When I was single, and volunteering at a children’s daycare center, I came across a book called Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, by Judith Viorst. Recently referenced on Stephen Colbert, for the same reason I’m going to, this book delighted me so much that when I had a child of my own, I added it to my daughter’s library.
Of course this was referenced because a law enforcement officer in Georgia explained away a mass shooter’s rampage, in which he slaughtered eight people, as him “having a bad day.”
Not a week later, someone else’s “bad day” in Colorado ended with the massacre of 10 people at a supermarket.
The past year has been horrific, with more than half a million of our citizens dying from a virus that has engulfed the rest of the globe, and has yet to see its end. And although our new administration is already surpassing all promises with 100 million vaccinations in President Joe Biden’s first 59 days (instead of his first 100), that killer virus hasn’t been arrested.
The world is COVID-19-fatigued. We’re frustrated and angry about the lives lost, jobs lost, homes lost, joys lost. We don’t want to keep living this socially-distanced life. We want friends, food in a social setting, celebrations that aren’t drive-bys, and hugs. We want normal.
But hold on a minute.
First, we’ve just passed our first anniversary of the pandemic. Let’s just get real. We’re in year two now, and although it’s looking better than our bewildering first year, this year will still be COVID-centric, even as businesses, lives, worlds open up, even as vaccines go into arms that aren’t vaccine-phobic. For as long as there is a significant number of the population resisting vaccination, the coronavirus will be with us and among us for the foreseeable future.
Second, this past week has reminded us that normal wasn’t all that great. We had become so numbed by previous mass shootings that the first one in this new year came as a shock to the system. Oh yeah, that year we were all in some form of lockdown? We didn’t spend any of that time reforming the stupidly lax gun laws in this country. Some of us were protesting the casual taking of Black lives by the people who purportedly became law enforcement to protect and serve (everybody but?) us. Some of us were protesting having to cover half of our faces to keep from giving or receiving a deadly virus, deciding either it was a hoax, or that God would protect us if we were holy enough.
Some of us were just trying to get through the endless days, too busy worrying about schooling (our own or someone else’s), our jobs (our own or someone else’s), our homes (you know where I’m going here), to remember that our normal wasn’t that good.
The normal we’re all itching and aching to get back to reared its ugly head with two massacres within six days. What, we thought we left mass shootings behind in the pandemic panic? Did we think if we performed a few marches and read a few books, the hate crimes would go away? The “bad day” shooter outside Atlanta, who bought his weapon the morning of his crime, targeted three Asian spas and six of his eight victims were Asian women. He says it wasn’t racially motivated, so yeah, we’ll believe him, despite our “walk like a duck and quack” sensibilities. The second shooter bought his assault weapon six days before he carried out his massacre, which happened 10 days after a judge blocked a ban on assault rifles passed by the city of Boulder in 2018. The Colorado shooting was the worst since the 2019 rampage in El Paso, Texas, that targeted people of Mexican descent.
Are we done yet? Are we going to throw up our hands again, send thoughts and prayers, compare the last time this happened and decide to ignore the body count until it personally affects us?
Frankly, I lost faith in our government’s commitment to act on this subject after 20 kindergartners and first graders were murdered in Newtown, Conn., and no one moved to do a thing to ban these weapons of mass destruction.
So we can either call on our leaders to end the normalized epidemic of gun violence with the same fervor they are attacking the pandemic of coronavirus — or we can keep screaming into the abyss. Because, unfortunately, that’s what we normally do.
