I’m sure you are aware by now that there was a shooting in Columbia Tuesday evening, in the Merriweather District. Gun fatalities in our community are frightening and tragic. They also mean big clicks and engagement for local media outlets so they push them over and over into our social media feeds.
I’ve written about this phenomenon before. I won’t belabor the point.
There’s plenty of talk online about the kinds of places in Howard County which are deemed safe compared to those that are assumed to be unsafe. I can tell you one thing: the place in Howard County where I feel the most unsafe is the comments section of the Howard County Police Department on Facebook.
One of the responses to the report of Tuesday’s shooting caught my attention.
The past couple of homicides have been at the mall and now in the newest part of Columbia. Normal folks are not safe.
Normal folks are not safe.
Today I’d like to ask a question. Who are normal folks, and why does that matter? Because: it really, really matters.
Probably the defining lie of the current administration in Washington is rooted in this - - that there is such a thing as Normal People and it is Us. And if you aren’t us, you don’t have rights. You aren’t protected under the law, you aren’t included in the law, and your suffering is unimportant. You aren’t a real human because you are not normal.
Examples of the “not normal” targeted so far include: anyone who is not white, LGBTQIA people, those who were not born here and “look suspicious”, the poor, the homeless, the physically disabled and developmentally/cognitively disabled…
This assumption flies in the face of basic human rights: that all human beings have rights simply by being human.
Daily we are told by those in power that it doesn’t matter if those people are suffering because we don’t like those people, we don’t care about those people. They are not like us. And this applies to our foreign policy as well. We are told to ignore the targeted slaughter and starvation of children in Palestine because they aren’t the right sort of people to care about.
All that matters is us. White us, selfish us, narrow-minded us, angry and entitled us.
If we had to call this out every time we saw it we would be very, very busy. It is overwhelming. But the propagation of this falsehood poisons our nation and pollutes our communities. There are not two classes of beings. We are responsible for protecting everyone’s rights.
And that also means prisoners’ rights, immigrants’ rights, and even the rights of people we really, really don’t like.
When there is a shooting in Howard County we should care no matter where it happens or who is harmed. I honestly can’t comprehend the mindset of those who believe that there should be some kind of extra special immunity from harm because they are a card carrying member of the Normal Class.
Once you accept the drawing of those lines you tend to forget that the people who make them believe they have the ability to change them at will.
A friend of mine is rereading George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Oh how, I hated that book when we read it in school: the meanness. The injustice.
That’s probably why it’s time to read it again.
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