Lunar

Been a month since I've posted here.

I was saddened yesterday to hear about the shooting at the Holocaust museum in D.C. It sounded like the attacker was old and perhaps in some kind of an irrational "nothing left to lose" state of mind. It also appears that he didn't actually lose much, given that he's still alive and one security guard is dead.

One thing that upset me, hearing the news reports, was the talk of "additional security measures" that might be implemented in the near future. Why is there a need for that? I feel like DC is probably one of the safest cities in the US, (or at least I would hope so) - and what everyone seems to be overlooking is that while YES, a psycho with a gun managed to get inside the door of a museum, no civilians at all were killed. The security forces that were already there did exactly what they were supposed to do, and they did it flawlessly. Why is there nobody out there THANKING the guards and police force for executing the defense of the museum so well? If nothing else, this shows that we HAVE learned from the past, from episodes like the VT shootings, and that we're getting better at protecting our citizens. Why isn't there more emphasis on that?

In any case, anyone who's visited a museum anytime recently in DC can't have missed the extremely watchful security guards in every room of every wing of every building. I feel safe with them there. What else can anyone ask for? What other measures could possibly be implemented in the name of keeping us safe?

I feel like there's a different message here, one that the media could be doing us all a favor by broadcasting: trying something like that simply won't work. There's no point in trying.

One news channel was interviewing people who were saying things like, "Yeah, it sounds like the awful economy really pushed this guy over the edge." What. The. Fuck. Everyone is suffering from the economy, and MOST people aren't handling it like he did. It made me sick - taking an occasion like this to make potshots about the economy seemed in really poor taste. I know that media companies are really in it for the profits, but it would have been really, really, nice if they'd just passed off the event with something like "Holocaust museum security guard dead in tragic shooting after 89-year old perpetrator enters building, firing shots." That's all that anyone needs to say: it happened, the guy failed, it's over.

There was another news channel interviewing a fairly prominent female about the day's events, and it was disgusting to watch her - she was just eating up the attention. One wondered if she was truly, at the bottom of her heart, cared about what'd happened. Is this really what we're turning into, as a society?