Many of us were either still raising glasses to bid 2024 farewell or waking up with fuzzy heads when we saw the headlines about the mayhem in New Orleans. Sadly, it was difficult to muster the kind of empathy that the moment called for since violent death is a regular fixture in the US news cycle.
About two weeks earlier, three people died and six others were injured in a shooting at a private school in Madison, Wisconsin. According to a CNN analysis from last month, there were more than 80 school shootings in the US, leaving 38 people dead and at least 116 others injured.
After a year of shocking violence globally and a US election season marred by bloodshed, who wanted to dwell on more of it just hours into the new year?
President-elect Donald Trump, for one. Never one to allow the facts to get in the way of his preferred narrative, he responded immediately by asserting that “this is what happens when you have OPEN BORDERS, with weak, ineffective, and virtually nonexistent leadership”.
Trump’s excoriation of the FBI, Democrats and other various targets that he labelled “SCUM that has infiltrated all aspects of our government” exemplified his determination to spout rhetoric that complicates the task at hand: to understand objectively what happened and who is responsible.
The rhetoric served to obscure the central irony: the perpetrator was identified as a US Army veteran born and raised in Texas, so the killings had nothing to do with undocumented immigrants.