Published: March 25, 2021

Millions of people across the country and the world unite with the residents of Boulder in dismay over the sudden ending of ten lives, and in sympathy for the bereavement felt by family members, friends, and co-workers of the people who were killed.

That is really all there is to say at the end of the week that began on March 22.

When I try to think clearly about the tragedy that took place at King Soopers, I cannot come near the aspiration laid out in the Center of the American West’s slogan, “turning hindsight into foresight.”

I am even further away from turning despair into insight.

I have tried to capture seven of the thoughts that have been racing through my mind since Monday afternoon. I recognize that this effort might be premature; keeping quiet for a spell might have been a better-considered choice. In other words, readers, you might want to wait a week or two before you read this, or perhaps never read it at all.

Thought #1: What I Had Learned from Previous Losses and Bereavements

and Relearned This Week

In the struggle to cope with an unbearable event, a person’s mind will go 100% irrational and work relentlessly to reverse time:

Could we please go back to the morning of March 22 and close King Soopers for the day? Could we please return to the early afternoon of that day and place armed guards, all in bullet-proof gear, in front of the entrances to the store?

The answer is always “No,” but the mind will persist in conjuring up pleas. Having one’s mind negotiate so hard against fact can seem like an alarming disconnection from reality. And yet, for good reason, the mind goes in search of every possible course of resistance to the acknowledgement of an irreversible calamity. These failed efforts at evasion are actually the necessary steps toward the concession: “This happened, and I cannot change it.”

Thought #2: A Platitude to Treasure

“This is no time for platitudes,” a letter to the editor in the Boulder Daily Camera declared this week. While I sympathize with that comment, there is no evidence that I will ever break a lifetime habit of finding refuge in platitudes and well-worn truisms.

On every day and every night of this week, the phrase, “There but for fortune,” has been lodged in my mind. King Soopers is a mile from my house, and I have shopped there many times. On nearly every visit to the store, I have run into someone I know. This pattern—heading down an aisle and finding an old pal—convinced me that the Table Mesa King Soopers would be the best place to go if you were yearning to have a lively conversation with someone you haven’t had a chance to see in a while.

Every time I think of the victims, I instantly think to myself, “That could have just as easily been me.”

At the risk of expanding the scope of my commentary too fast, I will make a broadscale assertion.

We are living in times when misfortunes—inflicted by Covid-19, by economic hardship, by political polarization, by racial division, by a range of stresses and strains on the mind and soul—burden millions. Surely the prospects for national recovery would increase if the habit of saying to ourselves, “That could have just as easily have been me,” became an ever-expanding trend.

There but for fortune.

Thought #3: A Doubt that Hangs Around, Even When Made to Feel Unwelcome

I join millions of others in hoping that stricter gun laws could end the epidemic of mass shootings. But I cannot dismiss this doubt: since the people who commit mass shootings are determined to defy well-established laws against murder, it seems very likely that they would defy tougher laws restricting the sale of guns, and instead turn to black markets and illicit channels for the acquisition of firearms. I do not present this doubt as an argument against tighter gun laws, but I acknowledge that this doubt keeps me from embracing the hope that stricter gun laws will put an end to the horrific events that keep occurring. Of course, this doubt lifts when I realize that other nations have figured out ways to reduce gun ownership, with a corresponding drop in rates of injury and death. Still, I have no idea how long it would take to replicate those regulations and their outcome in the United States. But it is still my hope that if I step forward and acknowledge this doubt, this admission might serve as a wobbly, precarious rope-bridge across the canyon of division on gun rights.

Thought #4: The Possible Benefits—and the Perils and Pitfalls—of Identifying and Tending to Troubled Souls

It is my own belief that the great majority of gun-owners will never use a firearm to injure or kill other people; in truth, I see that sizable sector of society as playing a crucial role in a coalition to design the laws that would reduce our country’s susceptibility to episodes of senseless violence. It is also my belief that there is a small population of troubled souls who are susceptible to intense episodes of explosive rage and resentment. For these people, a firearm opens the door to hell-on-earth, while putting innocent strangers at an unbearable risk. Hope lies in the fact that troubled souls—often, though not always—provide clues to their internal disorder. Can experts in mental health, allied with individuals who have prevailed over inner demons, tell the rest of us how to stay alert to the presence of troubled souls and to come to their aid? Can those knowledgeable folks guide us to practices that will steer clear of the risk of further stigmatizing mental illness? Long before March 22, perpetrators of mass shootings presented a national dilemma that required an “all hands on deck” strategy, engaging thousands of volunteers. But all the hands who show up on deck must know what they are doing, and also know what they should not be doing. Rather than wait for disaster, we need guidelines that will permit us to bring our actions into alignment with another platitude of timeless value, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” It is within the reach of possibility that this alertness might do a lot more good than harm, alleviating the isolation of troubled souls who are otherwise left alone with their miseries.

Thought #5: Postponing an Assessment of Proportion

On Monday, March 22, thousands of people in the nation went grocery shopping, pushed their carts up and down aisles of abundance, and took their purchases home without incident. For reasons that can be as vexing as they are compelling, public attention dwells on horrifying news. In some distant future, we can think about experimenting with a different arrangement of proportion and scale. This is an almost intolerable observation to make, but I cannot keep from thinking that an exploration, of the proportion of attention given to bad news and good news, might moderate the fears that burden children who are growing up in this era. The horrific events at King Soopers occurred in a context where millions of others had reason to think that grocery stores were places to go without dread of an attack. And yet we should not go anywhere near an adjustment in the proportion we assign to bad news and good news, unless we can be sure that we will not run the risk of distracting from or obscuring the loss of ten lives at King Soopers.

Thought #6: The “American Exceptionalism” Dispute Has Now Officially Earned a Moratorium

The United States came into being with distinctive ideals, and those ideals have generated a very complicated history of striving, achievement, default, and betrayal. While comparisons are necessary and illuminating, that history is not interchangeable with the histories of other nations. But the United States has also been home to innumerable human beings who have had the propensity for violence that afflicts the entire planet. Because the disturbing qualities of human beings do not defer to national borders, history refutes any claims that the United States has maintained a distinctive level of innocence or virtue. The widespread pattern of mass shootings supports the proposition that it is time to put a moratorium on the debate over American exceptionalism that has done little to aid the cause of national self-examination.

Thought #7: Time’s a’Wasting

Yearning for the time before the pandemic, as well as yearning for the time before the afternoon of March 22, is an entirely justifiable and legitimate exertion of the imagination.

But when we yearn for the past, we miss opportunities.

To permit me to explain what I mean by this statement, please put up with me as I revert to my old habits and conclude with the story of a curious coincidence.

On Saturday, March 20, I had a Zoom conversation with a treasured friend who does wonderful work in improving the capacity of scientists to communicate with the public. That conversation made me think about another treasured friend, an environmental scientist with an extraordinary gift and enthusiasm for communicating with the public. I had last been in touch with this person in 2015, when he told me that he had been diagnosed with stage-IV colon/liver cancer, and was on “essentially unending chemo, 2-3 week cycle.” He would have, he said, “maybe 1-3 years, unless that miracle happens.”

An over-crowded professional life has its satisfactions and its sorrows. A leading sorrow is my failure to stay in touch with friends I admire intensely. Despite an earnest intention, I didn’t figure out a way to end up in the same place at the same time with this friend. So I could not be surprised, but I could be shaken, when I found the obituary recording his death in November of 2016.

When I read this obituary on Saturday night, March 20, I was in a rage—with myself for failing to stay in touch with this friend, but also with the malignancy that ended his life at age sixty-two. The rage lifted, but the recognition lingered: I had cheated myself by not staying in touch with this person, robbing myself of the opportunity to benefit from his advice and coaching on the never-settled-and-mastered enterprise of engaging the public with the findings of experts.

On Saturday night, this recognition led me to start a “Missing-in-Action List,” composed of the names of people who had died before I got moving and asked for their advice. My plan was—and is—to write about the people on that list in future “Not My First Rodeo” posts.

On Sunday March 21, my “Missing-in-Action List” grew. I was still adding names on Monday March 22.

The people on my list had died from illness or frailty—heart attacks, cancer, or the multiple assaults of aging. No one on the list had died from violence.

On Monday, as I kept adding names of people who had left this world before I could spend the time with them that I now yearned to have, news updates and alerts about an active shooter at King Soopers began to appear.

This was, by no means, a matter of premonition. But the timing still strikes me as bordering on the uncanny.

Whatever this coincidence might mean or not mean, it affirms Thought #7.

Time’s a’Wasting.

Get moving, everybody, and move into each other’s company—distanced, masked, or on Zoom—while you still can.

 

Patty Limerick's Signature
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Photo Credit:

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