“This is what a suite on the 32nd floor of Mandalay Bay looks like,” reads a local radio station headline, caught somewhere between misguided thoughts and prayers, broken-record-repetitive calls for gun control, and weary sighs of disbelief.
What they mean to say is, “this is the lap of luxury upon which a coldblooded killer made himself comfortable, the throne upon which he declared himself king.” What they mean to say is, “we don’t want to politicize tragedy, so instead please accept our halfhearted attempt at humanizing this monster-man.”
What they mean to say is, “his name was Stephen Paddock and he was white and he was angry and he took 23 firearms with him that night and left with 59 lives that were not his to take,” but what comes out is that he was a gambler, a drinker, a lone wolf, a real troubled guy who adored his mother and had no criminal record, which is to say he was not one of those bad guys.
Stephen Paddock loved country music and led a quiet life.
And Oscar Grant wanted to get home to his daughter and Renisha McBride just wanted to find help and Dontre Hamilton was only trying to get some sleep and Ramarley Graham was unarmed and Jamar Clark was looking out for his girlfriend and Freddie Gray cooperated with his own arrest and Tamir Rice was “probably a juvenile” and Sandra Bland spent her summers helping others and Amadou Diallo was just trying to make a living and Philando Castile regularly paid for students’ lunches when they couldn’t afford to and Eric Garner was a neighborhood peacemaker and Mike Brown’s teachers said that he was one of the hardest-working students they’d ever had and Trayvon Martin saved his father’s life when he was only 9 years old and Charles Kinsey was protecting his patient and Emmett Till was innocent and this list will just continue to grow while these lives are suspended in time but all anyone seems to care about is their rap sheets and their mug shots and how scared those cops must have been facing something so dark and so big and so scary.
What they mean to say is, “this was an act of terrorism,” but what comes out is that this country will shield you from the flak, escort you to the squad car, and find you not guilty on all counts as long as you look like the rest of them. What they mean to say is, “this was never about race,” but the minute a brown man with a name too foreign for our whitewashed tongues unleashes a rainstorm of bullets on a crowd of innocent bystanders, his face is plastered across every screen so we know what the enemy really looks like. The enemy is never white.
The Las Vegas shooter loved country music and led a quiet life, which is to say that he wasn’t much different than you and me. It’s much easier to pretend that monsters don’t walk among us when we deny their very monstrosity in the first place. What they mean to say is, “this could have been you,” but what comes out is a virtual tour of his suite on the 32nd floor of Mandalay Bay and a laundry list of what made him human.
