A simple (?) question of humanity.
So I am just beside myself, reading about Ralph Yarl, Kaylin Gillis, Heather Roth, and Payton Washington. I think my actual question is something on the order of "what the fuck is wrong with people?" But I will note that the pundits and politicians creating the atmosphere of social dissolution are seeing the ramifications of that in all these cases. It's easy to throw bombs; it's much harder to build something. But if you don't try to build something, we all lose.
I also was thinking a little of the townhouse we lived in before we moved a few miles east. It was the nearest door to the main road and a bus stop, which became relevant a couple of times when we lived there. One of those times, a woman in her early 20s apparently had been kicked out of the car she was riding in with her boyfriend , sans shoes, and knocked on our door a little before 10pm. She was clearly someone who had lived at least a kind of challenging life to that point, it was a little late, and I didn't know her. So you know what I did? I gave her a ride home.
To be clear, I am not trying to score any specific points with the story; it literally just seems to me what a reasonably decent person would do. I don't know how you arrive at trying to kill someone you don't recognize, simply because you don't recognize them. And arming everyone to the teeth is not going to make that problem go away.
