By Chris Satullo
It’s a true story I’ve told many times. People usually find it pretty funny.
Many moons ago, my brother-in-law Tim got married; the wedding reception was held at a VFW-like place in the heart of glamorous Lebanon, PA. A few of his frat brothers served as volunteer bartenders. Those boys were prone to generous pours.
For most of the long afternoon party, I myself heavily inclined toward Jack Daniels. I’m not sure what my sister-in-law Maureen was drinking for those four hours, but by the time they ended, she was as blotto as I.
For the drive back to our then-home in the Lehigh Valley, my pregnant and sober wife was the obvious choice to hold the car keys. As Maur and I stumbled, unsteady and giggling, into the car, Eileen offered her considered opinion of our state: “You two are disgusting.”
Maur and I may have dozed off during part of the drive on I-78; frankly, it’s all a haze. What’s clear is that, somewhere around the hamlet of Hummelstown, I blurted out from the back seat, “Ei, pull off at the next exit. I really, really gotta pee. Like now!”
“Oh, God, so do I,” cried Maureen.
Grim and grumbling, Eileen complied. Just off the interstate exit ramp, we spied a glowing sign with the words “Tap Room.” In other words, a humble bar where the beer flows, the TV is always on, and the john is a tiny room behind the bar. Perfect.
Maur and I oozed out of the car and moved on wobbly legs up a couple of wooden steps to the wide narrow porch in front of the white clapboard building. I grabbed the handle of the door that I thought was nearest to the Tap Room sign, yanked and lurched inside, with Maureen hot on my heels.
Our joint, noisy entrance startled the heck out of the gray-haired portly couple sitting on their sagging living-room couch, watching Wheel of Fortune. I stood there for a moment, baffled like a moron, until Maur shouted, “Oh, God, sorry!!! Wrong door!!!!!” and yanked my arm to leave. Giggling even more, we felt our way to the next door over, went into the dark, little bar and found blessed relief for our bloated bladders.
Today, though, if we pulled that stunt, I guess there’s a solid chance we’d both be dead by now, instead of making a tableful of friends laugh at our blunder.
In an armed-to-the-teeth America – being fed a steady diet of fear-mongering and panicked rumor on cable news and social media, having its trigger-happy paranoia bolstered by Stand Your Ground and Castle Doctrine laws – people are getting shot for lesser mistakes than what Maureen and I committed that long-ago night.
People like Ralph Yarl, the nice kid from Kansas City who was shot in the face and arm by an elderly, paranoid homeowner after the boy knocked on the wrong door seeking to pick up siblings to take them home.
And, yes, the fact that Yarl is Black seems likely to have been a factor in why 84-year-old Andrew Lester (whose mug shot looks like the prototype of a Fox News viewer) went Sudden Impact on the teen, shooting first and asking no questions.
But 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis was white when 65-year-old Andrew Monahan shot her dead the other day for the crime of being a passenger in a car that mistakenly drove up the wrong driveway in upstate New York.
I can’t tell for sure from news photos the race of the two cheerleaders from Texas who were wounded by gunshots after one of them mistakenly opened the door to the wrong car in a supermarket parking lot. The suspect charged in the case is Latino. What matters most is that Heather Roth had already apologized and gotten back into her friend’s car when a passenger from the other car got out, headed towards them, and opened fire.
But wait, there’s more, all just from this past week, and this one also complicates the racial calculus. A Black man in Gaston, N.C., sprayed gunfire at his neighbors in a spat over an errant basketball rolling into his yard. A 6-year-old girl and her father (white) were lightly wounded.
That one hit home for me, too. Arguments about my basketball bouncing into our nasty next-door neighbors’ flower beds were chronic during my youth in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. More than once my dad, just like the one in Gaston, went over to tell our ill-tempered neighbor not to swear at his kid.
So, yeah, we still have a toxic and tangled race problem in this country. We also have a problem with paranoia over crime – fueled by demagogues and the captive media that serve them – that’s all out of proportion to the (not-terrible but not-thrilling) reality of crime stats. Worst of all, we have a citizenry that has armed itself to the teeth in response to the paranoia, without also arming itself with any mature understanding of when, why, how, and how rarely they should unleash a gun’s lethality.
Then we have the ongoing-spate of those Stand Your Ground and Castle Doctrine laws that tell people, whether they’re on the street or in their homes, that they’re justified in shooting first and asking questions later if they in any way “feel threatened.” These laws ignore (or do they revel in?) the fact that so many of us are in the grips of political and media demagogues whose path to power and riches depends on them fomenting in their followers a continual, frantic sense of “feeling threatened.”
I’m just an old white guy living in a nice neighborhood. But, in my life, I can think of a number of times when I could have easily been Ralph Yarl, Kaylin Gillis, those cheerleaders, that little 6-year-old in Carolina.
Conversely, I can think of no time when I ever thought about, came close to, or actually shot at another person.
These are choices we’re making, people. Poor and evil choices. Kids are dying or bleeding or being traumatized because we’ve concluded that our fears, grievances and delusions give us free rein to lash out mindlessly, lethally at our fellow humans.
Though less horrific, the crimes of the last week are in a way as ominous as the planned mass shootings that are becoming as common across America as McDonald’s drive-through lanes. These new incidents were spur-of-the-moment outbursts from people boiling inside with a stew of fear and rage, made lethal by a gun readily at hand. None of them woke up that morning and said, “I think I’ll shoot someone today.” Yet they did.
We got here through a long skein of bad choices. We could stop making those choices. But we probably won’t. If Sandy Hook and Parkland and Tree of Life and Uvalde didn’t make us, I don’t see how a wounded cheerleader will.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia