The Tragedy in Colorado

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It is still Friday, July 20, 2012.

The smoke (please excuse the pun) is still clearing in Colorado following the shooting at the midnight showing of the new Batman movie.

In the coming days, I am sure, more will be known about the gunman, what led him to his heinous act and the eventual death toll than is known now. Please keep that in mind as you read this because, if you are reading this sometime in the future, some of the facts are sure to have changed.

There are bound to be things that are thought to be true as I write that will be proven to be false. Already today, the death toll has fluctuated downward, but it may well go upward in the coming days. There are still people fighting for their lives, and some may lose that fight. The police are trying to figure out how to get into the shooting suspect's apartment and disarm booby trap[s] the suspect left behind, and I've heard some people say that process could take days or weeks.

But something that will not change is the fact that, once again, the relative peace of daily life for most Americans was shattered.

This morning, after I had first heard of the shootings, I went on Facebook, where I found that one of my former journalism students — now the executive editor of his hometown newspaper — had shared his paper's Associated Press account of what had happened in those early morning hours when most of us were sleeping in blissful ignorance.

And, in the comments section that accompanies just about every article that is published online these days, a young person identified as a student at the local high school, commented, "I don't understand why the world has to be like this sometimes."

And I was reminded of when that editor and I were on a college campus together two decades ago, and one of his classmates asked me, after observing the number of religious leaders who had taken exception to various accounts of Bill Clinton's ethics and aligned themselves with the likes of Patrick Buchanan, who had delivered a speech that was extremely long on intolerance at that summer's Republican convention, about the logic behind their position.

"I thought ministers were supposed to be about love and forgiveness," he said to me.

The same thought that crossed my mind on that occasion crossed my mind this morning when I read that young man's comment — the naivete of youth.

I guess we all start out that way. It reminds me of a conversation Daphne had with her father on the TV show Frasier. Her father told her that he was splitting up with Daphne's mother for good, and Daphne, disillusioned and disappointed, said she had always believed that love conquered all.

"We all believe that when we're young," her father replied, "but then life beats us around a bit, and you learn to dream a little smaller."

There may be a lot of truth in that statement, but July 20 has always struck me as a date when the stakes have been even greater than usual — and, consequently, the hopes have been a bit grander, too.

July 20 often seems to bring memorable events. When I was a child, men walked on the moon for the first time on a July 20. When my parents were still young, a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler failed on this date — an event that wasn't nearly as positive as but, in some ways, was more significant than the moon walk.

(Hitler would be dead within a year, anyway, but, if he had been killed on this date in 1944, it is probable that many lives would have been spared. How many? No one can say.)

When my grandparents were children, the Ford Motor Company shipped its first car on this date. Henry Ford's assembly line concept radically transformed the 20th century.

There are other dates like that on the calendar, dates when great strides were made in medicine, manufacturing, agriculture, whatever.

But sprinkled among them — and sometimes, as is the case today, coinciding with them — are days of unspeakable and unexpected terror and anguish.

Such occasions do not always feature a lone gunman. Sometimes it is other things.

But no generation is immune to shocking reminders that life is not fair.

It hasn't been fair when young people have died in what should be one of the safest settings outside their homes — their schools.

It wasn't fair that a crew of astronauts that included the woman who was slated to be the first teacher in space died in a fiery explosion less than two minutes after liftoff.

Nor was life fair when prominent people were being gunned down and race riots were breaking out in the 1960s.

I have often pondered why it is that some people die so young and others live into their 80s or 90s. There must be more to it than the cliche "the good die young."

The more religious among us will tell you that it is all part of God's plan and that we are not intended to understand God's reasoning.

That's just as well, I suppose, because I used to get headaches trying to figure out God's reason for allowing babies to perish in the Oklahoma City bombing.

The only reason I can think of is sheer randomness. I'm sure there were people at that movie who were there only at the request of others; maybe some of those people were hurt or killed — perhaps only because they were being polite to someone else.

I've heard of unaccounted–for servicemen who were undoubtedly prepared for the possibility of dying in a foreign land but more than likely never gave it a thought while standing in line at a movie theater.

The fact that this kind of thing has the power to paralyze virtually the entire country with fear tells you how rare — comparatively — such a thing really is here.

This summer, I've been re–reading Truman Capote's brilliant nonfiction novel "In Cold Blood" about the massacre of a Kansas farm family in 1959. "[D]rama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there," Capote wrote.

(Aurora, Colo., is considerably larger than Holcomb, Kan., was in 1959, but I suspect that the same thing could be said of Aurora.)

At one point, Capote observed that visitors to Holcomb noticed that almost all the lights in town were on late into the evening.

Capote asked, "Of what were they frightened?" and supplied the answer he had received over and over: "It might happen again."

That is an irrational fear, of course, but it's one that some people do have in these situations. I saw an online poll this morning asking people if they were more or less likely to patronize a movie theater this weekend. Thousands of people responded that they were less likely.

People living in Israel have long been accustomed to the idea that the store where they were shopping or the restaurant in which they were eating or even the road upon which they were traveling could erupt in violence at any minute.

When that happens, they mourn their dead, too, but they move on much faster than we do.

Here in America, I expect our national conversation to focus on Aurora for weeks — in spite of the Olympics and, perhaps, in spite of the conventions.

That will be a good thing if it leads to constructive conversations about what can be done to minimize the risk of such a thing happening again without trampling on constitutional rights.

But already today I have heard people, on both sides of the divide, arguing that the gunman had a political agenda.

Such talk can have no purpose except to contribute to what is already shaping up to be the dirtiest presidential campaign in my memory.

And that we do not need.

What we need is a discussion about how to reduce the possibility of violence intruding on our daily lives.

It probably cannot be eliminated.

But maybe it can be curtailed.

Stop All The Clocks

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When I was a child, it was almost fashionable to say the Kennedy name and the word "tragic" in the same sentence.

No matter where one stood on the political spectrum, it was a conclusion with which everyone seemed to agree.

President Kennedy and his brother both had been assassinated. Their oldest sister died young in a plane crash, and their oldest brother died in World War II. And over the years, it seemed that tragedy continued to visit the Kennedy family disproportionately. It didn't always take young lives; sometimes it merely left them in shambles.

That is certainly tragic.

But the truth is, in a family that large (there were nine children in Joe and Rose Kennedy's family, and most of those children produced children of their own), there are almost bound to be a few cases of premature and/or tragic death.

I'm sure there have been other large families in America that have suffered such losses, but they didn't exist in a public spotlight. The Kennedys, of course, were and, to an extent, still are politically prominent. Their influence is reduced now, but they remain the closest thing America has to a royal family.

When I was growing up in Arkansas, a politically prominent family lived just down the road from mine. It wasn't what I would call a royal family, but there were times when it seemed to me that it aspired to be.

I have written about this family, off and on, for about 2½ years now. I first mentioned it (briefly) in the days following my high school class reunion (which I was unable to attend but I got on the class' e–mail mailing list). It was at that time that I learned that the mother in the family had died the year before.

I wrote about it here again slightly more than a year ago when the patriarch of the family, a man known as Justice Jim Johnson, died of a self–inflicted gunshot wound. He'd been suffering from serious medical problems and apparently lost all hope.

Justice Jim, as I observed at that time, was an old–fashioned segregationist who ran unsuccessfully for governor of Arkansas when his twin sons and I were in first grade. I was too young to pay attention to a politician's speech at the time, but I have heard that his rhetoric was, to put it mildly, fiery.

He hadn't really been a prominent figure in Arkansas for at least a couple of decades when he died. Nevertheless, I was stunned by the vitriol I encountered when I tried to find out more about the circumstances at Arkansas–based web sites.

I was even more stunned a few months later when I heard that one of Justice Jim's sons, David, had lost his own son in an accident.

It was the kind of pain I couldn't imagine, and I said so to David in a letter I wrote a few days after learning of his son's death from one of the members of our high school class who has taken it upon herself to notify the rest of us whenever someone dies.

At the time, it really seemed to me that the Johnson family had been visited by more tragedy in a short span of time than any family should have to face. But there were two truths, one of which was obvious (Mrs. Johnson had been in her late 70s and Mr. Johnson had been in his mid–80s when they died; I was sorry that those two people were gone, but they both lived longer than most people of their generation) and the other had yet to be revealed, even though it was partially revealed last summer when David's son died.

I don't know if that truth has been fully revealed yet, but I got at least a hint today that it is continuing to unfold.

Today, I received another e–mail from Dianne — who has done a remarkable job of keeping us informed of these developments these last few years — reporting that David has died.

I hoped that Dianne was wrong, but, in my gut, I was sure she was right. I haven't known her to be wrong about any of these deaths in nearly three years, and she wasn't wrong this time, either.

I have confirmed that, yes, my friend is dead. I don't know what happened, but I have heard that he died of liver failure or kidney failure. I suppose I will learn the details in the days ahead.

It's funny the thoughts one has at a time like this.

• I was remembering, for example, when I was in first grade. David and I were the only ones who had the same first name. Everyone else — Larry, Susan, Lisa, whatever — could be identified by their first names only, but there were two Davids and that was a bit of a problem.
  
  As an adult, I understand the dilemma the adults of that time faced. There had to be a way to distinguish between David Johnson and David Goodloe. And it was decided that David Johnson would be known as "David" and I would be known as "David G."
  
  Now, in the 1990s, having an initial attached to your name was cool. But, when I was a child in the 1960s, I didn't care for it. Being the only one in the class whose identity couldn't be expressed in my first name alone made me feel like I was being singled out.
  
  It's hard to explain any better than that.
  
  But it just didn't seem fair — or necessary — to me. Everyone called him Davy, anyway. I never understood why I couldn't simply be called David.
  
  Later in life, I called him David, and he was always gracious about it, but he seemed to prefer to be called Dave.


• It's a funny thing, too, about "identical" twins.
  
  I've never understood why people often experience a kind of confusion over the identities of twins. They look so much alike, people say.
  
  And Hollywood has done what it could to promote that concept of mistaken identity with some successful movies over the years.
  
  Well, I've known a few sets of identical twins in my life, but I can only think of one set of twins who looked so similar that it was challenging for me to tell them apart.
  
  I never had any trouble with Danny and Davy. I always knew which one was which. Their voices weren't the same at all. And one of them had a birth mark on his face, not nearly as pronounced as the one that actor Richard Thomas had but clear enough to me.
  
  No, I never had any trouble telling them apart. They were alike in many ways, but they were always two individuals to me, not parts of the same person.
  
  When I got older, I mused about that very thing. Why was it so easy for me to tell Danny and David apart? I saw a picture earlier today of the Johnson family that was probably taken around the time of their father's gubernatorial campaign.
  
  (I'm guessing it was printed originally in campaign pamphlets. Politicians often circulated photos of their families in their campaign brochures in those days.)
  
  Anyway, I couldn't tell from looking at the picture which twin was which. It was in black and white, and I couldn't see a birth mark on either of the twins. They were dressed the same and had crewcut haircuts (I remember those haircuts).
  
  So I wonder if maybe the fact that the three of us were so young when we first met played a role. It's been my experience that children are often more perceptive about things than adults think.


• And, in sort of a random, general kind of way, I've been remembering my childhood on a manmade lake outside the city limits of Conway, Ark.
  
  David, his twin brother Danny and I shared many of the same likes and dislikes. We loved the same popular TV shows, like Batman, and we incorporated them into the games we would play.
  
  David and Danny had a toy that was popular in those days called "Creepy Crawlers." You would pour a liquid substance (which you would get at a toy store, and these goops, as they were called, came in a variety of colors, which kept the toy new and interesting) into a mold and heat it on a hot plate. When it cooled, you had a rubbery spider or some other similar creature.
  
  We would combine those rubber bugs into our version of the Batman series and invent adventures of our own superheroes — Bugman and Buggy instead of Batman and Robin.
  
  Well, what do you want? We were only about 6 years old! The names we gave ourselves may not have been very creative, but I think our games were.
  
  I don't remember who was Bugman or who was Buggy. Maybe we alternated. I mean, this was kind of our version of Cops 'n' Robbers, and someone had to be the bad guy. My memory of our games is that we were always fair. We always took turns — and we probably took turns being Bugman, Buggy and the bad guy.
  
  Perhaps that is why, when I think of David and Danny and our childhood on the lake, I think of us as a threesome — the Three Musketeers, with a group identity — and not as individuals like Bugman, Buggy or the bad guy.

I'm sorry my friend is gone, I really am, but I wonder if maybe I'm grieving as much for the knowledge that that chapter in my life truly is over now. Forever.

Realistically speaking, it has been over for a long, long time. But it lived on in my memory, along with images of three little boys swimming in the lake or riding bicycles on a country road on hot summer days.

Or sitting in a sweltering Arkansas schoolroom trying to focus on multiplication tables while beads of sweat rolled effortlessly down our faces.

We experienced all things together — on occasion, we even got into trouble together — and, for some reason, I thought we always would, but now David has experienced something that Danny and I have not.

If there is an afterlife, perhaps we will speak of it some time in the future.