Levi Justin Rogers

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lIqNjC1RKU]

The breeze picks up, blows leaves, fresh curly tree buds. It’s hot, but not too hot. The clouds cover the sun. The people stream in. A most diverse gathering in Salt Lake City, the most.

“The fuck who threw that?” says a man, as he picks up a beach ball, crumples it with his bare hands.

“Is that Lauryn Hill?” A white woman asks with jean shorts and her hubby husband, of the only clear main singer on stage. A black woman wearing a white dress. “Yes,” I say. That is Lauryn Hill. The person who you came to see tonight? No? You don’t even know?

The man beside us smokes weed, fine. The woman gabbing on her cell phone, not so fine.

Three teenage girls push their way wearing not much more than their Neanderthal ancestors.

Three teenage boys push by with polo’s and flippy-flip hair cuts. Does a fifteen year old with a haircut like Justin Bieber really know who Lauryn Hill is? Maybe? Doubt it? I don’t know.

“Do you people know The Fugees, what the word ‘Fugees’ even stands for?” I’m not trying to be pretentious, I just genuinely want to know.

A man dives on stage, tries to rap. Security throws him off.

2-3 people cram into a porter potty at once. Can girls play swords?

We are water bobs in a current of the crowd, best not fight it, let the wave lift you, carry you.

Five people stand in a circle, chatting away loudly like it’s the middle of July on a Saturday afternoon and there’s no one around for miles.

Oh , and Lauryn Hill was great just, you know.

Photo by Rodolfo Gonazalez, Associated Press

*This is the first part of a longer essay I am writing on school shootings. I’ve attached citations below in case you care further any of your own reading.

I grew up in the state of Colorado. It’s known for cowboys, mountains, skiing, the Broncos, (and now) the legalization of marijuana, but also—school shootings. Since the shooting at Seattle Pacific University in the beginning of June my connection to mass murder and school shootings has become all-too-familiar. My younger brother is a freshman at Seattle Pacific University where a 26 year old with a shotgun recently killed one and injured three others in the latest school shooting. My brother is finishing up his first year of school as a music major before moving to Santa Cruz in the summer to work as Christian summer camp counselor. While untouched by the damage to the shooter, another young man on the same dorm floor as him, Paul Lee, was not so fortunate. He was taken to the hospital where he was pronounced dead (three other wounded victims survived). Though the body count was considerably less than recent events at Santa Barbara, its timing mirrors the increasing normality with which such shootings are now taking place.

My brother and I grew up with guns in the town of Bailey, Colorado. It’s a small mountain town about an hour southwest of Denver. It’s a mere forty minutes away from the suburb of Littleton and Columbine High, the now infamous site of the first mass school shooting that really rocked the American psyche. One of the families who lost a son in the Columbine shootings attended our church for a couple years. Then there was the Aurora movie theater shootings where a man by the name of James Holmes killed 12 people at a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises. I used to go to Aurora in high school to watch movies in one of the state’s last drive-in theaters.

Bailey is a strange mixture of rednecks, conservative Christians, new age folks, commuters, hippies, outdoor enthusiasts, and undeniably proud gun owners. My dad was a hunter and kept a rifle beneath his bed (which he made out of Aspen trees he chopped, stripped, and stained himself.) Every October he would take a week off work and go into the mountains with some friends to go hunt. He’d usually come back with a deer or elk and our family would stock our freezer full of fresh deer and elk. My dad was never a huge hunter—I think more than anything he liked getting out into the woods and hanging out with a group of guys in the fresh mountain air.
Growing up I never had a problem with guns. They were a tool. Like a knife or a hatchet. We had an old antique gun that hung above the doorframe to the right of our black woodstove. People are proud of the second amendment right in Bailey. A lot of them hunters. A common refrain heard around town (in the case of shootings) is that if only more people had guns we could curb the gun violence done by others. The only thing that stops a bad person with a gun is a good person with a gun. People would say that in countries where more guns exist there are less acts of violence. People would say that mass shooting are sensationalized by the media and other homicides, involving knives or other objects, are never mentioned. These were the ideas I was grew up with. As I was to find out later though, the facts of gun control were increasingly more convoluted than perhaps either “side” would like to believe.

In 2006 a drifter by the name of Duane Morrison walked into our local high school (Platte Canyon High) and barricaded six girls into a classroom. He sexually harassed some of them before a SWAT team arrived and entered into negotiations with Morrison, enabling five of the six girls to escape unharmed (at least physically). Morrison shot the other girl, then himself. Her name was Emily Keyes. Same grade as my sister. The SWAT team, by all accounts, did a terrific job. My sister, as God or luck would have it, was coincidentally not there but on a filed trip, although one of her best friends ended up in the same barricaded room as Keyes. I was in college. My little brother was evacuated from the adjacent middle school.
I’d like to think that I am the only one with a brother or loved one who has witnessed multiple shootings, but I doubt it. In fact, I bet my connections to multiple school shootings are weaker than most. Still the question remains: if we as thinking, feeling human beings wish to seek life and prosperity of our brothers and sisters (both literal and figurative) what are we to do?

The issue retains complexity without a doubt. Gun violence is in the triptych of American controversy along with abortion and gay marriage. Some regulation? Probably. Yet it seems the results are mixed in Australia where since 1996 the country has enforced a strict gun control policy, as well as a buyback program, to curb gun violence. However, there’s still gun violence—armed robberies and such. Even so there has not been a mass shooting in Australia since 1996. Part of the problem could be with just how big America is, interlacing the rural with the urban, the federal with the state.

Mental illness? For sure. Quite some years ago Ronald Reagan implemented a proposal to move the mentally ill residents of infirmaries from cruel and unfair treatment asylums (think One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) to more community based care support services. The idea was fine. The implementation—not so much. The community based care services were attempted but never fully followed through with, transitioning America (with the help of the Vietnam War) from a place with a few drunks on the street to cities overflowing with veterans and sufferers of mental illness—the now homeless. Couple poor mental health policy with little gun regulation and you have a serious problem.

Currently guns account for 67.8% of all homicides, as reported by the “Crime in the U.S.” section of the F.B.I.’s website (knives or other cutting instruments account for 13%, personal weapons (like fists) 5%, blunt objects 3% and “other” dangerous weapons 9%. Many gun related homicides are gang related (though less than what some claim, perhaps 12% of homicides) and 60% are suicides. In general, violent crime by guns is down and, perhaps even more disturbing, most of the guns obtained by perpetrators of mass shootings obtained their weapons legally.
Mass shootings are undeniably a tragedy but they do make up a relatively small percentage of over all gun deaths. Cities such as L.A., Chicago, Long Beach, and Newark all have high homicide rates and gang deaths, but we don’t hear about these as often. They are the norm, as with, say, wars in the Middle East. It seems as if death by mass shootings is simply becoming the new norm. The Onion, after the Santa Barbara shootings, offered the chilling headline which read, “‘No Way to Prevent This’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens,” succinctly commenting on a sense of American apathy with just what the hell to do about school shootings. What are the answers? More guns? Less guns? Mental health policy?

Unfortunately, there will always be murder. Guns just allow us to engage in murder more efficiently. But does this mean we should accept mass shootings as the new norm? Are such events now so common place that we shrug our shoulders with mere apathy? As if shootings were as unavoidable as death by old age? Though I think it’s unfair to focus on the killings of one or two people at public schools lest we forget the murder rates of Chicago and L.A. (or even somewhere globally like Syria, where over 160,000 people have been killed in three years) I believe mass shootings rock our collective American psyche for a reason. Because they are random and at their heart—the definition of terrorism, in so far as they are all about fear, chaos, and a mass civilian body count. Mass shootings are an affront to our modern sensibilities and I might even go so far to say, to our inherent racism or prejudice against others. It could be a sad reality that the death of a black kid in Chicago in a gang shooting resonates less with white America than the death of a white kid in a school shooting. Or perhaps it makes sense to us when gang members or Middle Easterners kill others. There’s a precedent of territorial dispute and long standing rivalry. “It’s not the guns, it’s the people,” we say. “And thank God we are not like them, those psychos.”

An article in the Washington Post looking at findings by Everytown (a gun control advocacy group) recently pointed out that there have been 74 school shootings since Newton. However, as some folks were quick to point out, many of these were not active school shootings situations but included disputes, suicides, etc. Even so, mass shootings (often done at schools) are clearly on the rise . The six deadliest shootings in American history have happened since 2007.Thus begging the question: are school/mass shootings the new form of modern death? Is this merely the modern reincarnation of death by war or tribe or gang? Do schools now join the infamous ranks of Compton, Chicago, Syria, Vietnam etc. Is this merely the new face of death and mass murder?

Seattle sticks out to me because of my brother, but also because it was so close to the previous Santa Barbara shooting, June 5th (13 days to be exact.) Yet only five days later there was another shooting in Troutdale, Oregon on June 10th, making it the fourth multiple shooting event in six days. Both have already made less headlines (and for understandable reasons). However, it will undoubtedly be THE headline of students, parents, and family members involved for the next few months and probably years, hell, the rest of their life.
Mass shootings seem to be a decidedly modern, Western, and even more so, American problem. Or perhaps one could say, mass shootings at the hands of America males with a history of psychosis and access to guns. However you want to define it, gun deaths are a sordid issue rooted in complexity. Unlike what many political pundits or talking heads might say there are always multiple issues at hand, a combination of factors that leave the loved ones to grieve the dead and the rest of us debate.

References:

http://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/survey-analysis/measuring-the-extent-of-gang-problems

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8

http://www.snopes.com/politics/guns/baseballbats.asp

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/14/nine-facts-about-guns-and-mass-shootings-in-the-united-states/

http://www.salon.com/2013/09/29/ronald_reagans_shameful_legacy_violence_the_homeless_mental_illness/

http://blogs.seattletimes.com/today/2014/06/prosecutors-to-seek-life-sentence-for-spu-shootings/

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/apr/17/columbine-massacre-gun-crime-us

A Guide to Mass Shootings in America

http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/2012/12/16/gun_control_after_connecticut_shooting_could_australia_s_laws_provide_a.html

I just spent $119.15 at the grocery store the other day. It was at Smith’s. Sort of like the Safeway or Fred Meyer of Utah. Is it named after Joseph Smith? I asked myself the same question and I don’t think so, although the coincidence seems hard to discredit.

I grew up in Colorado where Safeway’s are in abundance, but in Utah there’s no such fucking thing as a Safeway. I hadn’t heard of Fred Meyer until I moved to Portland from Colorado when I was nineteen and everyone was asking me if I wanted to go to Fred Meyers. I guess so, I said, is he a weirdo? Does he have beer? Where does he live? Other places of the country have other names. Where my wife grew up they have stores like Ralph’s and Vons. In the South and Northeast I’m not exactly sure what they have. Probably doesn’t matter. Same version of Kroger or whatever other conglomerate. In fact I think Kroger owns both Fred Meyer and Smiths, but I could be wrong.

It made me sad though, me, spending $119.15 at a grocery store. Some of it was good stuff—yogurt, juice, broccoli. Some of it bad or unnecessary—pizza, cream cheese, nicotine. Regardless, it was a lot of money, for me as a resident of a two-person household, no kids.

The other day I was flipping through my friend Mike’s photo project after he returned from a trip to Jordan photographing Syrian refugees. He told me about how folks in the refugee camp have a budget of $34 a month for food to feed their entire family. I thought about how I nearly spent triple that on food that would last my partner and I a week or so. It’s just easy. I don’t even make that much money. Our car: medium. House we reside in: medium. But I still have the money to purchase nearly whatever I want at a box building filled with food. Mike said he met one guy in Syria who had to take out loans above his $34 a month budget so he could feed his family. For some reason the thought of a guy having to take out money on a thirty-four-dollar-fucking loan broke my heart more than any national news story.

My friends Isaac, Grace, and Rusty live in Haiti. I went down to visit them once and I remember Isaac telling me how he was trying to forgo one meal a day as to stand in solidarity with most of the kids who ran around his neighborhood, most of whom only got two meals a day instead of three.

It’s not just the third world either. Earlier this year in Utah a school gave out lunches to some of it’s students only to take them back and dump them in the trash because of negative balances on students parents’ accounts. Was it the parent’s fault? The schools? Did they forget? Or not have enough money? Either way, kids go hungry in Utah. It seems kids go hungry nearly everywhere. I mean, you think at least you could deny students their lunch at first, rather than to give them lunch and then in turn, take it and throw it away.

I think about such things now because I want to remind myself. Not in a holier-than-thou-white-first-world-guilt sort of bullshit, but because it seems a necessity to remember. The world we live in is not fair and yet I partake of the privilege, race, nationality, and gender bestowed upon me. And still it like seems like a sham. What do I do with my “freedom,” and my “riches?” Absolutely nothing. Mostly I just drink a lot of gin and complain about how I’m trying to quit smoking and nothing’s fair and then I spend money eating out. It’s not an absurd amount, and yet it is absurd in the same breath.

Are there people who give generously and live in a manner that is counter-cultural to the gluttony and idolatry of American living? Absolutely. Did I want to be one of these people once? Yes. Am I? No. I try to be, some days. My grandparents, for however conservative their politics may be, have discovered the practice of giving and living generously. And then there’s me, who get’s depressed and can’t fucking wait to shove a burger and a beer down my throat, or buy something, or pleasure myself upon the false icons of beauty we men have created and enforced for years.

My friend Rusty said that as soon as he returned to the U.S. he found himself at a Starbucks one day, looking at a coffee appliance on the stores’ shelves. He said that he remembered his first inclination was that he wanted this, this thing. And then he thought it odd that he hadn’t even been back to the U.S. for more than thirty minutes and he was already lusting over objects to buy. This coming from the guy with dreads and a bandana who really never went to Starbucks or any other chain store.

I’ve always hated America. With it strip malls and unavoidable luxuries. I shouldn’t say always. My wife tells me to not use superlatives. I said that to my mom once and she said, “Well then why don’t you just leave!”

I feel as if, for better or worse, God has trapped me in America. I would do much better in a third world country where people ride on motorcycles and you can buy fruit from the side of the road. Where everything is more visceral and less sterile. Where you don’t need to have health insurance or worry about car payments because you don’t worry about things like that. I’d rather worry about putting food on the table than about worrying if I’m eating too much. Because I am eating too much. And drinking too much. And buying too much. And it feels as if none of it matters. In America.

It’s not America the place so much as it is western society. Or civilization maybe. I don’t really know what it is. But it’s not a place with geographical boundaries. Besides, the world we live in now has no geographical boundaries, late capitalism and globalization have ruined any sense of the word “boundary.” People in one country make things to send to another. People in one country make calls to another. McDonalds are everywhere. Starbucks too.

Some people would say that people who live in third world places only wish they could have the luxury of car payments and insurance and so on, which is probably true. I am a lower-middle class white American after all who has the ability to wax philosophical without any real consequence. But I think it goes deeper. I’m talking about the individual vs. society, man vs. nature, machines vs. man etc., and I don’t know that we’ve actually created any thing called “progress.”

Part of it for me is unrealistic idealism. Problems in one place don’t disappear in another place. Brown people are probably tired of white people coming to their countries and trying to “find” themselves or build houses or whatever else they’re doing. At the end of the day I can say I hate America, but I really love America. Because in America I can say shit like this and not get my front door busted down. Well, almost.

Maybe my mom’s right and I should just leave.

I used to snowboard a lot. I grew up in Colorado where snowboarding and skiing were as natural as soccer practice. Even if you didn’t have money you found a way to make it work. I loved it. I loved being in the outdoors. I loved the drives up with mugs of gas station coffee and Red Bulls and granola bars. I loved the drives down with stops to pizza shops and movies at home afterwards. The snowboarding was fun, obviously, but it was the whole experience. It was minimal suffering with a known reward in sight. Sure, your hands might start freezing and you’d have to wake up early, but then you’d see the sun rise gloriously on I-70 and on the way back maybe you’d stop at Beaujo’s pizza, where the crust was made of wheat and the pizza weighed by the pound. And then when you got back home your head would feel hot from sunburn and your ankles worn from your boot pressing into your sock, but you could forget all that and lie down on a couch and feel exhausted, but incredible. I wish I could rest in the simplicity of such things for years.

But eventually I was on my own and I ran out of money to buy a season pass. So I stopped snowboarding. I also got frustrated with how expensive and bourgeoisie everything could be. It was undoubtedly a luxury. So I stopped for a while and lived my life in coffee shops and bars and in the mess and grime of city life. But I noticed the lack of life and the outdoors. I wanted to go snowboarding. Yet, it seemed like an unnecessary expense. I felt like I should live in solidarity with those who would never have a chance to go snowboarding or to afford basic necessities like clothes and food, but did it mean anything? After all, it’s not like I took the money I would have spent on snowboarding and gave it away to refugees.

And if I really wanted to just be “outdoors” I could go on a hike, which cost absolutely nothing. But I missed it. I still miss it. It felt like a lost something in the quest of my intellectual or literary or social justice aspirations. Snowboarding, in the sense was the problem. It made me feel bourgeoisie and stuck up. But it also made me less depressed. So what to choose? The ideal or the feeling? This was the problem, because perhaps not right now, but maybe next year I will be able to afford a season pass again, and so should I purchase it?

It will stem the tide of my own darkness in the winter. But it’s also a lot of money.

Perhaps America is the idea I like to take out my own inner frustrations on. My own addictions and darkness. Perhaps it’s easier to blame an abstract idea like “society” than to take the blame for the madness you’ve made.

It’s fucking ridiculous though, spending $119 at a grocery store. I feel like it’s this kind of stuff that should someone to hell, me at the front of the line. Not because of the amount or guilt, or that spending money on “luxuries” is inherently evil, but because of the way in which we can live lives of luxury and barely give a thought to the how or why we got here. On the one hand $119 doesn’t seem that much. I just spent $200 in gas over the weekend on a road trip. On the other hand $119 is an incredible amount. I guess for me it’s just hard to know how much is too much. Perhaps it comes down to responsibility and stewardship. I don’t know.

The first Wes Anderson movie I saw was The Royal Tenenbaums. I was in high school and the movie was playing on a cable channel like TNT or USA or something. I didn’t know much about the movie other than Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson were in it and I liked both of them since I had just recently seen Zoolander. I thought it was a comedy, which it was, in a sense. But as I finished the Tenenbaums, I wasn’t exactly sure what I thought. I mean, it was good—the characters were interesting, the storytelling unique, the humor was dry (which even in high school I could appreciate since I was a big Monty Python fan) but I wasn’t really sure what it was about. Though I couldn’t come up with the words at the time, it had a certain melancholy and quirkiness I wasn’t used to seeing in the typical Hollywood movies you watch in high school.

I followed The Royal Tenenbaums with Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and The Darjeeling Limited. Soon I was hooked, making sure to see each new Wes Anderson movie as soon as it came out in theaters.

However, there came a time when Wes Anderson seemed to out Wes Anderson himself. The sets, while gloriously decorated and intricately orchestrated, began to feel like either a distraction or the entire point. The characters, quirkiness, and whimsy seemed to the dwarf the overall meaning and plot of each film. I couldn’t pinpoint an exact film when this seemed to occur nor was it necessarily a bad thing. It just began to feel typical, unique for Hollywood perhaps, but not unique for Wes Anderson.

Therefore, with the impending release of The Grand Budpest Hotel I found myself thinking that of course I would see The Grand Budapest, but I didn’t have high hopes. I didn’t think it’d be bad, rather I just thought I knew exactly what to expect.  It’d be quirky, funny, and dry, with wonderful costumes and beautifully symmetrical shots and I would leave feeling happy, but not very moved.

And even though The Grand Budapest Hotel was typical Wes Anderson with the characters and sets, it didn’t disappoint and it was much more than I was anticipating. It’s a tiny bit darker than most of his films and set against the back drop of war, which gives it a more serious undertone. TGBH never feels gimmicky, rather it’s Wes Anderson and his characters at their finest. It’s laugh out loud funny and full of, dare I say, gripping action.

TGBH unfolds in layers. First with an old writer (Tom Wilkinson) who begins talking to us about writing The Grand Budapest Hotel, the book, then to the old writer as a young man (Jude Law), talking to the mysterious owner of the Budapest many years ago, a certain Mr. Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham), who then recounts to him how he came into possession of the once famous European hotel.

Enter Ralph Fiennes as M. Gustave in one of his finest roles, a hotel concierge who adopts the young Moustafa as his mentee. Gustave mixes pleasure with work constantly and will often sleep with guests (generally older women, sometimes much, much older women). He is shallow, but quick witted and full of heart and gentleman spirit. Problems arise with a contested will and a famous painting as well as the constant threat of war that seems to be ever looming in the fictional country of Zubrowka.

There are some wonderful scenes: M. Gustave and Moustafa at work through the lobby, a particularly red elevator, an art heist, and a prison escape. Form matches substance beautifully and the result is wonderful in The Grand Budapest Hotel, and who could argue with a movie filled with so many great actors including regulars like Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Willem Defoe, Adrian Brody and so on, each playing such a unique character that not one feels forced or over the top.

At the end of the day it’s still a Wes Anderson film, but it seems more somehow, with deeper meaning and richer relationships. Undoubtedly it’s one of his finest, perhaps even his best, although it’s probably too tell.