Nine Years On...

It's obscenely ironic in an age of instantaneous communication how much of what is important doesn't survive beyond a single news cycle. There is so much information and so many vehicles to share it, that we are inundated and ultimately overwhelmed, as news and events just wash over us. 

Nine years ago, today, the Pulse Night Club in Orlando, Florida was The News for all the worst and wrong reasons. What follows are words I offered a year after it happened knowing that somewhere events just like it would keep happening. At the time, I called it: 

Collateral Damage in the Age of Style

There's been so much killing and carnage since it happened I'd almost forgotten. It was one year ago that an impotent, life-long loser murdered forty-nine people in the Pulse Club in Orlando, Florida.

Murder in the Name of the Lord has practically become a daily occurrence and was so even before Pulse but no matter how often it happens, and how great the death and damage, it never, ever starts to feel "normal" or a part of any kind of 'just another day at the End of the World.' 

Pulse nightclub victims 

As a card-carrying First Worlder, without ever knowing it or knowing of it, I helped create the world order that has hundreds of millions living in squalor and penury so profound and institutionalized they will never escape it. The world, as they know it, has conspired to leave them with nothing.

The institutions I have created and support have, in turn, constructed protections and insulation for me so that I have as much, or as little (preferably) interaction with or even knowledge of their existence. I'm not indifferent to their struggle and plight; I am oblivious to it. And they have no personal contact of any kind of me and mine. We are on parallel but separate planets.

Except, of course, we share this one. And because we are our own closed system, one with the other, we guarantee that this dance of death and doom will go on until no one is left standing. 

When you have nothing to live for it makes death as deliverance attractive. And with nothing to live for, it's easier to find something to die for which is only partial solace unless and until you can make someone else die for it, too.

I'm never sure if God created man in His image and likeness (some things you must take or leave on faith alone), but I'm very sure we created God in ours, leaving me to wonder who will forgive us.
-bill kenny