Mourn the dead and fight like hell for the living

In an ideal world I would have been closer to that person striding toward the camera among the yellow leaves. Or I’d have had a longer lens. But here you are, it’s what I have for today: a day of wild downpours and fierce winds, leaves and raindrops spiraling through gray air and landing in wet heaps.

I have been reading about the two people in the Q Club, a straight man and a Trans Woman, both unarmed, who stopped the shooter but didn’t kill him. They did what a hundred armed cops failed to do in Uvalde (or anywhere else for that matter). I hear the shooter is the grandson of a Trump-Republican politician who supported the January 6 insurrection last year, make of that what you like. 

Since the Columbine killings in 1999—twenty-three years—the USA has spent billions to deploy a militarized police force to schools and towns and cities. That force is equipped with body armor and all manner of weaponry. Not one school shooter has been stopped by all those cops. But a straight man who took his wife and daughter to see a drag show, and a Trans Woman (not a drag queen, as was originally reported) who has not yet chosen to come forward to talk about it, stopped a man with an AR-15. They were defending a community they loved. They stopped a shooter from causing further harm than the five people he killed and the 25 people he injured. I’ve been taking that in. 

There have been some wonderful memes and pithy observations. Many have quoted Mary “Mother” Jones: “Mourn the dead and fight like hell for the living.”