VEGAS: FINDING THE WORDS

Las Vegas.

There are no words. I’m not even sure there are prayers, as I feel so raw and empty. Even growing up with pretty strong exposure to mental health care issues, I’m having a hard time even finding a frayed thread to hang onto. Like Columbine… like the slaughter in the Colorado movie theater…

like Sandy Hook… like the nightclub shooting in Orlando … like, like, like, like, like…

There is no explanation. No right words, no place to truly come to a start of “how.”

In a year that’s already been marked by much sadness, much indignation, much loss, much unthinkable tragedy, 22,000 people go to a country concert—and 59 are dead so far, with 527 reported injured. To have a fun night out? To throw your fist toward the sky, lean into a song and feel the freedom of what music does?

There are no words.

How many times have I been in the crush by a stage at Mandalay Bay? Or any number of places out in the wide open, out where people crowd together on an infield, an end zone? Watching the music, throwing myself over to what songs can do—heal, inspire, spark dreams and adrenaline. Music is a way to face the world, to be lifted up, to forget what pulls us under.

Now this? The numbers keep growing. 22,000 people came out on a Sunday night to have one last rush of songs and fun before their weekend closed. There are no words.

Or reasons.

Stephen Paddock, 64, Semi-retired. Owned two small planes. Getting a divorce. Had a girlfriend. Sent his mother cookies. Liked burritos. It’s all out there. Click, search, find. Piles and piles of facts.

So much to know: where he’s worked, what kinds of guns were in the room, how many. What property he’s owned. What was paid, what price it sold for. The fact he had no military background, no political affiliation, no religious affiliation. “Just a guy hanging out,” his brother said.

Where are the words? Eight or ten long-range weapons. The thirty-second floor—a perfect overview of a bunch of people getting ready for the week or letting go of the weekend. Hearing Jason Aldean songs like “Night Train,” “Hicktown,” “The Way I Know,” “Amarillo Sky,” “Laughed Until We Cried,” “Gonna Know We Were Here,” “Tattoos on This Town,” “Big Green Tractor,” “She’s Country,” “Dirt Road Anthem,” all songs for working people for whom their life is enough. No violence, no disruption, no hate being sown.

In a world that loves recrimination, where amendments and agendas tangle, pull, rub us raw, larger questions rise. The nation was built on the Second Amendment. NRA Country is part of how so many acts market their records, speak “to the base.” Where do we draw the line?

I am haunted by a late-night conversation with Eddie Montgomery, a man whose own life has been riddled with more tragedies than any one man should face, at the bar at the Hard Rock in Las Vegas over a decade ago. Him explaining to a city girl about country boys and guns: “You respect them, Miss Holly. You know what they can do, and you treat them accordingly. You keep ’em up, or locked. You make sure your kids understand that they can kill, and they’re not toys. And when they’re old enough to hunt, you let them understand that, too.”

It echoed a conversation another ten years prior with Richard Young from the Kentucky Headhunters, an avid hunter who explained thinning herds keeps animals from starving to death during the winter. It seemed a less cruel way to avoid what might be inevitable. I didn’t know then.

Right now, I don’t know, either.

I can see the bumper stickers: When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. I think about all the people I know who hunt. I know they’re not the problem, as it sets this morning.

And I know I do not know, beyond something has to change. Beyond turning away, beyond saying “it’s not my world,” beyond “this is an aberration.”

It’s funny, every time Country Radio Seminar would come around—and the vinyl NRA Country signs would go up along the big glass breezeway to the exhibit hall, my stomach would churn. I’d stand and stare and wonder, “What price marketing?” and “Do they understand how far this reaches, what all they’re really endorsing?”

It was never my place to say, and no one asked me. But standing here, I wonder, as someone who evokes eye rolls and clenched teeth with all my annoying questions: Where is the line? How honest do we want to be about the tremendous velocity of the world in which we live, our increasing numbness to other people’s states of heart and mind?

I do not know.

Except today in Las Vegas, 59 people, the number rises again, will not see another day. And the concentric rings of people who loved them, worked with them, shared families or children or laughs or work or worship with them, now have a hole torn in the fabric of their lives.

Except today in Las Vegas, 515+ people will have to begin recovering from profound injuries to their bodies. But also, their sense of safety in the world, their sense of how to live and work and breathe.

Except today in Vegas, 22,000 people will have varying amounts of trauma, of horror, their sleep shattered by cold sweats and nightmares. Their lives may be punctuated by shaking uncontrollably without knowing what triggered it, or losing their sense of place and time, or flashbacks from out of nowhere, but many of them will have landmines in their lives they don’t see coming.

A few may be okay. Grateful they got through it. Those are the blessed ones with no propensity for PTSD. Or survivor’s guilt.

And then there are the rest of us, who ride those highways, hang out backstage at those events. We know it’s not the norm. It doesn’t happen often, which is why I can’t turn away. Because it did.

It’s more than our innocence. That was lost in Paris when the Bataclan was rushed, when that slaughter happened. It’s more than our whistling by the graveyard at this point, the club killing in Orlando showed that it can happen here.

Beyond unthinkable, it is. It just is.

Seeing the shooter, hearing his brother talk about him, my heart hurts. He looks like just another guy down the street: a nice older man who’d go to Spring Training games, maybe hold down a stool at the local bar talking life and sports with the other regulars, who’d take his grandkids to Chuck E Cheese—or, in this case, out for burritos.

There are no words.

Beyond—today—telling someone you love how much you care.