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To Have a Bad Day
Pondering Motives that Led to a Massacre in Georgia
It doesn’t take much browsing to realize there is very little information about the victims of the mass shootings in Georgia. We know a little about Delaina Yaun, and the names of the other victims: Paul Michels, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Elcias Hernandez-Ortiz. The Atlanta victims’ identities have not been released.
We know a lot about the murderer. We know he is a 21-year-old white male, who was quiet in high school, who frequented massage parlors, who considers himself to have a sex addiction and self-treated with mass homicide, who “eliminated temptation,” whose parents suspected him of the shootings. He denies the attacks were motivated by race. The Sheriff’s Captain said the murderer was having a “really bad day.”
A Bad Day
I keep thinking of that phrase. A bad day is when your car doesn’t start, and it rains, and you miss an appointment. A bad day is when your boss yells at you, and you forget your lunch, and your cell phone breaks. A bad day might be when your fish dies, and a car splashes you with mud, and your power goes out. A bad day is not when, after years of silently fighting mental illness, filling an emptiness with victimization and rage, spending months fantasizing vengeance, you decide to violently take the lives of eight…
