The Independence Day mass shooting repeated a narrative our country has trained us to memorize of blood, nightmares, remembering and forgetting. First, our phones alert us to breaking news of a shooting: some wounded, some dead. News channels broadcast images of parking lots, police tape, red and blue lights flashing, lines of the evacuated, the patrolling of officers with rifles and dogs. Soon, the described scenes are made real through hastily captured smartphone recordings: We listen to the gunshots and watch strangers sprinting wildly from death.
Social media posts update the numbers of wounded and deceased; police chiefs speak about a recovered assault-style weapon and, after hours of suspense, a person of interest (typically young, white, male, troubled by loneliness, heartbreak, masculinity, delusions of grandeur). Democrats appeal for donations, Republicans for more good guys and prayer. Then we find the things left behind: strollers, lawn chairs, children’s bicycles, pools of blood, lives without nightmares, hope for this wretched country and world.
Monday’s mass shooting in Highland Park developed like the others we have watched and read but this time with the symbolism of lost freedom at a parade on the Fourth of July. And the narratives materialized for the people there, waving flags of stars and stripes — people suddenly splattered with blood, crouching behind dumpsters, fleeing down Central Avenue and throwing themselves against glass storefronts for refuge. They will carry physical wounds and psychological scars and haunted memory, the music of the band initially playing through the carnage, the lingering feeling of an absence they can’t quite describe.
