The girl on the bus

 In St. Petersburg, Florida, this morning a thirteen-year-old girl shot herself on the school bus.  No one knows why, it says here.  Police are more concerned with where she got the gun and how she brought it on the bus.  Imagine being in that kind of despair, surrounded by clueless adults.

Yes, imagine.  I don't know what we do now.  

I spent yesterday listening to Britten's War Requiem, his response to the catastrophe of the twentieth century, the long war which saw far more civilians than combatants killed.  Combining the Latin mass for the dead with the poems of Wilfred Owen, who died days before the end of the Great War, it was written to consecrate the building that rose beside the bombed-out Coventry Cathedral.  Britten was condemned for sticking to his pacifist principles as England fought for its survival, but by 1960 he was so central to the country's musical life that no one else could be asked to compose for the occasion.  By turns melancholy and enraged, the Requiem is a masterpiece that ends with consolation as the two (dead) soldiers repeat the words "Let us sleep now."

It feels like something died this week in a country largely untouched by bombs and death squads throughout the twentieth century.  There was small-scale ugliness, riots, lynchings, mass murder, but Bin Laden kindly held off his atrocity until 2001.  There was corruption, too, but the crimes we call Watergate were uncovered and punished, however incompletely and unsatisfyingly.  Hope was always in the bottom of the jar when everything evil escaped into the air.  We could believe, with Anne Frank, that people are really good at heart.  Although I prefer to believe, with Mike Nichols, "If you think there's good in everybody, you haven't met everybody."  Born in Germany in 1931, he was luckier than she was.  

Who am I to feel let down by America?  By the millions who voted for cruelty, vengeance and hate and by the greater millions who shrugged their vote away?  I sit here and type my snarky little blog every day and I don't have to worry about being arrested, deported, or gunned down by indemnified police and sovereign sheriffs.  A few people read it and then we get on with our day.  Really, what was I going to write about if the results had been different?  Why nobody ever seems to fix the postal service, or why my friend on Social Security still has to work every day?  These are problems that can be fixed, not the equivalent of Snowden's secret.  Remember?  Yossarian carefully binds up his friend's minor wounds just as he was trained, then unzips his jacket...

Snowden's secret is that there's not a thing Yossarian or anyone else can do for him.   He's finished.  Right now it feels finished.  I'm happy for Sarah McBride, the first openly transgendered member of Congress.  Karma threw us a bone.  She brings to mind Hiram Revels of Mississippi, the first Black member of Congress in 1870.  The end of Reconstruction and his career was not far off.  By 1876 the Party of Lincoln was already at the end of its usefulness.  

"Setbacks are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable," said Joe Biden.  That's some Kristallnacht of a setback, sir, would you like to help us sweep up the glass?  I can hardly wait to find out what happens when the most depraved criminal in American history assumes control of the government, his Enabling Act already approved by the Supreme Court.  Enjoy your retirement.

I hate the poorly educated.