Everyday barbarity

 The remembering place is at the top of a grassy hill, up a winding path from a green park where children play and parents watch and families lay out the picnic things. 

It's quiet up here, beneath the wide Colorado sky. A breeze ripples the grass and tugs at your cap. A wide paved entryway opens onto an earth-tone brick wall that curves gracefully away from you. Set into it here and there are bronze plaques inscribed with words of ache and loss and bewilderment, and of a determination never, ever to forget.

A mile away, give or take, across from the park and a parking lot and this peaceful hilltop, sits Columbine High School.

Where, 26 years ago today, two lost kids named Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold hauled firearms and homemade bombs into their school, murdered a teacher and a dozen of their classmates, and wounded 20 others. Then they shot themselves.

The remembering place -- the Columbine Memorial -- is the result of all that. It's a community's way of coping with an unimaginable loss back when it was still impossible to imagine such loss.

Theirs was not the first school shooting in America's history, but it became the seminal one in the national consciousness -- the dividing line between a time when we could still fancy ourselves a civilized nation, and this different, darker time. The cold deliberation of the act, its naked barbarity, lent it a particular horror that remains even as the barbarity has become a seeming everyday reality.

Columbine, see, was only beginning, or the imagined beginning. In time there would be Sandy Hook and Uvalde and Las Vegas and Aurora and Virginia Tech and dozens upon dozens others -- a veritable mass-shooting-of-the-week that would evoke pro forma thoughts-and-prayers from politicians who couldn't have cared less, and a sort of normalized numbness from an America grown used to living in an armed camp.

That armed camp produced yet another school shooter this week, and it wasn't a transgender or a Venezuelan gang member or some alleged terror-lover. It was a white 20-year-old MAGA from Tallahassee, Fla., the son of a deputy sheriff, who borrowed his mom's service revolver and shot eight people, two fatally, during an afternoon stroll on the campus of Florida State University.

And how did the President of the United States respond?

More or less with a shrug and "these things will happen." Or words to that effect.

Given the mindset of the president's fear-driven Regime, it's not unfair to wonder how different his reaction might have been had the shooter not been a Regime supporter. Not much of a stretch to imagine how the Regime would have revved up the Other machine if the shooter had been one of those creepy transgenders, or a Hispanic immigrant, or a Middle Eastern college student. Or, God forbid, a Democrat.

You might think this is straying a bit afield, but it's not really. In ways both big and small, that hilltop in Colorado, and the date it memorializes, is the on-ramp to a lot of it.

I've been thinking about that hilltop all weekend, and especially the bizarre confluence of the weekend's dates. Yesterday, for instance -- April 19 -- was the 250th anniversary of Lexington, Concord and an uprising of farmers and yeomen that became the American Revolution. It was also the 30th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh, who no doubt thought murdering 168 babies, children and everyday working Americans somehow made him kith and kin to those farmers and yeomen.

It didn't, of course. Instead, he was just a monster who died by lethal injection six years later in the federal pen. Put down like a rabid animal, and good riddance.

And today, April 20th?

The anniversary of Columbine. And also Easter Sunday, when those of us who believe celebrate the risen Christ, the most important day of our faith.

The world is a strange place.

And while you're praying your Easter prayers, pray it never becomes stranger, or darker, or uglier, or ever requires another hilltop remembering place.