Hi friend,

At every opportunity since a room full of students—children, really, from my increasingly salt-and-peppered perspective—were gunned down by some Gumby-gait-ass loser at Brown on Saturday, people in front of microphones have been trying to pacify me.

This morning, my neighbors and I woke up to two incongruous messages:

1. An armed man with nothing to lose is on the loose in your area.
2. There's nothing to worry about.

And that's a generous reading-between-the-lines of the shitty, can't-say-anything-straight mumble-mouthed communications apparatus at the center of this thing.

“The status of safety in our community remains unchanged, and we believe that you remain safe in our community, though we will continue to have an enhanced police presence throughout the city,” our terrible mayor mumbled terribly at a press conference this morning. The 'status of safety' does indeed remain unchanged: anyone could shoot you at anytime for any reason and you've just got to live with that, sorry!

See, we found a guy, but it wasn't the guy, or maybe it was the guy but we couldn't hold him? And if he wasn't the guy, hey, nothing to worry about, he's just an out-of-state 24-year-old with two handguns who spent his entire Saturday inside a hotel room in Coventry, Rhode Island, a place no one has ever visited on purpose.

Or maybe none of that is right at all. Who knows! Not me, but also apparently not anyone in charge. A shooting happened and they couldn't catch the guy, so he's still out there. That's horrible and terrifying, but it is what it is. I have to at least let myself believe that they do in fact want to catch the guy. Alright, fine.

It's the second message of the day, echoing so many we've received since Saturday, that boils my blood:

Calm, calm, little ones. We want your vigilance, your attention, your thoughts and your prayers. We do not want your rage. Here, suck on this: *garbled stream of desperate nonsense*.

I don't know how else to describe it. Up close to one of these all-too-common shootings you can practically feel the hum of the engine that drives the pacification machine. I can't help but be reminded of George W. telling us to go out and shop as cancerous dusts were still finding their forever homes in the lungs of 9/11 first responders and clean-up crews.

This morning's pacification came in the form of assurances that there were “no known threats”. That's...I suppose threat means something specific to the hundreds of LEOs in town, but I struggle to understand how a violent, gun-wielding person whose life is effectively already over being loose in the neighborhood (or really, anywhere now that a car, plane, or train could have taken him) does not constitute a “threat”. (Also...looking more closely at the particular way they use that word, one wonders if there was a “known threat” before...and if so, uh, WTF did y'all do about it?) It's transparently void of meaning to say that police “do not believe there is any immediate threat to Brown or the local community” on Monday morning after the shooting when, if asked, they would have said the same thing Saturday morning before the shooting.

The attorney general shook his keys and made cooing noises while telling us of his confidence that while they hadn't yet solved this case, they would do so soon. Personally, I am less concerned with “solving the case” and more concerned with the need to “find and stop the violent armed man”. To his credit, the AG did manage to say one truthful and coherent thing: “Obviously we have a murderer out there.”

The President pacified in his own style Sunday, telling us that “things can happen”, a Trumpian “life's a bitch and then you die” if I've ever heard one.

Late into Saturday night—while barricaded children and staff were still being terrorized by SWAT teams, and my partner and I tried to sleep for the sound of low-flying helicopters scanning the neighborhood—Smiley was already urging Providence to go about its business come morning. Go to church, do your shopping, live your life; the most public face of our city asking us to move on before the blood was even dry. (We already knew that Brett Smiley, aptly-described by a sticker I once saw as a "raggedy-ass bitch", completely sucks, but I don't have to be surprised to be enraged.)

Communication has been fractured, jumbled, and incoherent from the start. The streets in the news are my streets, the campus is my neighborhood, the buildings you're seeing in the background on TV are ones I walk or run by every day. There was no alert, no alarm, nothing...only friends and loved ones reaching out alerted us that anything was even going on. Since then, it's been: They have a guy, now they don't, now they do, now they don't. There was another shooting, wait, there's not. We got the guy, you're safe, wait, shit, sorry, do you have any Ring video of him, by chance?

Why? Why is it all so confused? My personal theory, drawing in part from my experience in the corporate consulting world, is that trying to make everything fine and trying to make everything seem fine are goals that work against each other. You can't fix what's broken if you're simultaneously trying to pretend that it has already been repaired, or was never broken in the first place. Which, perhaps, is how we got here to begin with.

Hope you’re well out there friend, considering.

Until next time,
Scott