Thank you, TC, for sharing your difficult story, it helps me understand better. On another note: if you watched the news clip of Abbot's press conference where Beto came in and "spoke truth to power", the most terrifying thing was seeing Dan Patrick the bully leading other bullies in shouting down and cursing at Beto. nr
Nancy, that's exactly what I thought. Patrick, Abbott, Cruz - all of them are bullies. And that disgusting MAYOR hurling profanity and then fawning over Abbott at yesterday's "press brief" (another free campaign event) - he almost slobbered in his reverence...one bully adoring another bully. If I took this one step further, I'd call out the entire GOP for bullying. How else could a minority run the Senate? How else could a Texas legislature make laws that are opposed by the majority of the citizens and that cause babies to be gunned down in their classrooms. Bullies. All of them.
Powerful testimony, TC. Thank you for sharing and advocating. Listening to Abbott talk about providing free health care to the families when he and the other legislators have not allowed the Affordable Care Act to be enacted in Texas all these years, and rank 50th in the 50 states for mental health funding, made me want to puke...instead I yelled F*** you! at the TV screen.
We were yelling the same thing, I have been screaming at my TV all week it seems, every one of those puffed up sanctimonious bastards is a coward that hides behind a badge or official title. Little men all of them, especially the ones that hide under the comically over size hats, I despise every last one of them.
Thank you TC; makes a lot of sense. Also to Going Downtown, that I just finished reading. Hard to tell which is worse: 40 million semi automatic rifles or 70 million voters for trump; the combination is truly worrying.
To the one thing making you different from Salvador Ramos was maybe that you had a father who was present enough to go shooting with you.
It is a question that should be asked. I live in such a racially homogenous community that I have NO experience in that milieu and cannot answer that question with any knowledge or accuracy. I suspect if those had been white parents and not Hispanic, there might have been more response, but I also suspect that the SWAT team is all gear and no go.
It's an essential question Ally as is the one you pose at the end about SWAT teams; everyone has one now and they are very impressively armed and vehicled (?) but one questions the effectiveness of such training as they might receive. One would hope that public safety personnel would be different but, in business, training is the first line to go when budgets get tight.
In my experience, you are 100% accurate. I went for 10 years with no refresher in Emergency Vehicle Operations (EVOC) but I qualified on the firearms range twice a year. We went for about 5 years with no "tactical" firearms training (shoot/no shoot, scenario based/building search) due to lack of training funds. I did far more building searches, confronted more shoot/don't shoot firearms scenarios than actually firing my handgun/shotgun/rifle (never). I drove my patrol car (sedan, jeep, SUV) every day.
I know that our local jurisdictions are ready to go and have gone multiple times. My "all gear and no go" was a take-off on "all hat and no cattle"...
I don't think so. Among those babies murdered were two little white girls. Years ago, when I worked in San Antonio, Uvalde was one of 15 counties my agency served, and I met with the superintendent of UISD and his administrators (and teachers) on several occasions. My staff provided staff development services for them. It is a predominately Hispanic community, but not completely. I would tend to call it more "rural" in nature than anything...much like the one I live in now (which is becoming urbanized thanks to Austin-tax-flight.) I think Ally (below) has probably nailed it. Those LE officers might have had the gear (think costumes) and equipment (think props), but they never learned their job (think script and acting chops) and apparently none of them had the stomach (think balls) for their jobs. It's like Ally said, all hat and no cattle. I suspect these guys barely made it through whatever "academy" they attended, were like overgrown football players wearing different pads and helmets (hats) but had no idea what play to call, how to run it, and what to do when the going got tough. I heard some reports of several who actually went inside and rescued their own children and then left. I hope that is just rumor, because if it's true, in that small community, I wouldn't give a fig for their survival.
I'll be sure to correct my comment with anything confirming this. Thus far, I think this has been a claim made by parents in interviews with reporters. Given their state of mind and their anxiety, I want to attribute those "reports" to the confusion and horror of the moment.
Makes sense, especially under the circumstances and, maybe more than anything, we don't want (or need) to add fuel to the fire that's already been lit.
There were an awful lot of white faces surrounding Abbott at his press conference, and the one that the Texas Director held (at least in his, the emotion was visble). Frank Figlusi (sp?), retired FBI, said on MSNBC yesterday that during that "golden" hour where people can be saved was lost. I cannot even imagine the anguish of these parents.
Fern, yes, got that part. Will be interesting to see if first responders were local, and the final tactical team nonlocal, and the demographics of such. But the lack of diversity with the first press conference and no translation in a population with many Spanish speakers, was apparent.
Olof, I think there were many differences between Tom and Salvador - race, ethnicity, class, family background, asperges, education... and something in common, the bullying.
TC, this was a really well presented discussion. You make sense in every paragraph. And it rings true for me because the single biggest reason I wanted to finish school and "get out of Dodge" was the bullying factor. I was a target for another reason. I was the "weak cat of the litter" in my school. I walked with metal/leather strapped brace - polio before the vaccine.
I too found strength in my own ways. I learned how to use humor to disarm and how not to irritate the bullies somehow. But I watched as they shifted their venomous attacks to other kids - like the Jewish kid with a big nose who had the audacity to have a beautiful Irish red head girlfriend. They would surround him, taunt him and then beat the crap out of him. All because this "different" dude had what they couldn't get. He had that girlfriend because he was such a nice guy. So..."Let's get him!"
I learned how to fade into the woodwork, do my own thing, find my own interests, and other friends who were not part of the bullying clique. Polio taught me two things. First, no amount of pain will ever be that bad for me. If I could survive and thrive after that, I could get through anything. Polio made me tougher. I have a very high threshold for pain. And, if you have such an obvious impairment, you would have to have a heart of granite if you didn't feel some sympathy for anyone who might be a little different. So polio also gave me the gift of empathy.
Ramos could have been rescued years ago. You are so right. Sadly, he didn't have the same skills that we were able to marshal by ourselves. There are millions of these situations across the country. Powder kegs ready to explode because we don't consider investing in the social services that we have the science to understand. We are sliding back to some perverse dark ages.
I'm old enough to have known kids who got polio, including a couple who died. I don't think I ever looked forward more to getting a shot than I did when our family doctor called and said he had it and come get it. There were two kids who were like you with crutches at school. As I recall, they were left alone. We were friends - I guess they used their empathy to figure me out.
There is *nothing* more fun for a guy like us than having the coolest girlfriend of all - there is no better "punch in the nose" to the bullying jocks. When I got to college, the first week of fall semester I met a young woman in her "Jackie Kennedy suit" including pillbox hat. Margaret Anne "Tiffany" Thompson (at a time when a nickname like that was not used by anyone) - as smart as she was beautiful (she'd been Miss Washington 1964 and third runner-up to Miss America) - and she liked me! After we'd gone out a few times, I had the temerity to ask why I was so lucky (that's not a question you should ever ask, you revel in your good luck and don't question it). Her answer was "Because you take me seriously." That was a life lesson I have followed ever since, and there has never been a shortage of quality women to get to know using that strategy. Once when we were having pizza at the local joint, we actually overheard a table full of jocks say "What's *she* doing with that peacenik?" We both laughed. Fortunately by then I had been in the Navy and as the only Vietnam vet on campus, the jocks weren't sure what to do with me so they left me alone and I was fine with that. But the thought of how pissed off it made them to just walk down the street with her always put a smile on my face.
Both-and becomes such an important concept to embrace these days.
For me, two powerful voices, such as yours and HCR’s speaking to me on a regular basis support my voice, freshens my resolve, and adds perspective which is not only relevant but crucial.
Thank you, TC. From the very first comment I read from you, I had only one immediate thought…. Sizzlin, TC, sizzlin’.
The number of firearms is staggering. 40m semiautomatic is just the start. Add in pistols, rifles, civilian and military, security and law enforcement… we have more weapons than people. And, broadly, people are seen as just another tool or commodity. Funding mental health is the same waste of resources as funding education or healthcare… just make them do what we want … if they won’t, they’re expendable… but keep them coming. I’m thoroughly disgusted by the inhumanity I observe.
Your "superpower" is the light you shed on today's events by sharing your personal experience. It comes through in your military writing and here. Heartbreaking to read but critical to do so! Too often, it is " chldren killing children".
Boys seem so vulnerable today. They are in a "social media soup" of bullying. I keep an eagle eye on my three beautiful grand-boys. But if you ever watch the YouTube stuff they get into ( because they all have phones) .....even with diligent monitoring stuff gets through. The pre-teen kids mimic obnoxious and disrespectul stuff purveyed by stomach curdling & immature guys who gawk their way through YouTube bits because they think it is funny. Some of it, adults can get arrested for. If the school and parents do not jump on it quick and early it escalates. THIs is, in ADDITION, to all the challenges you and others shared here from your own youth.
I am sure someone else is already on to this but some of this experience has to feed into the fact that so many of these late- teen shooters choose schools to be their " killing fields" and young children and teachers as their victims.....as if they are trying to obliterate the wounds of their own younger lives.
I was about to post exactly the same thought. Carol, that last half-sentence is remarkable. just totally brilliant. and obviously just about as dead-on as things get.
"In 1994, when the assault weapons ban was enacted, there were 40,000 assault rifles in civilian hands in this country. Today, in 2022, that number is 40 million...Forty. Million."
A well armed militia, cocked and ready to assemble for the call to bear arms. Terrifying, TC. Shared.
Outstanding, hopefully will get some more people thinking about solutions that don't involve making schools a Maginot line and staffing them with Special Ops wannabes.
In fairness, though, all southern cops aren't Rod Steiger in Cool Hand Luke or Jackie Gleason in Smokie and the Bandit, and those aren't limited geographically. This is another example of the need for improved training and supervision in law enforcement everywhere as well as the need you point out to provide help for those who need it as soon as we become aware of their needs.
You'reright, which is why I qualified it with "in my experience," which was pretty much limited to Killen TX in the late 60s at The Oleo Strut. It was really "funny" being harassed by Barney Fife.
I'm going to say diversity in LE is another area that needs addressing. What I saw in the last 5 years I spent with the SO as a part-timer was that 90% of the jail deputies transitioning to patrol were military. For the women it was 50%, and I'm thinking 5 women to 25 men in that time frame.
There's one thing I have always wondered about Sheriff's Offices - in LA, the LASD is always "problematic" in its dealings with the people (mostly nonwhite) in the areas it patrols. But these deputies on the streets have spent a minimum of 5 years in the county jails - hardly a place to keep (or get) a favorable view of humanity, and a good place to pick up every bad trait they demonstrate out on the streets. I really don't think prison guards should become street police.
I'm glad to hear that. I do fear though that the "jail population" in Los Angeles differs a lot from Oregon. Dealing Bloods and Crips, and the various Latino gangs here would probably drive a saint off his perch. But our problem is the deputies have formed their own gangs - which extend out to the station houses for patrol officers, and their gangs differ from the Bloods and Crips only in that sartorial choices and the fact they have the authority of the state on their side (which makes them worse).
You are spot on. As I said earlier, I live in a racially homogenous community. We don't have a gang problem per se (mostly what we had during my time were groups of white boys who played at being ghetto gangsters. What we do see are the drug cartels coming into the state and growing MJ, and mostly mid level drug runners/dealers, few of whom spend much time in physical custody.
The jail is a great more or less controlled environment for people to learn how to handle conflict, talk with people from different backgrounds, learn how to work within a rank structure, and to figure out if this line of work is for them. Our patrol division basically gets the cream of that crop, and as a field training officer (FTO) our jobs were really pretty easy.
My personal reach after almost 10 years of retirement: the Sheriff, his Chief Deputy with the rank of Captain, and the Police Services Division Captain were all guys who rode with me as explorer scouts in the early to mid 1990's. The PSD Lieutenant, more than half the sergeants, and 2/3 of the detectives are former recruits of mine. I finished my career as a contract deputy in Creswell, OR. The guy who took my place, and ultimately became the sergeant there was one of my recruits. He retires this week, and another on of my recently promoted recruits is taking his place. Mother Hen Rides Again!
Our jail was the first in Oregon to receive national accreditation for its operation. They still do a decent job, but farming out our food services and medical services to contracted companies has hurt the operations.
Getting food from the lowest bidder is always a shaky idea and medical services even more so but yours is the first I've ever heard of a jail being even mildly well regarded for its performance.
Cook County (IL) Sheriff's Police officers are, or were when I was there, much the same; you didn't want to run into them, didn't mess with them if you did and, if they turned up to evict you, you left quietly unless a TV station turned up.
I've noticed, even in small town IN where I lived until shortly after I retired, that cops (most) don't try to have positive relations with the public any more. Maybe too many jokes about donut shops but most don't wave back if I wave at them and many cultivate the kind of game face that John Cena wore in most of F&F9 (a nice piece of escapist cinema). We might be better off if the first line in every LEO hiring office was - Don't hire a**h***s.
My observation is much the same as regards both military background and measures of sociological diversity. I suspect without researching it that SWAT teams are composed largely of people from the military and that their current employers take advantage of that background to skimp on situational training. As with most skills, even those required by Special Operators need to be refreshed from time to time and, if it isn't, situations like yesterday's can result.
On a separate but related topic, I think the public image of SWAT teams and special operators is based too much on Tom Clancy's books and TV shows like NCIS and Hawai'i 5O. Most of the officers I've met are quite good and very serious but they aren't magicians and the good ones know it. If the rest of us understood that better our expectations might change there might be more support for training and alternative strategies.
I was active with SWAT as a negotiator for about 18 years. I know the commitment and expertise of those that I served with. Alternative strategies is a really good place to start.
Tom, you have done yourself--and the rest of us--proud. from my own point of view (which is tempered by my own experience, a lot of which you already know), this has probably been your most moving piece. the reason is obvious: you're offering a point of view that issues from a place we NEVER get any access to when these things happen: the shooter's place. and it's a place I would wager is actually pretty familiar to most of us, but we're very quick to deny that familiarity at exactly the times we should be embracing it; times like right now. I was bullied for very much the same reasons Ramos was. I had a disabling stammer and my own way of doing things, which led to years of "Unsatisfactory" grades in all things relating to "Behavior." I just kept reading, secure in the knowledge that I wasn't any good at "working and playing well with others." this ended--at least for a long time--when my genius of a fifth-grade teacher decided it was his job to figure out a way to "draw me out," which he did. I discovered that actually, I was extremely good at working and playing well with others if the circumstances were right. to this day, I would always rather make something collaboratively than alone. but at the same time, I got sent to Speech Therapy. the exercises might have been useful, but I tended to ignore them because I was just so horrified at being grouped with other kids who, it seemed to me at the time (with the abundant, absolute certainty of the ten-year-old) that THESE kids didn't have as much on the ball as I did, or had other stuff going on that I didn't have. I realized many years later that this was my primitive way of keeping myself separate and, therefore, "special" and that I would have been better served by just joining in and possibly picking up a few "pointers." the larger point I'm trying to make is that I ( and you, and a lot of us) can definitely, at least on SOME level, understand and even identify with someone (the "kind of person") who'd want to get even with the rest of the world by murdering twenty-odd nine-year-olds. when I read about Ramos, my immediate reaction was to think of a few lines from Auden's "September 1, 1939," which is the poem everyone likes to trot out when things like 9/11 or military invasions occur but (tellingly, I think) NEVER when these increasingly frequent, so-called "lone wolf" attacks happen:"...I and the public know/What all school children learn,/Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return." well, uhhh....yeah.
Thanks - your point about keeping yourself apart from the others in speech therapy is an important one. We keep ourselves apart so we don't have to take the risk of failing to do something: "Oh yeah, *your* problem - that's simple! That's easy! If you had to deal with *my* problem, you could *never* solve it!" And then we have made ourselves OK with failing to do something that we would really like to do. It all comes from fear.
I like to remember one of the few things I found in a "human potential" class that was actually useful:
TC, thank you for sharing your story. I am thankful for your finding your path and the success that followed, although I regret it took many years of pain and struggle.
I wonder if bullying is more a "male" thing than a "gal" thing? I ask, because my little high school group of five gal pals were all considered "different," but we never actually got bullied by the "in crowd." We ignored them. All five of us went on to have productive lives. Even now, I would rather be me, the "different" one, than any of them.
Well, I have certainly seen female bullying happen in Hollywood - actresses on-set, studio executives, etc. A lot of them come from what I used to call in college the "sorority girl set" even if they never set foot inside a sorority.
I heaved a huge sigh after reading your reflections. I too never read about or saw or heard about anyone shooting students and teachers in a school until my own children were in middle school and high school. My first question was: How can anyone that young get a gun that powerful? From a local store? Federally licensed or not it is a bunch of crap! The answers of course are terrible and they get worse day by day. Abbott is a fool and so are the legislators in my state of Michigan who refused to move reasonable bills this week out of committee for debate and vote. Bills introduced in 2021 by democrats in both chambers and sent to committee to die. I have come to believe that even sanity has become part of the cultural divide. It took a good number of years before automobiles were regulated, licensed, taxed, requiring liability insurance and trained drivers and all the rest. There is the issue of gun violence and the issue of stupid legislators who cut funding for the very things poorer communities need. As far as mental health goes....the nation and all of us in it are being forced to live in a crazy making house that is not getting any better. If we decide to swallow the Fascism pill it will be because we're finally too tired to keep fighting the stupidity and we want some "strong man" to take over and solve the problems we've been trying to solve for God knows how long. I hope we don't succumb to such a sign of hopelessness (like grabbing the opioids) but we're close to caving when confronted with such obvious mendacity, cruelty, and total stupidity.
Linda, I would add 'cave' to the 40+ years campaign to keep wages down, break the unions, spread lies and conspiracy theories on Social Media, divide the populace, pit us against one another, stuff the courts, fund anti-government, anti-taxes, anti-regulation movements, control state legislatures, support the gun culture (which needs to be broken down into various components) …wear us down; feed our grievances and disappointments; we've been primed for this.
So much of what you said made perfect sense to me Tom, including your mention of Franz Klammer’s incredible run down that mountain that I have never forgotten, I too was a loner, 1.1 GPA for all of HS, 3.89 for college, I loved ski racing especially the downhill, man against the mountain, I aspired to make the US Olympic team but wasn’t good enough in part because I didn’t start young enough. I have read that there are 20 million AR15’s or their variants in the US, if there are 40 million the problem is twice as bad. That gun was designed to be a very efficient killing machine, because of it’s low recoil, it was easy to use; the always jamming POS that I used in VN, (try being in a firefight with a jamming gun), has been vastly improved in the years since, from what I have read. We don’t allow Stinger’s to be sold to the public for fear of what a lunatic would do with one, the same risk for tragedy exists with the sale of the AR15, which can fire as fast as you can move your finger 3/8”. What happened in Uvalde was entirely preventable, those responsible are, starting with the POS Govenor and his predecessors who prioritized self reliance, in the Texas tradition, over community care, to include every one of those puffed up cowards standing along side or behind him on that stage the other day. Fuck them all!
Thank you, TC. I am so glad that you share and use your experiences to put events into context. I am glad too to know you, now. I almost skipped over this Mess. From it I come away with two gems. First, explained why does not provide justification for the act. So many of us stop there as if understanding the why is the end of the story. Which makes the second gem so important. That is, if we know the patterns repeated and do nothing about their prevention, not of the potential for another tragedy, but to do the kind of things (treatments, change in how we teach or guide kids), we, in the plural, fail as a society, because they fail to learn how to do better. I'd like to think it should be less about one kid repeating the slaughter and more about nurturing the generation of would-be bullies and bullied that copes with the diversity that exists, in constructive ways. Keep telling the tale. Your Mess I find a complement to HCR and Dan Rather, both of whom I also gather nourishment for my soul.
I am a gun owner. I have a large collection as the result of serving for many years in two different branches of the United States armed forces.
Access to weapons must be tied to the same sorts of responsibilities and restrictions I was subject to while serving in the military. Civilian gun owners should be required to pass a training class annually that teaches markspersonship and reinforces the ethics of being a responsible firearms owner. Gun owners should be subject to on demand mental health screenings administered at the federal level. All the nonsense of states being in charge of their individual gun laws must end. One standard needs to be put in place for the entire nation.
This issue affects all of us, and it is a human rights issue first and foremost. Human rights are more important by far than my individual right to have a firearms collection. That must be subject to the authority of the government, and if we do not have a government we can trust enough to decide who should and should not have access to weapons of death, we are doomed as a nation-state in the long-term anyway.
No private militias are going to solve our social or cultural deficiencies, or stop the conditions that have brought us to this point where children are constantly being slaughtered in their houses of learning, and going to any public venue in this country including grocery stores, comes with the risk of being murdered by someone whose mind had been poisoned by toxic indoctrination and cult thinking.
Thank you, TC, for sharing your difficult story, it helps me understand better. On another note: if you watched the news clip of Abbot's press conference where Beto came in and "spoke truth to power", the most terrifying thing was seeing Dan Patrick the bully leading other bullies in shouting down and cursing at Beto. nr
Nancy, that's exactly what I thought. Patrick, Abbott, Cruz - all of them are bullies. And that disgusting MAYOR hurling profanity and then fawning over Abbott at yesterday's "press brief" (another free campaign event) - he almost slobbered in his reverence...one bully adoring another bully. If I took this one step further, I'd call out the entire GOP for bullying. How else could a minority run the Senate? How else could a Texas legislature make laws that are opposed by the majority of the citizens and that cause babies to be gunned down in their classrooms. Bullies. All of them.
Thanks Ellen, I agree completely. nr
Powerful testimony, TC. Thank you for sharing and advocating. Listening to Abbott talk about providing free health care to the families when he and the other legislators have not allowed the Affordable Care Act to be enacted in Texas all these years, and rank 50th in the 50 states for mental health funding, made me want to puke...instead I yelled F*** you! at the TV screen.
We were yelling the same thing, I have been screaming at my TV all week it seems, every one of those puffed up sanctimonious bastards is a coward that hides behind a badge or official title. Little men all of them, especially the ones that hide under the comically over size hats, I despise every last one of them.
Good!
Thank you TC; makes a lot of sense. Also to Going Downtown, that I just finished reading. Hard to tell which is worse: 40 million semi automatic rifles or 70 million voters for trump; the combination is truly worrying.
To the one thing making you different from Salvador Ramos was maybe that you had a father who was present enough to go shooting with you.
I think you're right about that; also that I was white and my mother - while indeed crazy - wasn't a drug addict.
If you liked the book, I hope you'll post a review on Amazon Europe.
Another random thought I had yesterday: what if these had been little white children? Would the response by law enforcement been different?
It is a question that should be asked. I live in such a racially homogenous community that I have NO experience in that milieu and cannot answer that question with any knowledge or accuracy. I suspect if those had been white parents and not Hispanic, there might have been more response, but I also suspect that the SWAT team is all gear and no go.
It's an essential question Ally as is the one you pose at the end about SWAT teams; everyone has one now and they are very impressively armed and vehicled (?) but one questions the effectiveness of such training as they might receive. One would hope that public safety personnel would be different but, in business, training is the first line to go when budgets get tight.
In my experience, you are 100% accurate. I went for 10 years with no refresher in Emergency Vehicle Operations (EVOC) but I qualified on the firearms range twice a year. We went for about 5 years with no "tactical" firearms training (shoot/no shoot, scenario based/building search) due to lack of training funds. I did far more building searches, confronted more shoot/don't shoot firearms scenarios than actually firing my handgun/shotgun/rifle (never). I drove my patrol car (sedan, jeep, SUV) every day.
I know that our local jurisdictions are ready to go and have gone multiple times. My "all gear and no go" was a take-off on "all hat and no cattle"...
Or the Congressional analog, "All talk and no action".
I don't think so. Among those babies murdered were two little white girls. Years ago, when I worked in San Antonio, Uvalde was one of 15 counties my agency served, and I met with the superintendent of UISD and his administrators (and teachers) on several occasions. My staff provided staff development services for them. It is a predominately Hispanic community, but not completely. I would tend to call it more "rural" in nature than anything...much like the one I live in now (which is becoming urbanized thanks to Austin-tax-flight.) I think Ally (below) has probably nailed it. Those LE officers might have had the gear (think costumes) and equipment (think props), but they never learned their job (think script and acting chops) and apparently none of them had the stomach (think balls) for their jobs. It's like Ally said, all hat and no cattle. I suspect these guys barely made it through whatever "academy" they attended, were like overgrown football players wearing different pads and helmets (hats) but had no idea what play to call, how to run it, and what to do when the going got tough. I heard some reports of several who actually went inside and rescued their own children and then left. I hope that is just rumor, because if it's true, in that small community, I wouldn't give a fig for their survival.
In respect of the independent rescues, I've seen press reports of parents doing that but not LEOs. I concur in your hope that it's just a rumor.
I'll be sure to correct my comment with anything confirming this. Thus far, I think this has been a claim made by parents in interviews with reporters. Given their state of mind and their anxiety, I want to attribute those "reports" to the confusion and horror of the moment.
Makes sense, especially under the circumstances and, maybe more than anything, we don't want (or need) to add fuel to the fire that's already been lit.
Thanks for this, Ellen.
Rhetorical question right?
😣
And another related question is what was the racial/ethnic origins of the police and those in charge.
There were an awful lot of white faces surrounding Abbott at his press conference, and the one that the Texas Director held (at least in his, the emotion was visble). Frank Figlusi (sp?), retired FBI, said on MSNBC yesterday that during that "golden" hour where people can be saved was lost. I cannot even imagine the anguish of these parents.
Karen, I was referring to those in charge of handling the crime scene, the decision makers when the crime was taking place.
Fern, yes, got that part. Will be interesting to see if first responders were local, and the final tactical team nonlocal, and the demographics of such. But the lack of diversity with the first press conference and no translation in a population with many Spanish speakers, was apparent.
Olof, I think there were many differences between Tom and Salvador - race, ethnicity, class, family background, asperges, education... and something in common, the bullying.
TC, this was a really well presented discussion. You make sense in every paragraph. And it rings true for me because the single biggest reason I wanted to finish school and "get out of Dodge" was the bullying factor. I was a target for another reason. I was the "weak cat of the litter" in my school. I walked with metal/leather strapped brace - polio before the vaccine.
I too found strength in my own ways. I learned how to use humor to disarm and how not to irritate the bullies somehow. But I watched as they shifted their venomous attacks to other kids - like the Jewish kid with a big nose who had the audacity to have a beautiful Irish red head girlfriend. They would surround him, taunt him and then beat the crap out of him. All because this "different" dude had what they couldn't get. He had that girlfriend because he was such a nice guy. So..."Let's get him!"
I learned how to fade into the woodwork, do my own thing, find my own interests, and other friends who were not part of the bullying clique. Polio taught me two things. First, no amount of pain will ever be that bad for me. If I could survive and thrive after that, I could get through anything. Polio made me tougher. I have a very high threshold for pain. And, if you have such an obvious impairment, you would have to have a heart of granite if you didn't feel some sympathy for anyone who might be a little different. So polio also gave me the gift of empathy.
Ramos could have been rescued years ago. You are so right. Sadly, he didn't have the same skills that we were able to marshal by ourselves. There are millions of these situations across the country. Powder kegs ready to explode because we don't consider investing in the social services that we have the science to understand. We are sliding back to some perverse dark ages.
I'm old enough to have known kids who got polio, including a couple who died. I don't think I ever looked forward more to getting a shot than I did when our family doctor called and said he had it and come get it. There were two kids who were like you with crutches at school. As I recall, they were left alone. We were friends - I guess they used their empathy to figure me out.
There is *nothing* more fun for a guy like us than having the coolest girlfriend of all - there is no better "punch in the nose" to the bullying jocks. When I got to college, the first week of fall semester I met a young woman in her "Jackie Kennedy suit" including pillbox hat. Margaret Anne "Tiffany" Thompson (at a time when a nickname like that was not used by anyone) - as smart as she was beautiful (she'd been Miss Washington 1964 and third runner-up to Miss America) - and she liked me! After we'd gone out a few times, I had the temerity to ask why I was so lucky (that's not a question you should ever ask, you revel in your good luck and don't question it). Her answer was "Because you take me seriously." That was a life lesson I have followed ever since, and there has never been a shortage of quality women to get to know using that strategy. Once when we were having pizza at the local joint, we actually overheard a table full of jocks say "What's *she* doing with that peacenik?" We both laughed. Fortunately by then I had been in the Navy and as the only Vietnam vet on campus, the jocks weren't sure what to do with me so they left me alone and I was fine with that. But the thought of how pissed off it made them to just walk down the street with her always put a smile on my face.
Do you really think that all Salvador lacked was your skills?
No, of course not. I had supportive parents.
I just want to say, for all you LFAA folks who subscribe over here and tout TAFM over there: I love you guys.
Both-and becomes such an important concept to embrace these days.
For me, two powerful voices, such as yours and HCR’s speaking to me on a regular basis support my voice, freshens my resolve, and adds perspective which is not only relevant but crucial.
Thank you, TC. From the very first comment I read from you, I had only one immediate thought…. Sizzlin, TC, sizzlin’.
The number of firearms is staggering. 40m semiautomatic is just the start. Add in pistols, rifles, civilian and military, security and law enforcement… we have more weapons than people. And, broadly, people are seen as just another tool or commodity. Funding mental health is the same waste of resources as funding education or healthcare… just make them do what we want … if they won’t, they’re expendable… but keep them coming. I’m thoroughly disgusted by the inhumanity I observe.
Your "superpower" is the light you shed on today's events by sharing your personal experience. It comes through in your military writing and here. Heartbreaking to read but critical to do so! Too often, it is " chldren killing children".
Boys seem so vulnerable today. They are in a "social media soup" of bullying. I keep an eagle eye on my three beautiful grand-boys. But if you ever watch the YouTube stuff they get into ( because they all have phones) .....even with diligent monitoring stuff gets through. The pre-teen kids mimic obnoxious and disrespectul stuff purveyed by stomach curdling & immature guys who gawk their way through YouTube bits because they think it is funny. Some of it, adults can get arrested for. If the school and parents do not jump on it quick and early it escalates. THIs is, in ADDITION, to all the challenges you and others shared here from your own youth.
I am sure someone else is already on to this but some of this experience has to feed into the fact that so many of these late- teen shooters choose schools to be their " killing fields" and young children and teachers as their victims.....as if they are trying to obliterate the wounds of their own younger lives.
Your last paragraph is exactly what I have been thinking about this.
I was about to post exactly the same thought. Carol, that last half-sentence is remarkable. just totally brilliant. and obviously just about as dead-on as things get.
"In 1994, when the assault weapons ban was enacted, there were 40,000 assault rifles in civilian hands in this country. Today, in 2022, that number is 40 million...Forty. Million."
A well armed militia, cocked and ready to assemble for the call to bear arms. Terrifying, TC. Shared.
Outstanding, hopefully will get some more people thinking about solutions that don't involve making schools a Maginot line and staffing them with Special Ops wannabes.
In fairness, though, all southern cops aren't Rod Steiger in Cool Hand Luke or Jackie Gleason in Smokie and the Bandit, and those aren't limited geographically. This is another example of the need for improved training and supervision in law enforcement everywhere as well as the need you point out to provide help for those who need it as soon as we become aware of their needs.
You'reright, which is why I qualified it with "in my experience," which was pretty much limited to Killen TX in the late 60s at The Oleo Strut. It was really "funny" being harassed by Barney Fife.
As long as he didn't reach for the breast pocket where the bullet was.
I'm going to say diversity in LE is another area that needs addressing. What I saw in the last 5 years I spent with the SO as a part-timer was that 90% of the jail deputies transitioning to patrol were military. For the women it was 50%, and I'm thinking 5 women to 25 men in that time frame.
There's one thing I have always wondered about Sheriff's Offices - in LA, the LASD is always "problematic" in its dealings with the people (mostly nonwhite) in the areas it patrols. But these deputies on the streets have spent a minimum of 5 years in the county jails - hardly a place to keep (or get) a favorable view of humanity, and a good place to pick up every bad trait they demonstrate out on the streets. I really don't think prison guards should become street police.
We haven’t ever had that issue in our county. The jail is a great learning environment, and our patrol training program was generally successful.
I'm glad to hear that. I do fear though that the "jail population" in Los Angeles differs a lot from Oregon. Dealing Bloods and Crips, and the various Latino gangs here would probably drive a saint off his perch. But our problem is the deputies have formed their own gangs - which extend out to the station houses for patrol officers, and their gangs differ from the Bloods and Crips only in that sartorial choices and the fact they have the authority of the state on their side (which makes them worse).
You are spot on. As I said earlier, I live in a racially homogenous community. We don't have a gang problem per se (mostly what we had during my time were groups of white boys who played at being ghetto gangsters. What we do see are the drug cartels coming into the state and growing MJ, and mostly mid level drug runners/dealers, few of whom spend much time in physical custody.
The jail is a great more or less controlled environment for people to learn how to handle conflict, talk with people from different backgrounds, learn how to work within a rank structure, and to figure out if this line of work is for them. Our patrol division basically gets the cream of that crop, and as a field training officer (FTO) our jobs were really pretty easy.
My personal reach after almost 10 years of retirement: the Sheriff, his Chief Deputy with the rank of Captain, and the Police Services Division Captain were all guys who rode with me as explorer scouts in the early to mid 1990's. The PSD Lieutenant, more than half the sergeants, and 2/3 of the detectives are former recruits of mine. I finished my career as a contract deputy in Creswell, OR. The guy who took my place, and ultimately became the sergeant there was one of my recruits. He retires this week, and another on of my recently promoted recruits is taking his place. Mother Hen Rides Again!
That's impressive, I wonder if they've ever had their program written up and circulated.
Our jail was the first in Oregon to receive national accreditation for its operation. They still do a decent job, but farming out our food services and medical services to contracted companies has hurt the operations.
Getting food from the lowest bidder is always a shaky idea and medical services even more so but yours is the first I've ever heard of a jail being even mildly well regarded for its performance.
Cook County (IL) Sheriff's Police officers are, or were when I was there, much the same; you didn't want to run into them, didn't mess with them if you did and, if they turned up to evict you, you left quietly unless a TV station turned up.
I've noticed, even in small town IN where I lived until shortly after I retired, that cops (most) don't try to have positive relations with the public any more. Maybe too many jokes about donut shops but most don't wave back if I wave at them and many cultivate the kind of game face that John Cena wore in most of F&F9 (a nice piece of escapist cinema). We might be better off if the first line in every LEO hiring office was - Don't hire a**h***s.
My observation is much the same as regards both military background and measures of sociological diversity. I suspect without researching it that SWAT teams are composed largely of people from the military and that their current employers take advantage of that background to skimp on situational training. As with most skills, even those required by Special Operators need to be refreshed from time to time and, if it isn't, situations like yesterday's can result.
On a separate but related topic, I think the public image of SWAT teams and special operators is based too much on Tom Clancy's books and TV shows like NCIS and Hawai'i 5O. Most of the officers I've met are quite good and very serious but they aren't magicians and the good ones know it. If the rest of us understood that better our expectations might change there might be more support for training and alternative strategies.
I was active with SWAT as a negotiator for about 18 years. I know the commitment and expertise of those that I served with. Alternative strategies is a really good place to start.
Tom, you have done yourself--and the rest of us--proud. from my own point of view (which is tempered by my own experience, a lot of which you already know), this has probably been your most moving piece. the reason is obvious: you're offering a point of view that issues from a place we NEVER get any access to when these things happen: the shooter's place. and it's a place I would wager is actually pretty familiar to most of us, but we're very quick to deny that familiarity at exactly the times we should be embracing it; times like right now. I was bullied for very much the same reasons Ramos was. I had a disabling stammer and my own way of doing things, which led to years of "Unsatisfactory" grades in all things relating to "Behavior." I just kept reading, secure in the knowledge that I wasn't any good at "working and playing well with others." this ended--at least for a long time--when my genius of a fifth-grade teacher decided it was his job to figure out a way to "draw me out," which he did. I discovered that actually, I was extremely good at working and playing well with others if the circumstances were right. to this day, I would always rather make something collaboratively than alone. but at the same time, I got sent to Speech Therapy. the exercises might have been useful, but I tended to ignore them because I was just so horrified at being grouped with other kids who, it seemed to me at the time (with the abundant, absolute certainty of the ten-year-old) that THESE kids didn't have as much on the ball as I did, or had other stuff going on that I didn't have. I realized many years later that this was my primitive way of keeping myself separate and, therefore, "special" and that I would have been better served by just joining in and possibly picking up a few "pointers." the larger point I'm trying to make is that I ( and you, and a lot of us) can definitely, at least on SOME level, understand and even identify with someone (the "kind of person") who'd want to get even with the rest of the world by murdering twenty-odd nine-year-olds. when I read about Ramos, my immediate reaction was to think of a few lines from Auden's "September 1, 1939," which is the poem everyone likes to trot out when things like 9/11 or military invasions occur but (tellingly, I think) NEVER when these increasingly frequent, so-called "lone wolf" attacks happen:"...I and the public know/What all school children learn,/Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return." well, uhhh....yeah.
Beautiful job, Tom...really.
Thanks - your point about keeping yourself apart from the others in speech therapy is an important one. We keep ourselves apart so we don't have to take the risk of failing to do something: "Oh yeah, *your* problem - that's simple! That's easy! If you had to deal with *my* problem, you could *never* solve it!" And then we have made ourselves OK with failing to do something that we would really like to do. It all comes from fear.
I like to remember one of the few things I found in a "human potential" class that was actually useful:
Fantasized
Expectations
Appearing
Real
Wow, TC. That was very good. We must be about the same age. Bullying infuriates me. I'm glad you made it out alive.
TC, thank you for sharing your story. I am thankful for your finding your path and the success that followed, although I regret it took many years of pain and struggle.
I wonder if bullying is more a "male" thing than a "gal" thing? I ask, because my little high school group of five gal pals were all considered "different," but we never actually got bullied by the "in crowd." We ignored them. All five of us went on to have productive lives. Even now, I would rather be me, the "different" one, than any of them.
Well, I have certainly seen female bullying happen in Hollywood - actresses on-set, studio executives, etc. A lot of them come from what I used to call in college the "sorority girl set" even if they never set foot inside a sorority.
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I heaved a huge sigh after reading your reflections. I too never read about or saw or heard about anyone shooting students and teachers in a school until my own children were in middle school and high school. My first question was: How can anyone that young get a gun that powerful? From a local store? Federally licensed or not it is a bunch of crap! The answers of course are terrible and they get worse day by day. Abbott is a fool and so are the legislators in my state of Michigan who refused to move reasonable bills this week out of committee for debate and vote. Bills introduced in 2021 by democrats in both chambers and sent to committee to die. I have come to believe that even sanity has become part of the cultural divide. It took a good number of years before automobiles were regulated, licensed, taxed, requiring liability insurance and trained drivers and all the rest. There is the issue of gun violence and the issue of stupid legislators who cut funding for the very things poorer communities need. As far as mental health goes....the nation and all of us in it are being forced to live in a crazy making house that is not getting any better. If we decide to swallow the Fascism pill it will be because we're finally too tired to keep fighting the stupidity and we want some "strong man" to take over and solve the problems we've been trying to solve for God knows how long. I hope we don't succumb to such a sign of hopelessness (like grabbing the opioids) but we're close to caving when confronted with such obvious mendacity, cruelty, and total stupidity.
Linda, I would add 'cave' to the 40+ years campaign to keep wages down, break the unions, spread lies and conspiracy theories on Social Media, divide the populace, pit us against one another, stuff the courts, fund anti-government, anti-taxes, anti-regulation movements, control state legislatures, support the gun culture (which needs to be broken down into various components) …wear us down; feed our grievances and disappointments; we've been primed for this.
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...and the 5,000+ professorships they've bought around the country, programming the politics of hundreds of thousands of students every semester.
Thank you, Jeff. You rarely tell me something that I knew before you showed up. I hope you come around more often.
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So much of what you said made perfect sense to me Tom, including your mention of Franz Klammer’s incredible run down that mountain that I have never forgotten, I too was a loner, 1.1 GPA for all of HS, 3.89 for college, I loved ski racing especially the downhill, man against the mountain, I aspired to make the US Olympic team but wasn’t good enough in part because I didn’t start young enough. I have read that there are 20 million AR15’s or their variants in the US, if there are 40 million the problem is twice as bad. That gun was designed to be a very efficient killing machine, because of it’s low recoil, it was easy to use; the always jamming POS that I used in VN, (try being in a firefight with a jamming gun), has been vastly improved in the years since, from what I have read. We don’t allow Stinger’s to be sold to the public for fear of what a lunatic would do with one, the same risk for tragedy exists with the sale of the AR15, which can fire as fast as you can move your finger 3/8”. What happened in Uvalde was entirely preventable, those responsible are, starting with the POS Govenor and his predecessors who prioritized self reliance, in the Texas tradition, over community care, to include every one of those puffed up cowards standing along side or behind him on that stage the other day. Fuck them all!
Thank you, TC. I am so glad that you share and use your experiences to put events into context. I am glad too to know you, now. I almost skipped over this Mess. From it I come away with two gems. First, explained why does not provide justification for the act. So many of us stop there as if understanding the why is the end of the story. Which makes the second gem so important. That is, if we know the patterns repeated and do nothing about their prevention, not of the potential for another tragedy, but to do the kind of things (treatments, change in how we teach or guide kids), we, in the plural, fail as a society, because they fail to learn how to do better. I'd like to think it should be less about one kid repeating the slaughter and more about nurturing the generation of would-be bullies and bullied that copes with the diversity that exists, in constructive ways. Keep telling the tale. Your Mess I find a complement to HCR and Dan Rather, both of whom I also gather nourishment for my soul.
I am a gun owner. I have a large collection as the result of serving for many years in two different branches of the United States armed forces.
Access to weapons must be tied to the same sorts of responsibilities and restrictions I was subject to while serving in the military. Civilian gun owners should be required to pass a training class annually that teaches markspersonship and reinforces the ethics of being a responsible firearms owner. Gun owners should be subject to on demand mental health screenings administered at the federal level. All the nonsense of states being in charge of their individual gun laws must end. One standard needs to be put in place for the entire nation.
This issue affects all of us, and it is a human rights issue first and foremost. Human rights are more important by far than my individual right to have a firearms collection. That must be subject to the authority of the government, and if we do not have a government we can trust enough to decide who should and should not have access to weapons of death, we are doomed as a nation-state in the long-term anyway.
No private militias are going to solve our social or cultural deficiencies, or stop the conditions that have brought us to this point where children are constantly being slaughtered in their houses of learning, and going to any public venue in this country including grocery stores, comes with the risk of being murdered by someone whose mind had been poisoned by toxic indoctrination and cult thinking.
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