Author's note: On Oct. 1, 2017, a lone shooter murdered 58 people and injured 489 by attacking a country music festival in Las Vegas, Nevada, in what is currently the worst mass shooting in U.S. history. It's taken me a few days to write this because I'm still processing the tragedy. I'm not counting the shooter in the official tally of the dead because they don't deserve it. If you'd like to contribute to the Las Vegas Victims' Fund to help support the victims and families of the shooting, click here. For a list of the victims, click here. Thank you in advance for reading. #VegasStrong - Josh
Word Count: 1,119 | Est. Reading Time: 4:04 min | Readability Rating: A
Oh my God
"Oh my God!!"
The shooting had been over for several hours by the time my mom woke up and saw my messages asking her if her friends were okay.
I had already confirmed several hours prior with my little brother that my family was out of harms way. But when my mom asked what happened, whatever self-control I had holding back the tears lost out as I typed what we knew of the event at the time. The tears started to flow as I now had to traumatize someone I loved with the horrible news. Her reaction only made the nightmare that much more real. Oh my God. It was 4:46am in Denver at that point and I had been up for the whole thing doing what I could from afar to connect people, including foreign journalists, with local media sources covering the massacre. The East Coast was just beginning to stir.
"There was a mass shooting at Mandalay Bay last night," I told her. "Over 50 people are dead and 200 injured."
Oh my God.
Tweets from afar
The bodies weren't even cold yet, the death toll was still sure to continue rising at that point, and most of America was still asleep. The majority of the country had yet to learn of the news, and we were already being judged from afar.
"Guns are deadly - ban them," is generally the chorus that arises from the rest of the world whenever we have a mass shooting in the States. Different cultures have their opinions on firearms, and the debate in America is a hard one to have for a multitude of reasons. Cellphone videos of the massacre, as well as a barage of unsolicited opinions absent of many facts, circulated like wildfire. I had started to see the tweets from Europe pour in around 2am my time. The Australians were still awake - it was happening during their dinner time - but this was the morning news for Europe.
My mom wasn't even awake yet at that point. She had yet to hear of an unprecedented tragedy in her own city not twenty-minutes from her home. I knew that when America woke up the partisan news cycles and social media battles were going to consume Las Vegas as its next victim. I didn't give a flying fuck about what someone in Brussels had to say about guns, and I sure as hell wasn't ready to hear about it from New York or DC yet. People were still dying at that point.
Oh my God.
Staying alive
Nobody goes to a concert thinking they're going to die.
Music has always been my refuge from the nightmares of life. It's that way for most people and I think it's supposed to be that way, but for musicians it goes beyond just having something fun to listen to with our friends. We need it to breathe. And when we don't make music, it's like a part of us is dead inside. So we make music to stay alive, and then we put it out into the world to help others stay alive, too.
So then what kind of person attacks a concert? A coward. Cowards attack the defenseless. I don't need to know the shooter's politics nor his mental health state to know he was a coward who murdered dozens of people, injured hundreds, and terrorized thousands of people who had all traveled to Las Vegas to celebrate being alive. And then he killed himself.
Oh my God.
Humanity
I've unfollowed a lot of people over the past couple of days, but not because I disagree with anything that they have to say. No, I've unfollowed friends and strangers alike on both side of the debate who couldn't even wait 24 hours to give people at least a moment to grieve. I don't have the energy right now to quarrel with people who see me and my opinions as objects to smash.
As a reporter, I've had a front row seat to many historic events - some of them awe-inspiring, some of them traumatic, many of them a mixture of both. The emotional dissonance of my life is destabilizing and overwhelming if I'm not careful.
How do you have a conversation with someone about those things without overwhelming them when they never asked for that? So the traumas stack and compound because you hold most of it in to spare everyone else the trouble. Someone inevitably will have an opinion on it all. And of course there will be a contingent of the self-righteous who will sneer at my prayers.
Oh my God.
Outrage cycles
People speculated wildly about the identity and motives of the gunman, and how the media would try to spin the story. Even after the suspect killed himself, viral videos relived the massacre on repeat. During the attack a rumor circulated that three casinos were being assaulted. What if that were true? Law enforcement has debunked the rumor that there were multiple shooters, but the fog of war is thick in the immediate chaos, and unless we are mindful of our own feelings, our worst fears can propel us to spread any and every rumor.
We're paradoxically calloused and hypersensitive to the constant bombardment of tragedies and scandals. The frequency of the outrage cycle has conditioned us to respond on social media on cue with strongly-worded talking points. Our response to them is Pavlovian.
Real life has been turned into a video game. It doesn't matter how familiar we are with an issue. We're going to win arguments, share memes, get likes, and go viral because that's what we do now because that's how you score points in the game. We're always angry now, and many of our friends have disappeared.
Oh my God.
Gratitude
I've lived many places over the years, and even though I live in Denver now, Las Vegas is my city too. I am proud of how Las Vegas responded during the attack and in the aftermath. I am thankful to everyone who has reached out to myself, my family, and my friends. I am thankful for the generosity of strangers helping the victims recover.
Thank God my loved ones were safe, but other families weren't so fortunate. People died.
Oh my God.
View History
Josh Peterson is a 2016 Robert Novak Journalism Program Fellow and a writer living in Denver, CO. Follow Josh on Steemit and Twitter. Keybase for secure chat. PGP Fingerprint: 4507 3000 1A40 2691 DAB8 ED65 A3EA 3629 73FD B7FF. If you appreciated this post and would like to tip with Bitcoin: 1C7ZAsTRKLtt9XYVxuWoyvmR1REbGWSrBd
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.