A Leap of--What?

Two men died Saturday in Butler, PA. First, a bystander. The second, the 20-year-old assailant. Both, shot to death.

Does Thomas Crooks' age matter? No, not really. Not in a wider view of the event. Not historically most likely. Dead is dead, after all. But I did flinch when learning the would-be assassin's age.

Assassin. At 20? The word confounds my sensibility. He was a kid. 

How to make that leap, from kid to political assassin who might have rewritten--and maybe has--world history. 

Sure, I know the prowess of some trained shooters that age. Yes, Crooks was a shooting enthusiast they say. But that doesn't get me over the hurdle to understand him as a murderer.

Some say he was a loner, aloof, maybe a little odd. That characterization doesn't get me any closer to his thought process. To upon learning the site of the rally, to get into his mind such an idea, to scout the location, to secure a ladder, to practice his shooting a bit more, to purchase extra rounds--because he was perhaps a bit odd? I can't make that leap.

Reportedly he was smart, smart enough to do well in advanced classes. Smart. Smart? A planner, apparently. But--and this is the question that turns my stomach--did he know, believe, truly understand this undertaking to be suicidal.

Oh, Thomas.

Reports differ on the bullying question--some students say yes he was, school officials push back emphatically no he was not.

Bullied, e.g., politically assassination attempt. Bullied, assassin. Bullied, assassin. I don't know.

I just can't make the leap--just foolish, misguided, stupid even. And perhaps forever we are without any pointed information that reveals how this 20-year-old got to such a moment in his young life.

Two men dead. What the hell, Thomas. What a terrible, terrible shame.

Pace Long's Companion (F)

Two days after his 11th birthday, and three days before Valentine's Day, Pace Long broke through the ice on the upper part of the Sandy River and was carried downstream nearly twenty feet. By coincidence a witness, Johnny Banks, was parked on the shore and saw the boy fall through. Banks called it in and then grabbed a crowbar from the back of his tow truck and crawled out to the boy who was staring skyward through the ice. 

While Johnny hacked at the ice, Pace closed his eyes, the last thing he would ever remember from the incident. He saw Johnny, and then he didn't. 

Six minutes. 

Paramedics, afraid that the ice would not hold, slid the carry basket out to Johnny. County water rescue was twenty minutes away. 

Johnny kept smashing the ice, prying up chunks.

Seven minutes. 

About a dozen onlookers were gathered on the bank. A few called out. "C'mon. Johnny!" "Keep going, man!"

Eight minutes. The ice cracked, a sound like a gunshot. One last hunk of ice and Johnny reached down into the water and pulled the boy out. 

Dead at the scene they said. Breathing at the hospital. That's how it was summed up. 

The next day at school, classmates looked at the empty desk. Their teacher Mrs. Tastides had tears in her eyes when she asked them to make Get Well cards for Pace.

"Is he gonna be brain dead or something?" Matt Hill asked.

"Matt, don't even think such a thing, much less say it."

Pace came back to school the following Monday. Teachers fussed over him, the principal did as well. The other students didn't know what to say. Finally, at recess, Kenny Horton socked him in the arm. "Shouldn't have gone out there."

Pace grinned. "Nope, guess not."

When Pace was 12, he and his father saw a log truck turn over on a Honda Civic from out of town. 

"See Pace, see how easily it happens." The voice in his head. "At any moment, gone."

Two college kids on Spring Break were killed, sure enough, instantly.

When Pace was 15, a player from Williams backpedaling on defense fell and cracked the back of his head on the hardwood floor. The crowd silenced. Turns out, a heart attack.

"Never know, Pace. Old. Young. Healthy. Or not."

At 37, Pace got the news his high school girlfriend Annabelle Lewis died from breast cancer. Black hair, dark brown eyes. Funny. Sweet. 

"Oh, Pace, you know how it goes, don't you?"

Still, the news gave him pause.

"Come on, Pace, you know."

When he was 47, Pace heard Johnny Banks died. 

"Sure, send a note to the family."

At 52, his father. 

At 59, his mother.

At 74, his wife. 

"Always about, Pace. Waiting, yes. Coming, yes. But, you know."

Lyman 2024

Unalienable Bunkum

Perhaps our founding papas were selling us a bill of poppycock.

Of course, to be fair, the whole unalienable rights proposition was an idealized notion, but the independence idea needed an aspirational keystone to the whole enterprise. 

What better? That whole "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" gambit. Life. Hooray! Liberty. Hooray! Pursuit of Happiness! Hoo--uh, wait a minute. Pursuit? Why those slippery hedgers. 

No matter. Again, an ideal fostered to anchor the Declaration of Independence. And obviously ideals serve to undergird what follows when the nitty-gritty of human endeavors comes to the fore. 

But, after all, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary". That insight, well that would be from James Madison. And so, game on.

By the way, should you live alone on an island beyond any national sovereignty, delight in that unalienable mush. Meanwhile, as Madison knew, "Wherever there is interest and power to do wrong, wrong will generally be done". 

Don't we know it.

What if--here I merely ask--we from the get-go allowed every moment, every action, every response would be with the wide-eyed perspective that all rights are negotiated between citizens, neighbors, family members, all of the time. 

Nothing unalienable about any of it. Going forward then would be a source of constant tensions, discussions, analyses--nothing rights-wise taken for granted. Always in our face. Every right to be negotiated and renegotiated. 

And since we--I think very nearly all of us--do not live alone on an island, let us come together and savor our efforts to shape human rights that come not from the ether but from the forge of human toil.