It’s hard to know what you or I would do if confronted with a gunman in
a crowded nightclub. Any decision about where to run or hide would be a
complete game of chance. Predicting the trail of a killer, where he will turn
and shoot next, would be impossible to gage, so in the end we’d only have our
instincts, hoping against hope that where we chose to hide would be the one
place the killer would not look.
In many horrifying accounts of mass murders, there are always reports of
people who pretend to be dead in order to fool the killer. But pretending to be
dead takes a certain amount of risk. You pick a spot and you stay there,
immobile, until the killer passes over you but one false move and it’s over.
If you run and hide in a bathroom, as many in Orlando’s Pulse nightclub
did on the night of the killings, you risk penning yourself in a corner with no
way out, hoping somehow that the killer will forget to check the stall where
you are hiding. Since bathrooms generally only have one exit, this solution
isn’t a good one. When a shooter is shooting there’s no time to debate the
pitfalls of various hiding place.
Of course, if you had a gun, you might get lucky and pick off the killer
but a revolver is no match for the Sig Sauer MCX -semi
automatic assault rife that killer Omar Mateen used in his slaughter of 50 gay
people and the maiming of 50 more in Orlando’s Pulse.
When Mateen began the shooting at Pulse
he knew he’d be encountering people at a vulnerable time: at the end of a long
drinking night when individual responses would be staggered or slow. As news
reports indicate, as the shots rang out, patrons assumed they were a component
of the music, a DJ improvisation. During the Paris
massacre in 2015 at the Eagles of death Metal concert at the Bataclan, concert
goers at first thought that the opening gunfire from the terrorists was
fireworks or pyrotechnics. It took a couple of minutes before reality set in.
By the end of that slaughter, 130 people had been killed, the largest public
massacre death count in France
since World War II.
The massacre in Orlando got
me thinking of a lot of things. I thought of the big gay dance clubs I used to
frequent with their erotically charged reverely and music, of jam packed dance
floors where thoughts of violence and death were as far away as the Arctic
Circle .
I also thought of sudden death, and why it is that some say that it is
the worst kind of death because it takes us unaware without time to pray,
meditate or say good-bye to loved ones.
St Nicodemus the Hagiorite, an Orthodox saint who died in
1801, wrote that “death shows up like an unexpected thief and we do not know
how or when he will visit us. He may appear today, at this hour, at this very
moment and you, who woke up feeling fine, will not last until the evening,
while you, who have reached the evening, may not wake up…Therefore, my brother,
take heed and tell yourself: “If I die suddenly, what will become of the
wretched old me? What would be my benefit even if I enjoy all the pleasures of
the world?”
The massacre also made me think of what a
(now deceased) friend of mine was fond of saying: “Line them up and mow
them down” whenever he talked about his political enemies. He was talking about
mowing down members of the religious right, bigots who preached hate in the
name of Christ, bigots who should not really call themselves Christian. “Line them up and mow them down” had an
offbeat forbidden ring to it although my friend was far from violent. Saying
this for him was a kind of catharsis or personal exorcism.
I used to repeat my friend’s line myself line when feeling especially
exasperated by certain groups of ignorant people. Line
them up and mow them down. I’d laugh
while saying this to offset the horrible sound of it. After Orlando ,
however, I’m through saying anything remotely like this again.
The aftermath of Orlando set
off a series of political fights, of liberal vs. conservative, gun righters vs.
2nd amendment advocates, Trump vs. Sanders and Clinton
supporters. Orlando hadn’t been in
the news for five minutes before certain people started blaming Christians for
the slaughter. The reason? Because two or three crazy ministers announced that
they supported the jihadist Marteen who murdered 50 gay men and women at Pulse.
Blaming Christians for Orlando is
as absurd as blaming Tony Orlando and Dawn for the floods in Paris .
We also saw the antigun folks call for a ban on assault weapons as if
banning assault weapons would make terrorism disappear. Jihadists, however, can
just as easily don a suicide belt or “recycle” household items like gasoline or
kerosene into fatal weapons.
Assault weapons like the Sig Sauer MCX ,
however, do not belong on the open marketplace. Even Ronald Reagan (a man I do
not admire) advocated their banishment except in the hands of the military.
Assault weapons do not belong in the dens and kitchen cabinets of ordinary
Americans.
Next up was the Facebook wars over the Orlando
massacre. These battles were disheartening to observe, mainly because of the
polarizing opinions there.
Some said that the massacre was caused by the easy access of assault
weapons, while others blamed homophobia or radical Islam. It was the rare,
intelligent commentator who put the blame on all three.
God forbid that a card carrying
progressive should admit that Fox News might be right when it comes to fighting
radical Islam. Just because Fox News is wrong 90 per cent of the time doesn’t
mean it can’t score a bull’s eye on one or two issues. Neither the right nor
the left are infallible sources when it comes to political solutions.
MSNBC, Buzzflash, Alternet and Salon. Com,
all progressive news outlets, might be clueless when it comes to President
Obma’s or western Europe’s immigration policies, but these sources get my vote
every time when it comes to their opposition to tampering with Social Security
and programs for the poor.
Sadly, the “mow them down” mentality resigns supreme in America .
The vitriol against Trump on Facebook is so thick that one can easily imagine
an anti-Trumper edging towards violence.
Obama haters are just as ferocious in their obsessive rage. Some of
these postings on Facebook express the wish that some disastrous event would
come along and end the Obama presidency.
As for the Omar Marteen, since the massacre it has come out that he was
a frequent visitor to Pulse. There have even been reports that he picked men up
there despite his marriage to Noor Salman. Gays are all too familiar with this
type of man, the downlow covert guy who lives one life on the outside and a gay
one on the inside. As I used to tell people, the numbers of men who live this
way are far more numerous than the ordinary person could imagine. It is, in
many ways, America
While there’s nothing wrong with a healthy, questioning curious
sexuality, in some men this secret life has adverse effects, especially when
they hate themselves for what they’re doing.
This rage, this self hatred of course
might at any moment coalesce into violence, especially when fueled by religious
fanaticism.
This is why men who have nagging, persistent secret homosexual thoughts
and fantasies they wish to get rid of are the ones who often lash out at gay
men who feel comfortable in their own skin. In plain terms, the man who is
always yelling “faggot” is somebody to watch out for and take note of. More
often than not, this man is fighting repressed homosexual desires and putting
on a show so that his friends and family will not suspect his secret desires.
I experienced this on a Septa bus recently when a passenger, a male,
lashed out at me as I pulled the cord for my bus stop. Perhaps I glanced at him
too long when I boarded the bus at Front and Girard, but is this any reason to
get upset?
Whatever the reason, he yelled “pervert” as I got off the bus, then said
it again. He wasn’t carrying a gun or a knife but he might have well been.
I
gave him the finger, although even after I got off the bus he was still making
hostile gestures through the window.
This fanatic would not stop.
He
wasn’t Middle Eastern; he was just your run of the mill neighborhood dude in
black athletic shorts… with a very bad attitude.
