Ridiculous Opinions #203
So, we have been on the road since last week and have now arrived in Florida. We left Toronto on Monday and arrived in Blacksburg, Virginia on the same day; then it was off to Charleston, South Carolina; and now we find ourselves in Orlando, Florida. Astute people will notice a connection there that it took me a bit to put together.
We were wandering around Charleston during the week and Harper and I were sitting in rocking chairs on the porch of the hotel, having a wonderful father/daughter conversation, when Tracey approached from her own walk. “See that church?” she said, pointing to a church across the street from us. “That was where the Charleston shooting happened.”
We were staying about 25 yards from where a mass shooting happened in 2015. There it was; a beautiful church where something absolutely horrific happened. I immediately went silent, lost in thought, and the macabre nature of our road trip started to come into view.
The night before, we were in Blacksburg, Virginia so that Harper could see a friend from high school. Blacksburg was the site of the Virginia Tech shootings of 2007, where 32 people were killed. That had failed to register with me, but it soon came into focus when I realized that we were headed to spend the month in Orlando, where 49 people were killed at the Pulse nightclub in 2016.
We live in a bubble in the UAE, where we are safe from the kinds of things that happen in the United States. When I would tell people that we were headed to the US for the summer, a ton of people made bad jokes. “Don’t get shot!” they would say in a half-ironic way. I would laugh, but in my mind, the thought was there.
Don’t get shot.
Have we drifted so far that this is something that people actually say? Has the United States sunk so low that, purely by chance, our summer has been spent traveling from one mass shooting site to another, and then another? I don’t even know how to absorb that.
We really need to move away from the notion that someone casually saying, Don’t get shot is a half-joke. We should not become immune to the horrors of this kind of violence. I should be outraged at the fact that I traveled to all of these places where something horrific happened.
Not a lot to say about this, otherwise. It’s kind of depressing. As it should be.
