We’re all hurting. I couldn’t face doing much of a roundup today without ignoring the two national tragedies we’re facing, but also wanted to be with you and talk with you.
I don’t think it’s a subconscious psychological coping mechanism to watch a hundred horror movies when I want the horror of the world to be confined and controlled and fictional and under two hours and a quarter in length.
Yesterday and today I watched “What Keeps Us Alive,” which is about two women, married to each other, visiting the Remote Cabin of the Beautiful Femme’s youth. I give nothing away that isn’t given away by the trailer when I say the past is unearthed and the captivating Soft Butch Wife finds herself in a no-holds-barred fight for her own survival. I will say that it put the nail in the coffin of wanting to have a beautiful power femme step on my neck/run me over with her Jeep. It’s quite remarkable, I think you might enjoy it.
It was different, watching it. The guns seemed different. There’s a scene of the Beautiful Femme gearing up like Rambo and I was utterly, utterly smitten in that way that I am when Linda Hamilton is doing pull-ups in her cell, but there was also a sickness to it, a sickness to that feeling.
I’m from a hunting family, I have friends who shoot professional high-power and are nationally ranked. I have a dear cardiac surgeon friend who saw his colleague die by gunshot at the hands of a grieving husband, and who after having had his own life threatened by a patient in court, got an almost un-gettable Massachusetts carry permit and now carries even in surgery (it wouldn’t be hard for you to identify his friend, but for hours we thought it might be OUR friend, having heard only the name of the hospital and the surgeon’s specialty, both matching, and he didn’t pick up his phone for hours). We don’t have guns. I sometimes think about getting my concealed permit (Steve has one, though does not own a gun) for the training, because I watch so many home intruder movies and I don’t want to have my thumb up my ass if the unimaginable happens, even knowing I’m more likely to be a victim than a survivor. Those movies do not help. I am also minorly convinced they are partially underwritten by the NRA under a production company.
I don’t know what to do. The situation is untenable. Our country can’t do a fuckin’ thing on a federal level, and the buy-backs that worked in Australia are unlikely to work here. The guns are everywhere. It’s horrible. I do not know what would work in the United States as it currently is: I do not understand the United States as it currently is. I have a friend whose semi-estranged parents all bought AK-47s when Trump won, convinced the Great Race War was finally upon them. They would kill, they would hunker down, and they are not outliers. I don’t understand much of anything. I understand that I don’t understand this country, fundamentally.
This is word-vomit, this is just what’s on my heart. I am afraid of the United States. I am also afraid for the United States. I am afraid for the wives of police officers, who are murdered and abused at well over the national average, and I know the police officers in this country will never be unarmed. I am afraid of the breeding-grounds online for disaffected, angry, horny young men, where they are welcomed and encouraged and radicalized.
I’m afraid a lot. I love you.
xoxoox
n
I want to go back to Canada, this is not my home, but I have an American husband and three American children and I have been here since 2001 and I also don't want to get driven out.
My oldest nephew survived the Marshall County High School shooting in Benton KY in 2018. My family lived in DeKalb during the 2008 NIU shooting.
We don't have the luxury of being afraid or sad or of thinking that other science-based, proven methods for reducing gun violence (and access) won't work. Paralysis and nihilism, in practice, are apathy. Listen to the survivors as they lead. Reinforce their work, lift their voices, give generously, pray without ceasing, and vote like a motherfucker. Sublimate your anxiety and fear and grief into action. That is the only way forward.
BUT. Most importantly: Don't own guns-- especially not out of something as weak as fear-- and don't be complicit in the ownership of ANY guns.
The "good guys" had guns this weekend and in countless weekends exactly like this one; the bad guys with guns still took lives. Even the best trained citizens are ineffective in stopping people using weapons designed for mass killings in taking lives. Access to guns only increases access to guns and your gun is FAR more likely to be used against your or stolen and used against someone else than it is to protect you. Guns do not protect you or anyone else, not in your home, not in an operating theater (what the actual fuck), and not in a public space.