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History will record that European whites came to America, killed the people living there, stole their land, and enslaved others. Those invaders then carried out a 300 year program of treating non-white people as inferior.

The people living in the United States of America fought a civil war after only several decades as a new nation. After the states that wanted slavery lost, they continued to fly the flag of their rebellion and created monuments to the people who had rebelled against the United States.

As they pushed west and settled on the land they stole, they confined the indigenous people to increasingly smaller land areas. Although slavery was now illegal, women and non-whites could not vote and were often treated by the law and society’s mores as inferior.

Additional upheaval occurred in the twentieth century. By now the genocide of the Native Americans was nearly complete. Despite shifting demographics that reduced the percentage of white Americans to around sixty percent, they retained disproportionate power at the local, state, and federal levels.

And then it was April 13, 2021, and you read this.

Six-twenty on a Sunday evening.  Remember back when the Dayton shooting happened earlier this morning? People were shocked that a 24 year old white guy shot forty people in under a minute. Ten of them died, including his sister.  That kind of thing happens in America.

We don’t pay close attention to the overwhelming gun violence epidemic. Over in Dowagiac, Michigan, another guy shot his wife and then killed himself. That kind of thing happens in America.

Around the same time, a teenager in Winston-Salem was shot near where 16th Street crosses Route 52. Gilmore’s Funeral Home is about a block away, but he’s still alive. Police are silent about why he was shot, but he was a teenage boy on a Saturday night. That kind of thing happens in America.

Another 16-year-old wasn’t as lucky. The Detroit Police say that he was playing with a gun and fatally shot himself. Kids killing themselves while playing with a gun is an often-told story. That kind of thing happens in America.

The Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C. also announced a shooting last night. They warned people to watch out for a six foot tall black man wearing a gray shirt, which sounds like a dysfunctional version of the Where’s Waldo game. This man shot another in the leg. They didn’t say why, but that kind of thing happens in America.

In Modesto, California, a man was involved in a car crash and also had a gunshot wound. Police have no idea what happened or in what order. They only know that a woman called, said she was involved in the crash, but knew nothing about a gun. Nothing, she insists, as she continues to be interviewed by detectives. That kind of thing happens in America.

A different car crash, this one in Revere, Massachusetts, also happened last night. The police were chasing a man driving a black SUV. He hit a curb and a hedge in a residential area and was shot by police. ABC5 says that there have been four confirmed shootings in Revere in just over one month. This was the second fatal one so it’s clear that this kind of thing happens in America.

About one hundred miles west of there, on the other side of Massachusetts, a man was shot and killed in downtown Holyoke around midnight. The only thing police are telling people is that he’s dead. They’re not even telling people if he’s young or old so his is a report that no one will empathize with unless they’ve also been in a town somewhere around midnight. That kind of thing happens in America.

Still more from there, but around Boston, where police say a man walked into their station on Washington Street in Roxbury. It’s that ugly tan and glass building near the little spit of grass. It’s right where Malcolm X crosses Washington. Anyway, the police got him an ambulance because he had been shot. That kind of thing happens in America.

Another man got his own ride to the hospital after being shot. Someone took him in a private car to Yale University’s hospital in New Haven, Connecticut. We don’t know how old he is or what has happened there either. We only know that this kind of thing happens in America.

Down in Philadelphia around the same time, two men, 24 and 19 years old, were shot. The younger man was brought to Temple University Hospital by his friends with a gunshot wound to his torso. He’s in critical condition. The other way to say critical condition is “likely to die”. No one knows yet what happened, but we all know that this kind of thing happens in America.

The Philly police do know that a 31 year old man went upstairs to get an assault rifle last night and fired it into his father’s head. His mom was there at the time. The man has schizophrenia according to the police but had easy access to a gun. He left after shooting his father still hasn’t been caught. That kind of thing happens in America.

Down south, there were more shootings. One was at The West End Watering Hole in Mobile, Alabama. Two men were shot there by a 23 year old man. Police found them in the parking lot around 2:45 this morning. That’s also when the shooter turned himself in. But it was Saturday night closing time at a bar. That kind of thing happens in America.

I haven’t bothered to tell you about the people who decided to shoot themselves.  There are an average of 59 people who die every day from shooting themselves. That’s one every 24 minutes. You could watch binge watch three episodes of The Office, and three more people will have shot and killed themselves while you enjoyed the show. You can kill yourself lots of ways, but ask an emergency room doctor which method succeeds most often. Guns, they’ll tell you. That kind of thing happens in America.

Many of the suicides won’t be shown for what they are. A stigma still exists around them. My family’s own genealogy has a record of a 19 year old dying in a hunting accident. But it was not a hunting accident even if that’s what the record written by a kindly medical examiner or police officer shows. That kind of thing happens in America.

America also doesn’t talk about the number of people shot by children as young as two years old or the number of children shot. There have been 395 children shot in 2019, including a one month old girl who was shot in the head yesterday in Shreveport, Louisiana. That kind of thing happens in America often because we know that a little three year old boy was shot to death in Colonial Heights, Virginia just the day before.  And 393 other little ones have been shot in the last seven months according to the Gun Violence Archive. That’s too many children.

We don’t talk about that often in America because we prefer civility and turning away from the horror. The police and media aren’t writing about the Shreveport infant girl or Virginia toddler. Let the parents grieve in peace, let the memory fade to a constant dull ache instead of the searing white hot agony their families endure. That kind of thing happens in America.

7:20 now. There are more stories to read. They never stop in America.

Note: I am indebted to the Gun Violence Archive for its continuing mission to present the facts around gun violence. Please visit them and support their work.

With regard to the news of a German government official saying that Jews should not feel safe to wear a yarmulke throughout Germany, an Austrian friend wrote me.

She tells me that there’s a translation or other issue dealing with the official’s statements. She also says that the problem is exacerbated by refugees who are predominantly Muslim making their way to Germany and other European countries.

The Guardian (London) and The NY Times were explicit in their coverage.

“Antisemitic hate crimes rose by 20% in Germany last year, according to interior ministry data, which blamed nine out of ten cases on the extreme right. There were 62 violent antisemitic attacks, compared to 37 in 2017. France has also seen a spike in violent incidents,” according to the Guardian.

The official’s comments were further written about in this way:

“Klein acknowledged that the arrival of more than a million asylum seekers, many from Muslim countries such as Syria, Afghanistan or Iraq, has had an impact on the situation in Germany. Some were influenced by watching certain television channels “which transmit a dreadful image of Israel and Jews”, he said. However, he emphasised that the far-right was to blame for the overwhelming majority of antisemitic crime.”

I also worry about antisemitism This is especially true given armed attacks on synagogues in Copenhagen, Pittsburgh and near San Diego. For years, I’ve referred to a small city one hundred miles away as “beautiful downtown Charlottesville” and toyed with the idea of retiring there.

Charlottesville, of course, is Ground Zero in most people’s minds for raging white supremacy rallies, an unfortunate series of events since it was only a convenient venue that had a Confederate statue. The small city voted 80% for Hillary Clinton. Surrounding Albemarle County voted 60% Democrat, a single symbol of blue in a field of Virginia’s red mountain counties.

Why make a big fuss over what one obscure German official says? Or one death protesting a white supremacy rally?

Because they’re often the cue that we read about when studying the lead up to historical events. It’s not a stretch to envision a future historian connecting the events of isolationism and white supremacy through the elections of Trump, Erdogan, and Bolsonaro nor their embrace of dictators and autocrats in countries like Saudi Arabia and North Korea to the rise in white supremacy throughout the world.

As the comments and actions of these politicians become normalized, one can easily envision a future historian writing that a minor German official sounded an alarm, but his voice was nowhere near powerful enough to command ongoing attention.

By the time people realized that their societal norms had eroded, the first battles had been fought and the first city bombed.

It’s Memorial Day in the United States, a day when Americans celebrate the memory of those who died while serving in the Armed Forces with parades, barbeques, and big box retail sales. Many people struggle with the differences between Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day.

As the holiday comes to a close, I urge you to find a combat veteran and be their audience for anything they may want to share with you. You’ll find that the mostly young people boarding planes and ships to Iraq, Saigon, Kabul, Normandy, North Africa, Seoul, and so many more places where America staged war efforts in the last century often don’t speak about the war. Any comments they make are likely to be non-linear. They’re not speaking to tell a neat Hollywood story.

Ask, if permitted by your friendly combat veteran, if people understood the run up to the war they fought. Then pray for peace, work for peace, fight for peace among nations.