Monday mornings are a drag. You wake up slowly, shaking the cobwebs from your brain after a busy weekend and get ready for another long, dull work week. You force yourself to get out of bed and get started. It’s what we do.
This past Monday in Washington D.C. twelve people went through this ritual, just as they have for many years. They shook the cobwebs loose, got ready to go to work, kissed their families goodbye…
…and died.
Without warning or logic, apparently by sheer dumb luck, these people entered a field of fire and were deleted by a nut job with a head full of demons.
I know. It’s not my job to judge or impugn the people who become the subjects of the day’s news, willingly or otherwise. Even when these people become the self-made stars of surreality horror shows we in the business are required to treat them with dispassionate objectivity, and we usually do.
On the other hand, part of my job is to try to make sense of things. It’s futile, of course. How can anybody make sense of a man wantonly, randomly gunning people down until he runs out of targets or is, himself, deleted?
We all try desperately to make sense of these things but we can only scratch the surface of reason because we can’t understand a sick heart and a twisted mind with brains and souls that function properly.
I don’t know what to call this guy but I’m absolutely sure it doesn’t matter. No matter what we call him or how hard we try to imagine ways his life might have been straightened out before it went so far off the rails without warning nothing will be changed. Twelve families are wracked with unimaginable grief. Dumb luck has damaged their lives irreparably.
The rest of us will wring our hands and knot our brows and flap our mouths and write millions of words in search of sense. Activists will use the tragedy to make their points; politicians will use the activists to sell promises.
Monday will come again and life will go on.
The only thing I can find that makes any sense in this is a profound appreciation of those things I so frequently take for granted: my life and the people I love.
At times like this I even love Mondays.
Dave Williams