened in my neighborhood but if you live in America long enough it’ll happen to you, too.  And the saddest thing?  It’ll actually feel pretty normal.

There was a gun massacre fifteen blocks from my apartment on Friday, in Santa Monica, California.  I was at work, twelve miles away sitting near a few fellow Santa Monicans when the news broke.  And I’m embarrassed by my reaction.  If I’m repeating this phrase too many times it’s because it’s still echoing in my mind: there was a gun massacre fifteen blocks from where I live.  And when I got the news, my reaction was:

(at the time) Only 5-6 people known to be injured? That’s not too bad.

And it gets worse.  Let me take you through the collective reaction I observed in a room of people located exactly twelve miles from the shooting and among whom several live within a mile of it.

1) Did you hear there was a shooting at Santa Monica College?  Wow, that’s crazy… (everyone heads to Huffington Post or the LA Times for more info)

2) Well, only 5-6 people known to be injured…that’s not too bad.  Glad it wasn’t worse.

3) Hey, wait – I heard on NPR this morning that President Obama is in town…do we know for sure he’s okay?  (Quickly we confirmed that he was miles away from the incident)

4) Wow – that’s right.  Obama’s in town. Traffic was going to be horrible anyway, but with this shooting it’s going to be awful.  How are you going to get home?

Yep, that’s the reaction we have to gun massacres these days.  A little concern, a little relief that less than 10 people were killed, and then the real panic begins, at least here in greater Los Angeles – how is this going to affect traffic?!  (We’re eerily like that SNL skit “The Californians” and all those spoof news breaks they did on Arrested Development.  “Mass murder in Santa Monica – what that means for your commute coming up at six!”)

And can you blame us?  In just the last twelve months we’ve had the Aurora theater, Newtown, unprecedented gang violence throughout Chicago, the Boston Marathon and its shootout aftermath, and now this. I don’t bring up the above “stages of hearing your neighborhood got shot up” because I’m proud of it or to make fun of it.  I bring it up because two days later I’m still in shock about how little shock I was in when I got the news.  I swim at Santa Monica College; I have my own parking permit there as a Santa Monica  resident who uses the pool.  On the radio they interviewed people who work at the oil change place I go to; on the news I saw the tire shop where I got a new set on the Dodge last year.  I drove right past the crime scene today going from a haircut to Trader Joe’s.  There was a mass murder in my neighborhood and my reaction was essentially “wake me up if the death count rises to double digits.”  Several innocent victims lost their lives along a stretch of road that I travel regularly, and within minutes I had entered into a discussion of how that would affect traffic for the rest of the day.

But what can you do?  We’re numb.  When Columbine happened I was a junior in college and sat in disbelief watching CNN, so much so that I showed up late and disoriented for a final exam that day.  I read all the stories, watched the interviews and vigils on TV, mourned with the rest of the country and stamped that day in my memory forever.  In my lifetime that was the second tragedy that I’ll never forget.  There was the Challenger explosion.  There was Columbine.  Then we had 9/11.  And then?  Shoot, I can’t name them all.  Was there a Jonesboro?  Or maybe Jonestown?  There was Virginia Tech, Aurora, Newtown…  And there have been a bunch of others.  Santa Monica will probably be forgotten soon like some of the other “small” massacres of the past 15 years.  How could it not be?  It’s been six months since dozens of elementary school kids were killed in cold blood and we haven’t done anything to fix it.  Congress can’t get enough votes together to even hold a vote.  Wayne LaPierre will make a statement tomorrow about how “if everyone on that Big Blue Bus that the gunman scattered bullets upon had had their own gun, maybe this wouldn’t have happened” or “if community colleges spent less money on laptops and more money on arming their teachers with guns we’d be smarter and safer” or whatever garbage the Koch Brothers stick in Little Wayne’s teleprompter.

And we’ll forget all about Santa Monica College.  Shoot, as I’m writing this two days after the shooting, this incident isn’t even the top headline at latimes.com.  We’ll forget about this like we forgot about the others – do yourself a favor and read this article about Newtown six months later…the world has forgotten but these families are living hell day by day – having felt emboldened and united to change America’s ludicrous ways too many times and having been stymied by LaPierres, Hestons, Cantors and Boehners.

Leading up to the Newtown shooting – and picking up just as soon as we’ve mostly forgotten, I’m sure –  there was a bill passing through the legislature in Michigan, where I grew up,  that would have allowed concealed weapons in places like sports arenas and, yes, movie theaters.  Like Aurora.  Because, you know, the second amendment is more important than the sixth commandment.  And even stranger, the second amendment is evidently more important than the first – every elementary school student knows that the first amendment right to free speech doesn’t cover “yelling fire in a crowded theater,” yet if 20 elementary school kids hadn’t died at Sandy Hook Elementary, Rick Snyder would have made it exponentially more likely for someone to open fire in a crowded theater.

That’s America.

We’re the only developed country on the planet that does this.  And while we use taxpayer-funded guns to spread democracy across the world we don’t listen to our own tenets of majority rule.  Most of America – and, screw it, all of intelligent America…my apologies to the members of Bachman/Palin Overdrive – favors stricter regulation on high-capacity magazines, bans on automatic weapons, background checks and the elimination of the gun show caveat.  Yet the NRA’s influence and the Tea Party’s reluctance to do anything cooperative with a black man have filibustered our outcry and our grief to the point where there was a gun massacre in my neighborhood and I shrugged my shoulders because the death toll wasn’t big enough to get worked up about.

I’m an American.  You can tell because there was a gun massacre in my neighborhood.  And if you live in America long enough you’ll be able to say the same thing. Unless we continue to fight to do something about it.

Wayne LaPierre and Charlton Heston like to say that we can take their guns “when we pry them from their cold dead hands.” I’m in, fellas. And this week you know exactly where to find me – just head for the chalk-body outlines and walk a dozen blocks toward the beach.