Earlier today I finished a proposal for a book I’ve been pining to write for YEARS. The proposal was utter trash. The fact is I haven’t been writing enough over the past few months to be revved up to write well. I missed on it and now I have to live with that. However, I don’t want to spend my time talking about that. I want to focus on the Shooting in Buffalo where an 18 year old white-male wearing military gear stormed a supermarket and shot 13 people. 10 died. Later we can get into the specifics of the news coverage of the incident (I’m using the APnews link here). Suffice to say that Fox News focused on the retired cop who was killed defending the people. CNN focused on how far the kid drove to get there. Everyone was clear about the white on black nature of the violence, though not everyone dared to call it a hate crime. I want to call it what it is: Another Lone Gunman.
Except he was not entirely alone. He livestreamed the entire damn thing to twitch.
We have a problem in our world with filtered information that breeds hate. Humans are tribal by nature and given the hyper-media world we live in it is easy to be incensed and driven to violence. It is just as easy to ‘kit up’ and go do what you think is going to make you feel better or make you feel like a hero. Moreover we don’t have the political will to shut down people –especially those who may be viewed as our voting base– who would perpetuate this violent ideology.
I think if every black person in America decided to ‘kit up’ the way the media acts like we already do (because aren’t people buying guns to stop the threat that they largely televise and identify as black?) we would not only have a massive change in gun law, but we would see a lot more serious violent clashes openly in the streets. I hope we are not headed towards that. As a fiction writer it isn’t too hard to imagine a future where we just might be.