Cafe Hitch-hike

2023-02-14

This bizarre week

America's most current mass shooting occurred in a place near and dear to me. One of my relatives is a professor there and marked herself safe, along with my friend Vlad who still lives nearby the shooting. There was a posting that said they may have had multiple shooters, but that is unverified.

Five years ago, the same place had one of the biggest athlete sexual abuse scandals in college sports. I was absolutely reeling about it for multiple reasons. It happened right around this week.

Also, five years ago was when another serious mass shooting happened in an affluent high school in my region. My colleague knew 3 of the teenagers who died, and one was their neighbor. They volunteered to work with a group to preserve the signs placed by mourners at the memorial site, and that project turned out to be a serious shitstorm, according to them. They now hate talking to the press and refuse to even get a benign photo taken because they got harassed in various ways. The office of a local political overlord was upset and got in touch with the colleague and their group about a sign left by a mourner that criticized the overlord's pro-gun views. (I swear to the multi-verse I'm not making this shit up).

I had to curb the urge to lash out at a member of an online women's group who thought the high school shooting was a hoax and had crisis actors (oh, they talk about conspiracy theories once in a while). I simply typed: The. Shooting. Was. Real. No. Crisis. Actors. (followed by a sentence-long summary of the colleague who knew 3 who died).

This reminds me of the time I took the ayahuasca and a message I got was specifically to pray for my siblings, and my niece was killed about a week later. I organized a prayer/ healing activity in my online women's group this week, and although only me and 2 others participated, a bunch of people thanked us for getting it started. Members started posting their personal grievances.

Meanwhile, for my training, I'm reading about elite theory, bureaucracy, and democracies. This gets really deep. The scary thing is most of it was written over 20 years ago and it was prescient about a lot of things now. Unlike a conspiracy theory, they usually have examples. I tell Avery what I read so it can shake him out of his Faux News stupor (he parrots crap he hears on it); he thinks climate change is a hoax. Well, none of the geoscientists, oceanographers, or K-12 science teachers I've known say it is. According to them, I may have oceanfront property if I stay around here long enough (that is, if our water sources aren't completely salinated).

Anyway, it is late and I still have a page to read from an article assigned to me. I just had to laugh about doing homework tonight, then thinking, "gee, this sure reminds me of my days as an undergraduate," and then I hear about the shooting, and then I recall what happened 5 years ago this week.

Well, for VD (Valentine's Day), matzo ball soup is in order for Avery's icky cold. For some reason he gave me my gift last night and told me not to open it until tomorrow. Jewish penicillin soup, some chocolates followed by the new West Side Story sound fine by me for comfort in this bizarre week.

downwind | upstream