Guns and Noses

The great thing about New York is the diversity, the fact that we're all thrown in together-- the haves and the have-nots.  I mean, there are a few neighborhoods that seem exclusive, but that doesn't mean there aren't homeless people and panhandlers and mixed street traffic in those zip codes.  The garbage is maybe higher priority for scavenging; there are 2 or 3 'teams' who go through the Park Ave. bags at night, gathering bottles and cans; some of the doormen and porters actually expect these people and make their job easier…  a kind of symbiotic thing happening.  Besides, the bottle collectors work incredibly hard; this is their sole source of income, they have large immigrant families who don't qualify for assistance, and they put in long hours in the heat, in the rain and snow and frigid weather.  They deserve a kind of medal or uniform.  Benefits.

I live in a mixed building; there are older tenants with very limited incomes and the new hedge-fund generation owners who require high-maintenance services and raise the cost of living here.  For these people, monthly increases are meaningless; for the rest of us, it means going without what many people find essential.  Most of us in Manhattan embrace the diversity. Of course, I don't see many of my more fortunate neighbors at the Harlem grocers' trying to save pennies--  they don't even go to stores; they order.  I do see them occasionally up at Chez Lucienne or the Red Rooster when they have tourist visitors who are curious, but mostly they frequent the same 'hoods that are comfortable for them.  Harlem is Harlem.  However gentrified it gets, you can always walk a block or two and find some funk, some hustling and street preaching.  This comforts me.

But what I don't get is how these long-standing residents of Harlem can't resent the extreme fortune of some of their new neighbors.  I mean, just today, one of the fat hedge-fund guys from across the street was walking his dog (not a common practice-- they have 'staff' to do this).  He has many times run down his classic rock nostalgia rap, just to let me know how cool he was or is-- after all, who else buys up the charity concert tickets at the Garden which cost more than my annual food allowance?  So just today-- I've been struggling with some plumbing issues, my kitchen lights are flickering-- the usual repairs that will erase my Christmas budget-- and the guy asks me how I'm doing as I pass.  How am I doing?  I'm fantastic, I answer, and under my breath find myself muttering 'you fat philandering fuck'.  Ouch.  Bitter am I?  This guy once had me bring one of my starving artist friends to hang work all over his hedge fund offices, then failed to pay for it.  After the crash in 2008,  his office was shut down, his billion dollar fund went belly up, and I had to get a state marshall to accompany us to retrieve the art which was dog-eared and ruined.  And today?  Has the guy paid back his investors?  Of course not.  He has another fat job which enables him to buy his kids apartments and pay some obscene rent for his own massive residence.  His Lexus SUV shuttles them back and forth to the Hamptons and they are spending Christmas skiing in the Alps.  Whatever. The guy has never even apologized.  His wife spent more at Barney's this afternoon than I will earn for the rest of my life.  Are they better than I am?  Smarter? Luckier? They are a kind of lowlife, in my estimation, with good table manners and pretentious foodie preferences.  They talk a kind of talk I understand, and they operate within the enormous margin of what I would like to call the outsider economy:  the staggering sums which do not exist in every single bank, mutual fund, most corporations, hedge funds--- the 95% or so fictional percent which is loaned, invested, inflated--- but which gives them the audacious collateral and income to live the way they do, without regard for you and me, without values.  Jamie Dimon is another one of my neighbors… has he ever paid back the money that bailed him out?  I don't think so.  His financial profile is so fat it would eat up a whole zip code.  What does he get?  A little bit of early stage cancer that will be cured painlessly?  A huge Christmas bonus that would solve the world's hunger problem many times over.  Go smoke your fat cigars in your cork-lined room, Jamie.  I'll bet you don't even pay ATM fees.

This Christmas what I've always known seems to be getting some exposure: the myriads of charitable organizations and not-for-profits which collect millions and millions from us bleeding hearts have been a little busted-- and lo and behold, an average of something like 6% of intake actually goes to the needy.  The CEOs and directors, the 'event planners' and fundraising directives receive not just the lion's share but the pig's as well.  I am not a violent person, but I begin to see how, for those of us who aren't getting high and watching cable shows until we pass out, there is an amount of anger and deep-seated bitterness welling up.  The murder rate is spiking in New York City.  Mass killings are at an all-time high.  The gun culture is obscene and people will apparently use whatever is at hand to vent.  Peaceable negotiation doesn't seem to be an option.  Rich people have everything, and they also have prescription power--- pain killers, anti-depressants, anti-anxieties-- you name it-- access to spas and entertainment events--- good food, expensive wine-- it takes the edge off.  The poor and not-quite-brain-dead-- some are angry.  Values don't seem to be taught, and religion seems to be another tool that is used to manipulate political goals.  Guns seem effective and they are cheap.

Politicians don't have the limited health-care options we do.  They don't even have college loans.  Who is looking out for their fellow man when the average millennial knows very little about the world beyond entertainment and their start-up culture?  I worry about my old neighbors, about the homeless fucked-over  veterans I see hanging out in East Harlem at the methadone clinics.  Some of these guys go all the way back to Vietnam.  What is going on?   People lose their homes because they cannot make a payment-- and then our entire economy and the whole obese banking system is based on the very business of debt.

A friend of a friend put a gun in his mouth and shot himself 2 weeks ago.  Why?  He left no note.  Of course, he had a gun and at least he didn't use it on someone else.  But maybe if his neighbor had thought to look in on him that night, he would have felt okay.  He was a good person.  Scott Weiland died yesterday--- his issues were complicated… but was he not the product of the whole music business?  The pressure of becoming an icon and being simply a person?  Having the adoration of everyone and the true love of no one?  Not that his behaviors helped elicit sympathy.  I'm a little angry today… angry and frustrated, and if I weren't educated and humanistic and psychologically astute,  it might occur to me to take it out on someone else.

Yesterday I visited a mental health facility where some of the patients and participants were exhibiting their artwork.  It was extraordinary and honest.  They were forthcoming about their issues and brave and creative.  They were swimming against a brutal current and doing something valuable in this culture which places a 9-figure price tag on a piece of crap made by an employed staff of a fake like Jeff Koons in the name of art.  Their work made the mainstream art market look sad and pathetic.  But who will see this? Certainly Van Gogh needed no bodyguard in his lifetime.  Nor even a bank in which to keep his money.  Who among us has not been insane or mad, at least temporarily?  I felt much more compassion and connection with their work than I have felt in a Barnes & Noble or the new Whitney for that matter.

The forward momentum of any great culture requires rebels and punks and visionaries.  Without mental health facilities like these, special people might not have access to their own talents-- they might become self-destructive or violent.  Here they are saving not just themselves, but others.  This is incredibly empowering.  They saved me yesterday from my own emotional black hole.  Their hope and painted dreams and failure to conform to a society that is sick was a kind of rescue.

The Sex Pistols had guitars; they might just as well have had guns, but they didn't.  I feel a bit useless picking up my pen, playing my songs, carrying a bowl of soup to the homeless guy on the corner, having a conversation with the crazy lady who howls outside the grocery store in East Harlem.   Stuff builds up in people, and when it becomes unbearable, they use whatever tool or weapon they have for relief.  Life is meaningless if we don't show compassion for one another, if we don't appreciate people and what they do.  Dogs become mean if mistreated; and why are we all so uber-sympathetic to animals?  It seems so possible to rehabilitate a dog, but not a person?  Dogs are cute--even the old ones.  Humans are not always so cute… especially the old and angry ones who spit and curse and disturb.

I've been seeing the same 'Happiness' statistics recently  over and over-- a scientific study was conducted which concluded that 50% of happiness is genetic, 10% circumstantial, and 40% is changeable-- diet, behavior, exercise, social participation, etc. Why in this world of threatened chemical and biological warfare can we not start an epidemic of kindness and compassion?  Statisticians are obsessed with population growth, ethnicity--- nose counts and data--- can they not poll people about their emotional status and consider this?  Let's at least begin with some human honesty because besides our 10% economic and geographical difference, we are all very, very similar.  And for God's or pity's sake, let's take the guns out of Walmart; no one ever really won a competition of any skill by destroying his opponent.  Amen.

Full Stop

My father’s old adage about lying down with dogs and getting up with fleas is no longer valid in Manhattan. And for some of us who rarely lie down at all these days, the prospect of paying $4,000 for a non-warranteed bedbug treatment is daunting.

My neighbors downstairs have been 'diagnosed'. The required letters have been sent--- far too late, I suspect—and the nagging fear of another unpayable bill for a sort of biblical-aged plague reminds that the meek will not exactly inherit this hideous economically-driven civilization, but they will annoy us like hell. And despite our blackberries and high-tech lives, we have nothing on these critters. Not to mention cancer.

One of my closest friends died a hideous and inhuman death not because she chose to smoke, but because –well, for no reason I can find. Her absence leaves a hole I cannot seem to describe, and while the wake was impressive and the Mass sombre and meaningful, the finality of the coffin is unbearable when you love someone. Death, in this culture of greed, insurance, inflated hospital bills and lawyers, brings no relief. There is no etiquette or law that prevents the vultures from descending on whatever remains, and one either spends endless sums and precious hours planning for after-death, or just throws in the dice and lets one’s family and creditors duke it out.

I prayed for her to die on an odd-numbered day; it seemed appropriate--- but this didn’t work out either. And the morning of the funeral was crisp and sunny and beautiful. Cruel, it seems—the ‘life goes on’ thing. We weep, we kneel, we pray, and then eventually we go home and eat a sandwich.

For 2 weeks I continued to dedicate songs to her— the same ones she requested while she lay in bed, worrying about her husband cheating on her and too exhausted to argue with her kids. I would fall into a shallow sleep, awake with the sensation I am suffocating— my personal way of grieving— and then pace around my room. One such night I jumped out of bed in the dark and whacked my arm so hard on the door, I saw stars and got that feeling of overcoming nausea true pain elicits. When I could breathe, I swear I felt this rush of cool air in my sweltery August room... and I could almost hear her voice saying--- Watch out, you lucky fuck-- just feel that pain and stop the drama queen bs.
AFter an hour of ice packs, it was only a bruise and not a break... I went back for a dreamless desert sleep. She crossed over. I let her go.

The next day it poured. A record accumulation. Punishing rain, someone must have once said, because it jumped to mind like a cliche. Like delayed mourning. Thank God no major celebrities died and invaded our despair... no huge front-page world disasters...the unbearable quiet parade of photos from Somalia, the heroic children slipping away without a wake or a funeral mass. Amy Winehouse’s father was handing her clothes to fans... good man that he seemed to be. Okay...we had to witness her worst druggy performances on the news... but we will remember her for her talent, in the end... her style, her conviction, the person she was.

Another acquaintance had a massive heart attack in his sleep last week. Another death, like taking a lover after a heartbreak, punctuates sorrow...frames it, in a way. He didn’t suffer--- at least not for long... but there was no closure, no deathbed handholding and promises we may or may not keep. I will keep mine, I know that. I also do not have the task of taking her clothes from the closet, of changing her sheets. I have called her phone so many times, just to hear her voice...it still kills.

One night in a morphine stupor she was ranting on about how much she hated facebook; her daughters had made her a page. We went on about pathetic it was that middle-aged adults were signing up like some kind of social security. And what happens to your goddamn page after you die? People you couldn’t stand posting histrionic messages of grief for their own self-promoting pity parties. How I’d sworn not to tell anyone she was ill, how I knew in my heart that once she died her private life would be spilled onto some social diary page like the contents of Elvis’ stomach.

I woke up last night and called her cell. Someone finally shut it down. Maybe didn’t pay the bill. So I turned on my computer and looked at old photos. I cried. I destroyed another pot on the stove as the coffee charred to black tar. Before I went to bed in the 5 AM haze and the stench of burned Starbucks, I searched for her on facebook. No photo, all info private. I friended her.

Noir Morality Tale

Okay. Here is a Writerless-style New Year's morality tale. I’m not even sure what that means…but I think I mean the kind you don’t quite 'get' from those medieval mystery dramas:

So after years of longing-- of hourly, daily, drawn out minutes of obsessive vague craving for not just someone but the absolute possession of your self by this moment of completion, of everything you are-- where it becomes a kind of religion, an utter devotion to the pursuit of this moment...

There you are, in the perfect bed of the perfect moment--- you have touched his perfect body with your mind, as Leonard Cohen says—and the reward of it, the ecstasy of knowing everything you are has entered this person as he enters you--- every word you have ever spoken is on the tongue of this night, and as his breath begins to even and deepen, and you are drifting into this after-sleep of the perfect night, you miraculously (the mystery-play thing) watch yourself sit up… and pause on the edge of his bed--- the sheets draped around you… and you feel your bare feet touch the floor, you calmly and deliberately put on the clothes he took from you--- like a palindrome—and you walk down his dark hallway to the door… knowing you can go back--- you are still in the moment--- you can go back to his blessed warmth, to that bed and the night and the body you have created, the two of you—this body which is you and he, which understands and is everything you have waited for… and you open the door to the cold hallway with the glaring sconcelight which is so harsh and hellish… and you pause again, knowing full well what you do-- knowing his pain will be nothing compared to your own, and you are driven/compelled-- -there is no choice… it unfurls in front of you--- the sound of the door latching, and the walk down the hallway to the elevator, and your hideous baptism into the dawnlight of the rest of your life… and there you are, on the train, your clothes slightly misbuttoned, your hair uncombed, the scent of him on you like a drug, and you ride away from this night.
In an oarless small rowboat you float on from the shipwreck of the moment into the endless sea of the rest of your life, into the reverse of the longing.

And he will awaken, and cry out for you, and then he will wonder and begin his journey. He will take your necklace and your barrettes he finds in the sheets, and hold them to his face; you will pray that he makes a small shrine, that he lights candles and worships the possibility of your return. But of course he begins to hate you. After five unanswered voicemails he flushes these things into the Manhattan sewers along with pieces of your heart, and he steels himself for his life so that even if he passes you on the street and your pulse is hammering in your mouth and your head is shaking on spineless memory-twigs, he will not look.

You toss and turn in your bed of shipwreck; every night is a worse storm, like some mystery hell-planet of bad dream-weather, and every day is a walking disaster where you are an emotional amputee and he is the aching broken limb that you cannot repair, and to hate yourself is nothing—to speak is a revulsion, to think is to step with all your weight on that broken limb…

You are the open-wound version of yourself you have created. You are the director of your own deliberate fate-- the camera, the actor, the writer, the sole audience, the film itself. The blackness. The simultaneous birth and death of love, the perverted Promethean punishment of your life you have devised, only it is your heart not your liver and it is the god-author of yourself who lets it be eaten and there is no anesthesia of time because every day the pain is equal, the blood is fresh.

You go through the motions—you are living, you drink coffee, learn to speak with someone else’s voice… you can hear, you can see a bit, you pass as human on the street and occasionally lock eyes with another wrecked being—another heinous criminal who will go unpunished because you are your own victims and what is the moral here? Are you better, are you worse, those who crucify themselves, who cut themselves and pierce themselves, who pay others to carve pictures on our skin, who employ specialists to abuse us, to hurt us… those who hurt others to hurt ourselves… are we better? Do we stare horrified and mute as our doctors ask us where it hurts and to describe the pain on a scale of 1 to 10 and around us are the injured and ill and medically torn, the victims of earthquakes and deformity and falling buildings, of firestorms and deluges, who have had children and limbs ripped from them and live with this indelible noise?

Shall I compare thee with a summer’s horror? A winter mass-killing?

I am this morning sleeplessly wondering whether there is anything behind one of the billion darkened windows or in the stacks of some e-library or a warped profile on match.com or okcupid which admits to stalking an endless corridor of its own palindromic fate, editing the un-editable neverending of a morality tale, tasting the addictive immortality of that moment out of which I am doomed to watch myself walk.

Fade to black.

All Men Created Random

I’ve been noticing lately an enormous spike in the frequency of occurrence of the word ‘random’. In news articles, on television. Politically--- it is becoming a catch-all, an excuse-word—a generic non-response when the speaker chooses not to incriminate himself with details. ‘Some random restaurant’ he had lunch in…’some random man on the street’ he’d canvassed. And of course, in an election year, we are given more than our daily fill of ‘random’ polls and surveys, implying a non-effort to non-target any one group or strata. Which also implies that each sampled opinion has an absolutely equal opportunity to be solicited. Like lotto numbers; although anyone who has studied gambling odds is well aware that all numbers, however random, are not exactly created equally on the board of chance. In fact, a recent UK survey shows the number ‘38’ appears in the National Lottery with nearly 50% greater frequency than the number 20. Figure that one out.

But most of all, in daily, colloquial conversation, random seems maybe to be replacing the obsolescing word ‘dude’. My son uses it on the cellphone when I attempt to ascertain his whereabouts. He is in some random store, or on some random street-corner. When I ask him who he is taking to 'some' party, the quick response is some random girl, on either side of which is the implied ‘none of your f—ing business’.

A man shoving his way onto a rush-hour 4 train today asked one of the people crammed halfway into the doorway to get his random-ass on the f---ing train. Ah, I thought. This man is acquainted with my son.

And it’s not as though this is a new concept. Many cab-drivers in New York City seem to select the random route between two points. The IRS apparently uses random selection rather than probability to verify our tax returns. Apparently to the detriment of us poor tax-paying slobs because we pay the salaries of the IRS auditors who do not always come up with money which justifies their efforts. But according to the papers today, a rather conspicuous and successful restaurateur had failed to pay a massive tax bill and was randomly ignored until another government employee was paid with additional tax money to investigate this rather huge and blatant evasion. And ironically, while pocketing his payroll and sales taxes, along with under-reported profits he was also pocketing generous small-business post-9/11 grants which were being given out a bit too randomly.

In several recent mass-murder scenarios, the gunmen shot at apparently random victims whose families now find themselves overwhelmed with the horrific, tragic and unspeakably random sentence of grief for the holidays.

Regarding our upcoming elections, one wonders whether the same polled random selection of the population will actually vote, and whether they will vote deliberately and with intelligence or will be unaquainted with many candidates because they were busy watching reruns of ‘Tila Tequila—A Shot at Love’ and will merely hit random levers in the booth because one or two names sound familiar.

At random moments during the day, I find myself terrified by the prospect of not only random errors in the electoral process which will irreversibly affect the course of history, but also random incidents which might catastrophically affect our world. Hurricane Katrina destroyed my friend’s home in New Orleans, while on either side, the houses seemed miraculously or randomly undamaged. One begins to wonder.

And mathematically, we are told that patterns that seem random because they are more complex than the average brain can comprehend, are actually pseudorandom.
I love this word and can imagine it becoming the new ‘rad’ which I secretly suspect is some abbreviated form of random.

In fact, as I see it, the epidemic of apathy and entitlement in America has created a new culture which, rather than seeking responsibility for such phenomena as weather or poverty or cancer, is now putting them into the rather innocent white dress of random.

Could it be a conspiracy? I just opened a book I was sent to review and noted ironically it was published by Random House. Is that why I found it insipid and not worth reading? Will I awaken and find New York City has been renamed City of Random? Sounds more credible than Duane Reade. Less ‘calculated’.

So as I see it, random is the new whiteface, the new cover-up for calculated and intentionally premeditated, pseudorandom acts for which no one wants to take responsibility in this new society of the Entitled-but-all-too-often-Clueless. Perhaps George Bush should have had his boys out looking for Weapons of Random Destruction in Iran. Maybe we should amend our prayer-books to ask God’s protection from not just the evil and unfortunate, but random acts of the universe.

And before long, expect the next person who serves you your Big Mac or Starbucks venti to be wearing a nametag that says ‘Random’. Totally.

4000 Holes in Blacksburg, Virginia (I read the news today...)

As the Virginia Tech horror unfolded yesterday, I think all parents everywhere felt its poignancy-- the ones stressing out about their children’s college applications, the ones watching fetal heartbeats on sonograms, the ones changing diapers, the ones exasperated at 2-year-old tantrums, the ones in hospitals waiting for MRI and biopsy results, and the ones who have to wonder where their sons and daughters have wandered-- when they will come home, who might hurt or mislead them, praying always that their underformed judgment might not take them into a dangerous zone, and that the simple luck of the draw will be on their side.

Two points. One, the right to bear firearms in this country has become a huge liability. Each of us has the human ability and justification to defend ourselves against danger or threat, but with a fully mobilized law enforcement system not to mention a military in place, the usefulness of this ‘freedom’ has once again proven itself lethal. I cannot fathom that a large percentage of those who question a woman’s personal right of decision to bear a child insist that they maintain the right to bear a weapon whose only purpose I can see is to kill another’s.

Some strange parallel here with last week’s posterboy/antihero Imus who abused a constitutional freedom to insult and slander over our ‘free’ airwaves...
This week a depressed and deranged individual used his constitutional right to take the for-the-most-part young lives of 32 individuals who were involved in a humanitarian pursuit of knowledge.

So the system failed twice. The ability to purchase a firearm should have been restricted if not prohibited. Why should a university conform to the gun laws of its own state? A university is an institution of learning, a body in and of itself. These students are from everywhere. They don't vote in that state. They believe what they believe. There is no time in a young person's life like university. They are free-- unburdened-- thirsty to learn, to explore-- becoming. It is their intellectual cocoon.The first pledged allegiance, as we found the hard way, should have been to the nurturing and protection of its students. Of course, neither the University nor the state of Virginia had the right to restrict the freedom of this misled individual who has now changed our history books.


Second point: One always gets nervous when one hears the suffix ‘est’. While the Boston marathoners were running to determine The Fastest, at Virginia tech someone won achieved the designation ‘Deadliest’. In a free society like ours, this becomes a Ripley’s entry. Like a dare. And for every single statistic in our record books, there is at least one individual out there intent on bettering that number. Just several weeks ago a student killed his girlfriend and her best friend because the friend cautioned against the relationship. There was the school killing in Pennsylvania. Columbine has been near-fictionalized.

I can’t help thinking my own kids are processing television coverage of this incident a bit like a film, because it is hard for them to distinguish the real from fiction. My 17-year-old wraps his brain around '24' but cannot quite understand the reality of terorism in this world. The 23 year-old Virginia Tech gunman somehow crossed a border from reality to some nightmarish fantasy, to the actual execution of this mass murder. And of course the simple use of a semi-automatic weapon made this easier-- closer to child’s play.

I know my own kids, in order to play on a sports team, have to pass some medical tests. To make sure that they are able to withstand physically the stress of athletic challenge—to protect them. But what about some mental stress test? Has anyone thought of this? And has anyone considered the effects of these anti-depressants and other drugs which are dispensed a bit like candy to applicants showing need. And need, as often as not, is simply their word against anyone's.

One of my kids had some trouble in the 7th grade. Minor bad-boy incidents. But the school didn’t like it. Maybe he is depressed, they suggested, when they called me in for counseling. Well, maybe I am, says my 13-year-old. So what? So we were led down the road of that year’s model anti-depressant called Effexor which led us 3 months later to the Emergency room where he was admitted and forced to detox in an adolescent psych facility where, coincidence of coincidences, 14 of 16 inpatients, most of them with the same Medicaid-type insurance as we have, had also been prescribed this new drug. One of them was even from my son’s class, He’d been picked up waiting to jump into the autumn waters of the East River. Something had gone amiss.

After 3 weeks and tons of red tape to get my child released, they couldn’t quite make a diagnosis. At this point the papers were full of horror stories about Effexor and its use among teens. That it caused hallucinations, nightmares, states of extreme agitation and anxiety, extremely high blood pressure and the symptoms of rapid heartbeat and asthma which brought us to the Emergency room. Rage. Tantrums. Suicides. It had been banned in the UK.

So we were free. With follow-up treatment. Next clinic appointment, without even looking at my boy, the Psych prescribes. For what, I ask? Well, he gets either anti-depressants or hospitalization. Those were my choices. Medicaid, second-rung style psychiatric treatment. All those poor kids in the hospital. A few had completely dysfunctional families. Caught in the system, their parents fed them whatever pills were dispensed. The streams of diagnoses: ADHD, ODD, Conduct Disorder, bi-polarity, etc. So I went down in their medical records as being an uncooperative, maybe incompetent parent who refused to follow psychiatric recommendations. But my kid was clean. He went back to school and misbehaved a little. By 15 he grew out of it. I often wonder about those other kids in the psych-ward. A few of them were already repeat-patients. Caught in the loop.

I’m not on the side of mass murderers, but I am sympathetic to mental illness. When it is undiagnosed or misdiagnosed or mistreated, it is not only contagious but deadly. It needs, like meningitis or measles, to be quarantined. Our kids need to be protected, sometimes from themselves. Somehow this one fell through the cracks. And our Republican government made sure that instead of proper mental healthcare, he received his right to purchase a weapon and inflict his rage on innocent victims, on the tragically aborted young lives whose mothers’ grief I can scarcely imagine. And for their friends and students everywhere, another End of the Innocence. Another reminder that even our Ivory towers are not only not immune but vulnerable. Innocence is always vulnerable. Freedom is vulnerable.

A tragedy of this magnitude does not easily translate into lessons learned. That will come a bit later. For now we have not just 32 or 33 but thousands of holes in Blacksburg, Virginia, and millions more in our hearts. At least some of the bulletholes in our future can be prevented.