Day of mourning

Ambulances in Christchurch are chartreuse, with sirens that emit a keening up and down electronic wail foreign to non-European ears.  Over the coming weeks, for some, the awful caterwaul of March 15 will meld into daily traffic.  Church and temple bells will toll, breaking news alerts will subside, and the adhan will one again call the faithful to pray.  It will be normal, except it won't be anything like normal.  The norm will be a resetting of the baseline, an increased circulating level of stress hormone.

It is particularly evil to attack people at their most vulnerable.  At a outdoor concert, young and old enjoying themselves, enjoying life, that through-the-looking-glass target practice buried the needle into awful as far as I thought it could go, but on their knees, in a house of worship, praying for guidance, forgiving trespasses, while streaming it online LIKE A FUCKING VIDEO GAME, achieved a whole new decibel of madness.

New Zealand was supposed to be free of the festering inbred race hatred plaguing much of the western world, yet turned out to be equally defenseless against its largest malevolent force - Immoral, ignorant white males with access to weapons of mass destruction.  The Maori knew long ago what their conquerors were capable of.  All 49 victims in Christchurch spoke perfect English.  Can you not comprehend the destabilizing, unsustainable paradox of forcing converts, essentially indoctrinating them, into a particular "acceptable" way of life, then killing them for doing so?

I don't need to read the manifesto to know what it says.  I already read it, posted on trees outside Charlottesville, and Squirrel Hill, and Charleston, and Mobile, and Sand Creek.  You are not welcome here.  Hatred, anger, impotent rage, xenophobia, misplaced entitlement, racism, mistrust of the "other".  The words flow, the temporal rivulets flow, and it only makes sense to those mad enough to give it purchase, to permit it to continue.  I've already read it locally, in covenants that restrict land ownership to the master race, in scavenger hunts and ongoing fund drives intended (oh, but "we didn't understand, we cannot recognize the sirens so far removed") to resurrect and reintroduce and essentially worship anti-Semites and accused pedophiles.

No one is blameless.  No one gets out unscathed.  Americans, upon arrival, destroyed a civilization functioning perfectly well on one continent and then, for good measure, destroyed another on another, in order to form the more perfect union of extracting maximum wealth at minimal cost.  But given the current climate, the Tea Party manifesto is just as ignorant and unhelpful and divisive as the recent unsolicited call to action released by our cherished League.

Those who criticize the cronyism and nepotism of the Trump administration while remaining blind to the cronyism and nepotism operating on the local museum board or Economic Development Corporation, giving it the old nudge-nudge, are no less responsible for what happened in Christchurch than for the hell their ancestors managed to unloose at Wounded Knee, or Dancing Rabbit Creek.  We will receive our just reward.

I was not in attendance at the recent political forum where a local Estes Park resident (or interloper, the jury is still out), Caucasian, informed a candidate that the government quota had been reached on "his kind".  This is a voice that echoes, sadly enough, from Estes Park's past, and the banishment of a family of long-time residents, some of whom were Americans by birthright, because of rampant ignorance lashing out for victims of easy access, in order to revenge something happening a million miles away.