Unfortunate. Tragic. Heartbreaking.

Those words don’t do today’s shooting justice.

This was not someone tragically killed in a car accident.

This was not someone who just found out they have cancer.

This was not fate, or bad luck, or the universe being cruel for no reason.

This was a person killed as the direct result of human decisions.

Words like “unfortunate” imply randomness. Bad timing. An outcome no one could have reasonably anticipated. As if what happened today simply happened and wasn’t from a chain of deliberate choices.

But nothing about this was accidental.

The government is conditioning its most loyal, uncritical followers to see certain people as less than human.

To see them as threats by default.
As problems to be dealt with.
As bodies that don’t quite count the same.

That conditioning is intentional. It’s reinforced through rhetoric, through policy, through the constant drumbeat that the victims deserve it: they were agitators, they were dangerous, they brought it on themselves.

And once you’ve convinced people of that, the rest is easy. It becomes easy to accept fear as justification. Easy to excuse violence as necessary. Easy to shrug when someone is killed and reach for words that make it sound inevitable.

And once it’s inevitable, it becomes normal.

And this can never be normal.

current mood: sick and seething

current music: finnegan tui – old one