Note—Adapted from
earlier posts. Tragically timeless.
Periodic shooting outbreaks
and mass killings have become a feature of modern American life. It is already
a cliché that they shock us, but no longer surprise
us. Unless we are tethered to the event
by ties to the victims, geography, or some other accident,
our grief and outrage fade after a day or two and we resume our
lives puttering away at the mundane until the next horror grabs
our fleeting attention.
School
shootings have become almost routine. Incidents involving two or more injured or
killed now occur about once a week. That
is so common that it takes multiple deaths to make more than local newscasts and several or a spectacular
act of sacrificial heroism to
lead the evening news. Add attacks in workplaces, shopping centers,
and the occasional rampage through a small town by some maniac
out to eradicate family members.
The daily drive-by shootings in
Chicago and other gang infested drug war battlegrounds.
We have even got used to the now ritualized
dance that follows a particularly bloody outbreak. Video of anguished families, portraits
of the dead floating over grave looking anchor heads, the police reports, the scramble to peg the
shooter as some sort of lone wolf or psychopath, the funerals, the pleas for gun reform on one hand and the snarling
response that more guns and more armed citizen
heroes on the other are the answer, then the vilification and
attacks on victim families members who demand change. We know it all so well we yawn now and
turn the channel.
Of course, if we do have that personal connection, perhaps we have
not given it up quite so casually just yet.
And in this world since we are, it is alleged, only separated by six degrees from any other mortal,
many of us stumble into some unexpected connection. It turns out that one of several young men
who died a few years ago in that Colorado
movie house protecting his girlfriend with his body, Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class John Larimer,
was from here in Crystal Lake,
Illinois. At 27 he was just a year
younger than my youngest daughter and although they went to different high
schools they must inevitably had some mutual acquaintances.
One eruption of mayhem I feel
a particular kinship to occurred 13 years ago today on July 27, 2008. As these things go, it was not a major
event. They body count was low—only two
dead and a handful injured. If it were
not for the somewhat unusual location of the shooting, it would have
received no notice at all outside of Knoxville,
Tennessee.
It was a Sunday morning—and it is always a Sunday morning in my mind when I
remember it, regardless of the exact anniversary date. A sad, disgruntled man whose life
was unraveling, walked into the Tennessee
Valley Unitarian Universalist Church that bright morning as children from
two local congregations were getting ready to present their summer
program, an adaptation of the sunny, iconic musical Annie. He removed a shotgun, a primitive weapon compared to the high
powered ordinance used in other killings, from a guitar case and
began blasting away in the crowed sanctuary. He kept firing until he was tackled
and disarmed by congregants as others fled in terror
leaving mangled bodies behind.
The killing spree turned out
to be somewhat unusual in that it seemed to be motivated by
something more than just a twisted desire for infamy based on a total
body count of anonymous strangers.
The killer picked this church and the people in it. He had a motive of sorts. He wrote it down in a rambling manifesto
that the police later found. He believed
that liberals had ruined his
life. And because he could not get to
the politicians he especially despised,
he sought to kill those who he thought had elected them, the liberal
members of the local Unitarian Universalist Church. Of course, it also turned out that his ex-wife
had been a member and that he had once been a welcome guest. So perhaps his political motivations were mixed
in with other harbored resentments.
My connection to this little horror
comes not because I knew the victims, although I knew people very like
them. It came because I was accustomed
to spending my Sunday mornings in another UU congregation in Woodstock, Illinois. And
I had been at summer services where liturgy was jettisoned in
favor of some interesting or compelling program put on by the lay
members. And what could be more
interesting, compelling and just plain delightful than beloved children you
know by their first names singing familiar songs. I felt it could have been me collecting the fatal
buckshot, that it could have been my church.
The children never got to sing their
songs that morning. They were shepherded
out of the church and away from danger.
But the next night when the whole of Knoxville seemed to gather at the
near-by Presbyterian Church for a memorial
service, they asked—no demanded—to sing their song.
Video of them singing that optimistic
tune and of the whole assembly joining in moved me deeply.
Naturally, I wrote a poem,
which I read the next week in church and again on the first anniversary.
Knoxville: 7/27/2008 10:26 A.M
They are about to sing about Tomorrow,
as
fresh and delicate as impatiens in the dew,
when
Yesterday, desperate and degraded
bursts
through the doors
barking
despair and death
from
the business end of a sawed of shotgun.
Tomorrow will have to wait,
Yesterday—grievances
and resentments,
a
life full of missed what-ifs
and could-have-beens,
of blame firmly fixed on Them,
the very Them despised by
all the herald angels of perfect
virtue—
has something to say.
Yesterday gives way to Now,
the
eternal, inescapable Now,
flowing
from muzzle flash
to
shattered flesh,
the
Now when things happen,
not
the reflections of Yesterday
or
the shadows of Tomorrow,
the
Now that always Is.
Now unites them,
victims
and perpetrator,
the
innocent and the guilty,
the
crimson Now.
Tomorrow there will be villain and martyrs,
Tomorrow
always knows about Yesterday,
will
tell you all about it in certain detail.
And yet Tomorrow those dewy impatiens
will sing at last—
The sun will come out
Tomorrow,
bet your bottom dollar on tomorrow
come what may…
How wise those little Flowers
To
reunite us all in Sunshine.
—Patrick Murfin
