General Discussion

Voltaire2

(13,008 posts) Sun Feb 18, 2018, 12:43 PM Feb 2018

Calling B.S. in Parkland, Florida

Last Thursday evening, I arrived at Pine Trails Park, in Parkland, Florida, just as the candlelight vigil to honor the dead was ending. The cars were still arriving, in long lines that gleamed under halogen streetlights, waved through intersections by officers of the Broward County Sheriff’s Department. Flashlights and phone lights bobbed along the sidewalks that bordered the road as families passed on foot or on bikes. It was just past eight o’clock, darkness had fallen over the palm glades and cul de sacs and strip malls of this city at the edge of the Everglades, and if you hadn’t known the circumstances, you might have expected a Fourth of July celebration.
Instead, the people here had gathered for a different kind of national ritual. In Parkland, Florida, after the fatal shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School this Valentine’s Day, the aftermath had at first a familiar pattern: the initial news alerts; then the psychological profiles of the killer; the repetition of “thought and prayers,” the news scrum, this vigil. The funerals would begin the next day, but the long-term prospect was of another lull in the debate until the next act of spectacular violence—a routine so predictable that a couple of days later I saw that someone in Fort Lauderdale had drawn it in imitation of the Krebs Cycle and printed it on a T-shirt. The first hint that something might be different this time came the morning after the shootings, from a Douglas High School sophomore named Sarah Chadwick, who informed the President of the United States, via his favorite medium, in words that quickly went viral, “I don’t want your condolences you fucking piece of shit, my friends and teachers were shot.”

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/three-days-in-parkland-florida