Trying to Make It All Make Sense

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When Editor Steve Bouser first e-mailed and suggested that I put my usual political stuff aside until next week and write about the recent shootings in Moore County, I balked.

Look, my gig is pointing up the absurdity of the wingnuts by using biting wit and devastating satire. Failing that, I resort to cheap shots and sarcasm.

But wit fails in the face of a something like this.

I can whistle past the graveyard as well as any man, and better than most, but there's a limit to even my capacity for gallows humor.

How do you write about how it feels to turn on CNN while eating lunch on a quiet Sunday afternoon and see a national story about a massacre a mile from your house?

How do you even write about a horror like this occurring within sight of the pond where my kids used to go to feed the ducks?

Eleven shot. Eight dead. A police officer wounded. And to add to the misery, there was another killing, an unrelated drive-by shooting of an 18-year-old young man, in Robbins on Tuesday.

A drive-by shooting. In Robbins. That's the sort of thing you expect to happen in places like New York or L.A. or Baltimore, not Robbins. Not the town where my dad's from, a place that's associated forever in my mind with Christmas dinners (and my Granny's amazing cooking). A place I always associate with Grandpa taking me to the drugstore downtown to buy me comic books. Not a place I ever thought I'd think of in the same sentence with the words "drive-by shooting."

You never think it can happen here, the headlines blare. But it did. And now, as I write this, I can look out my office window and see the flag at the post office, still at half mast.

White ribbons are everywhere you look. And those freakin' TV trucks don't look like they're ever going to leave.

They will, of course. The perfectly coiffed and made-up reporters with names like Christi and Sloane will file their stories, looking oh-so-serious and concerned.

Then the anchor will cut to sports and they'll all move on, ready to breathlessly describe the next crime or disaster, without a thought of those of us who are still here, trying to get past it. Trying to make it all make sense.

There are some things that help, like the story of Carthage police officer Justin Garner, who was the first one on the scene. The prudent thing would have been to hold on and wait for backup. But had he done that, the shooting probably would have gone on and more people would have died. So he went in, shot it out with Robert Stewart, and ended the killing, while getting wounded himself in the process.

We don't know what was going through Corporal Garner's mind that morning as he pulled up to Pinelake Health and Rehabilitation Center. He was faced with an unknown killer, armed with God knows what. I know that had it been me, my knees would have been knocking together like castanets.

But whatever fear Corporal Garner may have been feeling, he shoved it down, went into the killing zone, and did his duty. You listen to the 911 tapes posted on the Internet, listen to Corporal Garner reporting back to dispatch that he'd taken down the shooter and been wounded himself, and you hear the voice of a guy who's scared and in pain, but who's hanging in there. Doing the job.

Then there's the story of Jerry Avant, the former Coast Guardman who came back to Moore County to become a nurse.

Doctors said Avant suffered more than two dozen wounds while trying to shield his helpless patients from the terror stalking them. You read their stories printed here and in other papers, and you begin to get a sense of who they were. Not steely-eyed, iron-jawed heroes out of a thriller novel, but regular, decent guys. The kind of guys you meet every day.

And that's one thing that'll help us get through this: remembering the stories of these neighbors of ours. Regular guys who were confronted with a threat that would be enough to chill anyone's soul, but who saw what they had to do and did it.

If they can do it, so can we. For their sakes.