Orlando, Hope, and My Calloused Soul

Buckle Up. This is the new normal. Death, destruction, hate. It’s all around us. Sure, it isn’t new. But it seems like it’s never been this prevalent. What the hell is happening to us as a society?

Last Sunday was a chore day in my house. My husband and I were diligently working on putting together a new IKEA loft bed for my step-daughter. During a break, my husband (who, like me, works in Homeland Security) said:

Hey. Have you checked your work phone?

Those dreaded words. I wish it was the first time I had ever heard them.

My email had blown up — the Orlando massacre saturated my work email, the news, and then my thoughts. I spent 20 minutes scrolling through and responding to emails. I looked online. I turned on the 24-hour news station. I thought about the families wondering about the fate of their loved ones, or worse, just getting the news of their deaths. I thought about Omar Mateen, the man who rained this violence down upon an unsuspecting crowd, these innocent victims merely out for an evening of dancing and drinking and fun.

Then I picked up my Allen Wrench and went back to work.

The next morning, in my first cup of coffee haze, I hated myself a little bit that I was not more distraught. This is the worst mass shooting in American History. But it is not the first. And we’ve had a ton of shitty stuff lately to have to choke down. And after a while, it just starts to hurt a little less.

My nephew turned 18 years old in May and graduated from high school. I asked him the other day what his earliest memory was. I suspected the answer and was right — it was 9/11. He was two and a half. Since then the horrific incidents, the tragedies, the violence, none of it has stopped or slowed down. Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, San Bernardino…the list goes on and on.

Something had happened to me. After a while, it seems as though I’d developed a bit of a callus on my soul, just to go about my day. I worry about that. How many of today’s toddlers will have a defining event like 9/11? Or will it just be one of many? Just another day in the life of the new normal?

I sat and thought about how I got to this point. Here are five things that came to mind that helped build up that callus. (Thanks a lot assholes.)

5. Donald Trump

Okay, so voting this year is like choosing between death by firing squad or being slowly disemboweled. Bad or worse. But Trump is for sure the worse. (Check out this article detailing the bullshit from both parties.) But listen, this guy just takes it to a whole new level. In response to the shooting and death of 49 people at Pulse night club, Trump tweeted the most epic “humblebrag” in history: “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don’t want congrats, I want toughness and vigilance. We must be smart!”

It’s not even false modesty — it’s unmitigated narcissism. Yes, this guy may be your next President. Not a moment’s thought toward the victims or their families. He’s patting himself on the back for using the actual words “radical Islam.” Forget the fact that the foundation of his policy of addressing “radical Islam” is a ban on refugees. So I’d say he was wrong, considering Omar Mateen was born in the U.S. (For more reasons Trump is just plain terrible, take a look at this article.) Our country’s embrace of Trump’s divisive rhetoric certainly helped numb my soul. I feel self-loathing when I think what it really says about us as a society. And then I turn off the news and go about my day.

4. The people who are for and against Trump

Why is the voting public so disappointing? How many times have we seen the news lately and they utterly fail to talk about the violence at Trump rallies? There’s more than enough blame to go around here as both sides of the Trump divide seem more than happy to instigate confrontations. Is this what our forefathers intended by giving us the right to assemble —name-calling, yelling and screaming, racial epithets and hate speech, sucker punches, pepper spray, throwing eggs, breaking through law enforcement barriers, and more?

Remember when watching the news and the violent demonstrations were in other countries? I do. And I always thought, “Wow, it would suck to be them. Thank God I live in America.” Now they look at us that way. And we totally deserve it. (If you choose to attend a rally, here are some people you should avoid.)

3. Civil rights

Reports are indicating that Mateen targeted the Pulse nightclub because it was a popular LGBT hangout. His father claimed he was motivated because he saw two men kissing in front of his wife and three year old child. That display of affection, the act of kissing, created such hatred in a person that he killed 49 people.

Marinate on that for a minute, he killed 49 people because two people demonstrated their love for each other in public.

And, lost in all of the news about Mateen, is the fact that another nut job, 20 year old James Wesley Howell, was arrested while on his way to the L.A. Gay Pride Parade with a car containing three assault rifles, high-capacity ammunition and a five gallon bucket with explosive precursors in it. Who knows what he planned to do with it…uh, I have a good guess.

All of this on top of the North Carolina gender bathroom nonsense. Did we not learn anything from the mistakes of our parents with racial equality? Instead of black and white water fountains, are we going to have gay, straight, and transgender? I can’t wrap my head around how we are repeating the mistakes of the past. (Sadly there is enough about this topic that 5 ‘n Dime has a whole other post about it.)

2. Targeted violence

In yet another horrific, gut wrenching incident, 22 year old Christina Grimmie, a former contestant on the popular TV show “The Voice,” was shot and killed by 27 year old Kevin Loibl, a man she never met. Grimmie had just performed at a club (also in Orlando) last Friday night, and was signing autographs. Grimmie was gunned down in front of her brother, who heroically tackled Loibl in a vain attempt to save her from him.

I wish I could say this is the first time something like this has happened, but we all know it is not. People get weirdly affected by celebrities and take action against them, or on their behalf. Remember John Hinckley? He attempted to kill President Reagan, Press Secretary James Brady, and Secret Service Special Agent Timothy McCarthy, just to impress Jodie Foster. What about Mark David Chapman, who shot John Lennon in 1980? Remember Rebecca Shaeffer — star of the sitcom “My Sister Sam?” She was shot and killed in 1989 by John Bardo, a fan who had been stalking her for three years. Bardo eventually showed up at Shaeffers’s apartment and shot her in the chest after she answered the door.

But what used to seem so unfamiliar now seems almost routine, and it just gets easier for the bad guys to pull off. I don’t know if it is access to guns or not, but all the bad guys had them in these examples. There are some real concerns on both sides of the gun control argument. So much so that 5 n’ Dime authored companion articles, arguing both for and against gun control. I suggest you read both in the interest of fairness.

1. Extreme violence on social media

Remember Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was captured and beheaded in Pakistan in 2002? How about Nick Berg, the freelance radio-tower repairman working in Iraq who was captured and decapitated in 2004 by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the father of the Islamic State (IS, or ISIS or ISIL or Daesh). Their deaths had the unique distinctions of being captured and passed via social media. What was then an oddity has now become commonplace. Just look at any day’s Daily Mail. Scroll down past the Kardashians and Justin Bieber, and you will find at least one article about an atrocity committed by ISIS. Maybe yesterday they beheaded a group of Assad supporters, or they burned a Jordanian pilot alive, or they cut off the hand of a 15 year old for listening to Western music, or they raped a Yazidi sex slave, or they threw a “suspected homosexual” off a roof.

It’s all out there, and I’m tired of seeing it. (If you want to know more about it, you can see this article about the way ISIS treats women, or this one about the latest issue of the organization that spawned them, Al Qaida’s, hateful magazine and how it talks about killing more people.)

As I sat and thought about my callousness and where it came from, it struck me that the question I should be asking myself is why?

Survival.

The only way I have found to survive this constant onslaught is to harden my heart. Just a little bit. To put one step in front of the other and march forward.

So what do I do? I take a deep breath, I think about the loss, and then I pick up my Allen Wrench, and get back to work. Maybe next Sunday will be better, because nothing bad happens.

And maybe I haven’t lost ALL my faith or my hope. Because my calluses — maybe they’re there to protect them.