(In which two women are wounded by random bullets because they decided to go to the wrong White Sox game in Chicago ... and a kid in Oklahoma dies because he decided to go to the wrong high school football game ... and three more people die in Florida because they decided to go shopping at Dollar General on the wrong day)
Anyway ...
Anyway, this is America now.
This is a country I no longer recognize, because in 40 years as a sportswriting grunt I went to hundreds of high school football games and a fair amount of professional baseball games, and being in the line of someone's fire was never something I thought about. It literally never crossed my mind, in the way "Tonight I might get hit in the head with a meteor" never crossed my mind.
It never crossed my mind the two nights in Cleveland I sat in right field to cover the Indians and Red Sox in the ALCS.
It never crossed my mind all the times I stood on a sideline at Zollner or Spuller or Luersfield or John H. Young Field in New Haven, night coming down fast and the air turning cool in that particular way you only feel when summer's dying and fall -- real, actual fall -- waits just offstage.
Hell. It never crossed my mind whenever I went to church or the movies or the grocery store, for that matter.
Now the only reason it never crosses my mind is because I make a conscious effort not to let it. The difference is subtle, but I can't tell you how much I hate it.
I can't tell you how much I hate realizing that America has become a place even the Wild West of myth and legend would find appalling. For all the dime novels and Zane Grey westerns and Saturday mornings with the Lone Ranger and Roy Rogers, see, it was never the shootout-a-minute reality America seems to be now.
There were laws; Wild Bill Hickok himself once was charged with enforcing a firearms ban when he was the marshal of Abilene, Kansas. There was also a code; you might shoot up the local saloon on Saturday night, but you never shot up the Methodist church on Sunday -- and if you ever shot a man in the back, why, you were nothing but a goddamn coward.
There is none of that in our new Calibration Nation, where everyone's packing and no one's allowed to question the sanity of that, lest the Second Amendment hysterics start up their tired refrain: They're comin' to take our guns!
In this America, there seem to be no boundaries, none of the mental breakers that in a civilized society tell us certain things are not just wrong but obscene. Crazy people backshoot other people all the time, in this America. Cops backshoot more people because they don't know anymore who's packing and who's not, who's crazy and who's not.
Shoot up a school, kill a bunch of kids? Walk into a movie theater and start blasting away? Open fire in a synagogue, in a church, in a grocery store, at a traffic light?
Sure. Why the hell not?
And so we get a high school football game in Oklahoma that turns into the last night of young man's life. We get a White Sox game where two women minding their own business are hit by bullets that seem to come out of nowhere. We get three black Americans dead in Jacksonville, Fla., on the 60th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech, because a kid sick with hate decided to armor up and go kill some black people at Dollar General.
The Wild West of myth and legend?
Got news for ya. We're living it for real these days, in real time.
God help us.
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