A Reflection on the Most Recent Mass Shooting

Well, today was a bad day, folks.

I got back from lunch and saw that there was a mass shooting.

Another mass shooting. Just numbers on the screen anymore.

But this one hit home more than most of the last 1000 mass shootings. I haven't had a existential emptiness in my stomach since I was listening to the radio and the number of dead kindergartners was growing by the minute. What was it, three years ago?

It hit home because they hit a place similar to the place I work. I thought people giving service to the disabled was an uncontroversial social good. Maybe I was wrong. No one's been caught, we don't know any motives.

It's just that I never really thought of my place of work as anything but a safe place. I can't be the only one. I had to legitimately ask about safety plans in a similar situation, since I didn't think we had one at work.

It makes me think of how this fear gets normalized. I remember my then-girlfriend calling me the day of the Columbine massacre. The way she described it, it took me several minutes to understand that it didn't happen at her school. There had been some smaller school shootings in the 90s, but nothing of that scale. I remember her emphasizing that all she wanted to do was graduate. School was no longer a safe place for her.

By the time I was teaching in 2007, we had drills. Less than a decade to normalize the threat of violence.

It's not just the schools, but everywhere. I have been to three concerts since the Paris attacks. In the back of my mind, I've had to think that there was a nonzero chance that I might be shot.

That’s a scary world we live in. Typing this makes me think of people who have lived their whole lives under the threat of violence. Black communities in America get telescoped to the whole of the middle east. Today the British Parliament took a vote on if they should bomb Syria and Iraq to fight ISIS (or whatever they’re being called today). That means that each member of parliament will undoubtedly have the blood of the innocents on their figurative hads as many who will die will have had the same thing I wanted - just to live my life in a day to day mundanity. And that’s just two of the many horrible things that happened today that I’m aware of.

What I hate most is how powerless it makes me feel.

Review: The Difference Engine

The Difference Engine by William Gibson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars



View all my reviews

A Writer Searching for his Depth: Earnest Cline's "Armada"

This book came out in the shadow of the long awaited new book by Harper Lee. Perhaps it is better that it did because much hope existed for Cline after the success of Ready Player One.

I like that first book, noting that Cline has an ear for action. What he misses is that both of those books were maybe a little heavy on the exposition. I had actually liked that first book so much that I preordered this book months in advance and received it on the release day. I read it quickly, and with each page I was madder and more disappointed. I had seen the headlines of some of the early reviews, but I didn’t want to read them because I didn’t want them to ruin the book for me. The headlines could be charitably be called “mixed”. I was getting madder because so much of this book rehashes so much of the first book.

There is so much focus on nerdy popular culture that it gets in the way of the story. And I say this as a member of who should be the target audience - early middle age, white, grew up with the technology and the culture. I didn’t write a review at that time because I was worried about throwing up a review that reflected my fresh hot anger at Cline and running head into an army of fanboys. The problem is that I’m writing this and thinking about the book and getting madder.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s a cool conceit. The video games we have been raised with are actually training for the alien invasion. We’re using them to train the best to fight the … buggers. OK, so maybe it’s not wholly original but you can still read both The Forever War and Old Man’s War, right. But it’s also just copying himself. Instead of the games being a reflection of the world, they are the world. Big change - Jazzhands.

The real problem is that Cline doesn’t write characters well. It doesn’t have to be a character driven book, but caring about who they are and what they do and how their relationships develop are important to me. It's like my whole problem with Neil Stephenson: Cool world, what are you going to do about it. In Armada the main character *spoiler alert, yo* goes his whole life thinking his dad’s dead only to be reunited with him so that they can use their superior video game skills to defend earth. I felt nothing at the reunion scene. Such a disappointing use of the world he built.

In the end, the book (much like the previous one) is like a video game itself - a medium trying to find its depth despite the promise of what it can do. Video games are getting there. I hope Cline will too.