What can you say?
Nothing, really. It helps, of course, to talk about tragedy, but nothing anyone can say will make sense of last night’s tragedy in California. What hit me when I saw the pictures of the shooting victims in the Link today was how ordinary they looked- how normal. They look no different than the people you or I work with every day. And then, in an instant, before most of us had ever seen their faces or known their names, they were gone forever.
Our brains and our hearts can’t handle this kind of sudden senseless loss. We feel the need to search for a reason behind it. Was there something wrong in that facility? Does it prove that there really is something to the phrase ‘going postal?
I don’t know what might have triggered the tragedy, and neither does anyone else right now. I have the feeling, deeply unsatisfying as it may be, that it really was simply a senseless, horrible tragedy. We will find out more as the investigation develops, and we can only hope that we will learn things that will make us safer, even if we never get the answer to the nagging question: why?
As far as the ‘going postal’ business is concerned, I’m afraid it is back for a while. There’s no reason for it, of course. At least no rational reason. In 2000, the Califano Commission studied the perception that postal workers were prone to violence, and found that they were statistically no more likely to attack their co-workers than the average American. (While it has been 6 years since the report was issued, remember that there had not been any further ‘postal’ incidents until last night.)
That makes it hard to take the casual comments like this from today’s LA Times story, calling the killings “the latest in a string of shootings over the past decades that have made the phrase ‘going postal’ a synonym for murderous anger”.
According to the Associated Press, the last so-called ‘postal’ murder was eight years ago. It involved a Dallas postal employee who killed a co-worker after they had an argument. To the LA Times, that is a ’string’.
There are about as many postal employees as there are residents of Austin, Texas. Last year there were 27 murders in Austin. Austin is considered an exceptionally safe city by American standards. (Houston is three times as big, but had over thirteen times as many homicides). Including last night’s killings, you would have to go back 15 years to get to the same number of murders among postal employees as occurred in a single year in safe, quiet Austin.
That doesn’t help much in making sense of what happened in Goleta. Nothing will. But I take some comfort in knowing that the community I work in is really not so different than the rest of America whether you’re from Austin, Boston or Santa Barbara. We’re just 700 thousand or so normal, ordinary Americans. We will be hurting from this for some time- but we will get through it.
