A Look On The Lighter Side: A bad day for America in Georgia

Judy Epstein

On Tuesday, March 16, a white 21-year-old Georgia man allegedly shot and killed eight people and wounded a ninth at three different massage businesses in the greater Atlanta area. Seven of the murdered people were women, six of Asian descent.

This was very clearly a hate crime directed at Asian-American women.

But some law enforcement people have had trouble seeing clearly. FBI Director Christopher Wray, for one. “It does not appear that the motive was racially motivated,” he said.

Another man with trouble seeing clearly was Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office Capt. Jay Baker, who described the shooting spree this way: “(The shooter) was pretty much fed up and at the end of his rope. And yesterday was a really bad day for him.”

I join with everyone in America who responded, “I think the day was considerably worse for his victims.” Also for their families. Also for all Americans.

In fact, Capt. Baker’s statement instantly went to the top of my chart of Most Idiotic Statements of All Time after Mass Shootings, pushing the previously Most Idiotic Statement to No. 2.

I refer, of course, to the comment by the California 16-year-old who fired a semi-automatic rifle at the children and adults at the elementary school across the street from her parents’ house in 1979. She killed two adults, wounded another and injured eight children. During the seven-hour standoff before she surrendered to a SWAT team outside her house, she told a reporter she had done it because “I don’t like Mondays.”

That remark became the title of a hit song for Bob Geldof and his band, The Boomtown Rats, which is why I remember the sentence. The song’s chorus repeats:
“Tell me why?”/ “I don’t like Mondays”/
“Tell me why?”/ “I don’t like Mondays”

Much has been made in the days since the Atlanta shootings of what were the gunman’s motivations: Were they racist? And were the victims just plain ordinary massage therapists or were their massages sexual in nature?

I have lost all patience with this discussion. Who cares what these women did for a living? The point we must not lose sight of is that these were HUMAN BEINGS. Human beings just going about their day, trying to make a living and whose lives were snuffed out by a man who felt that he had the right to do that.

When people were murdered at a company Christmas party in San Bernardino, Calif., in December 2015, I don’t recall much discussion of the victims’ occupations because it didn’t matter. Nor should it now.

I also don’t want to lose sight of the fact that the murderer was apparently able to buy a gun and use it—that same day—to kill eight people. You cannot, however, register to vote  in Georgia and then do that the same day. It shows you what Georgia’s lawmakers were truly afraid of.

Actually, there is one aspect of the gunman’s thoughts that does concern me: namely, the idea that he murdered these women because he was unhappy with his own thoughts and believed that if he could eliminate the women, he could then eliminate the thoughts.

Of course, thoughts don’t work that way. But this is the same twisted logic that has the Taliban in Afghanistan insisting that women wear head-to-toe burkas, so as not to “distract” the men. And super-Orthodox men in Israel insisting women sit at the rear of public buses, so as not to “distract” the men.  And middle-school principals measuring the length of female students’ skirts and the width of their shoulder straps (“Is it linguine? Or spaghetti?”) so as not to “distract” the men — I mean boys.

It begins to be clear that the problem is not with women or what they are wearing or even what they do for a living.

It is high time for men to stop blaming the rest of us for their own flaws. And they certainly need to take responsibility for their own actions.

If they cannot do that, then I think they are the ones who should be kept at home or in the back of the bus or otherwise isolated in “purdah, ” so that the rest of us can safely mind our own business. Whether that business is in a high school or on a city bus or, as sometimes happens, in a massage parlor.

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