Nothing Feels Safe Anymore

As you are reading this, you are already well aware of the mass shooting at a Walmart in my hometown of El Paso.

I didn’t actually hear the news myself until late afternoon the day it happened. The Husband Dude and I were out and about doing some fun things and just never looked at our phones. It wasn’t until we were driving to dinner that I pulled out my phone and saw a dozen texts and Facebook messages asking me if everyone I knew was ok.

“I think something happened,” I told THD as I quickly began scanning my Facebook newsfeed. It didn’t take long to figure out what it was.

“Mass shooting at Cielo Vista Mall” which was later clarified to be the Walmart that’s right next to the Mall.

“Oh my God,” I said out loud.

I knew what Saturday at Walmart in El Paso looked like. Especially this time of year with kids getting ready for back to school. Especially that Walmart. It’s busy all the time. I’ve never seen it not crowded.

Mom and I used to joke about how shopping in El Paso was always a family affair. Here in Northeastern Oklahoma, when I walk into Walmart, I’ll see men or women pushing carts alone, or they might have a couple of kids with them. In El Paso, you would see entire families together. Not just parents and kids. Grandma and Grandpa and aunts, uncles and cousins would be there too.

That’s why it made total sense that the victims ranged in age from two months to eighty-five years old.

Walmart wasn’t there when I was growing up, but the Mall was the hub of all things shopping. At Christmas, that’s where we went to talk to Santa and tell him what good children we had been all year. I spent a lot of time there in middle school and high school before I could drive because my parents could drop us off and we could entertain ourselves for hours with at the food court and the arcade.

And our parents didn’t have to worry about someone walking in with a gun and mowing us all down.

As more details came to light, my heart grew heavier and heavier. This wasn’t just a disgruntled employee finally losing his shit and going off. This wasn’t a domestic situation where somebody goes hunting for an estranged spouse and happens to shoot anyone in his path.

This was pure, unadulterated hate.

This guy (I’m not going to name him, because he doesn’t deserve anymore time in the spotlight than he has already been given) traveled a great distance to carry out a savage act of annihilation based on his hatred of a group of people.

If you aren’t familiar with Texas geography, let me start by saying this is a big ass state. You can start at one end and drive for twelve hours and still have a ways to go before you leave the state again. This guy came from Allen to El Paso to carry out this act of brutality. Allen is over six hundred miles away, or about a nine to ten hour drive.

I think about that drive along I-20 and then I-10. There’s a lot of empty space, where you can be alone with your thoughts and the road, winding through flat grasslands that slowly morph into mountainous desert. There’s a lot of time to change your mind. Turn around. Feel guilt remorse about planning such a heinous crime.

This guy felt and did none of those things. He had a mission of evil and he carried it out.

In the three days since this shooting (and the subsequent one in Dayton that night), there have already been pundits politicizing this event and social media is blowing up with opinions about guns and gun control and mental health and Trump and free will and an environment of hate. In the coming weeks, we’ll see more.

I’m not here to talk about any of those things.

I’m just here, in my little corner of the internet, to talk about what I’ve lost, and what the people in El Paso have lost.

We’ve lost a sense of peace that we felt about our community. Maybe we were naive, but we didn’t worry about something “like this” happening because El Paso is a safe city, despite what you’ve heard from the talking heads on TV. Yes, it is across the border from one of the most dangerous cities in Mexico, but despite that, El Paso has managed to garner the title of one of the most safe cities of its size in the country.

As an illustration, here are a couple of statistics. The estimated population of El Paso was 682,669 in 2018. The murder count that year was 23. Here in Tulsa, the metropolitan area that I live in now, the estimated population in 2018 was 394,500 with a murder count of 65.

In other words, a city that is twice as big had less than half as many homicides. These numbers are not unique to 2018. They are pretty similar across the years. That’s why it feels shocking to have almost as many murders in one event as happened in all of last year. It’s unfathomable.

But that’s not all of what I wanted to tell you either. I want to tell you what a beautiful place El Paso is and how privileged I feel to have grown up there.

From almost any given location in the city, there’s a beautiful view of the mountain or desert landscape. I always took it for granted until the first time THD came there to visit. He had flown in the night before and only got a glimpse of the city lights and the beautiful star on the mountain. It wasn’t until we got up the next morning and walked out my front door that I heard him gasp and exclaim, “Wow! Oh my God!“

I turned around, thinking he had tripped on the apartment stairs or something else had befallen him, but no. It was nothing like that. He was standing on the edge of the sidewalk, gazing at the mountain that was peeking out at him from between the buildings. That was the first time I saw it from an “outsider’s” viewpoint and I realized how lucky I was to wake up to that every day.

Let me tell you about the people. We are multicultural. It doesn’t matter if your ancestors came from England or Scotland or Ireland. If you spend a significant amount of time in El Paso, you’re going to find yourself eating tamales for Christmas Eve and learning more than your share of Spanish. Mexican-Americans who live in El Paso embrace the tenants of a free country and the pride that goes with being a Texan and contrary to popular belief, they work their asses off to make sure their kids learn both English and Spanish because they want their children to succeed.

El Paso has a symbiotic relationship with the other side of the border. There was never any “us” or “them”. We were all just kind of one big metropolitan area. Before Juarez became so dangerous, my mother and aunt would take me as a small girl to eat lunch and shop at the mercado and get a pedicure at the salon. Nobody questioned all the Chihuahua license plates you saw on the cars in parking lots in El Paso. People from Mexico always come and go, shopping and eating and infusing the economy with money. I went to an all girls Catholic high school with many girls who traveled over the border every day to attend.

The people are warm and generous and you’ll hear a lot of both Spanish and English in one conversation. They love to celebrate and they still believe in multi-generations of family living together. Everyone takes care of each other and looks out for their neighbors. Yes, we have crime. Yes, we have gangs. But the majority of people are good and honest and hard working.

I mean, can you see why so many military people who get stationed at Ft. Bliss end up retiring and staying there? Or come back when their time is done? Who can resist three hundred days of sunshine a year?

I am fortunate that nobody I know was there on Saturday. They are all safe, but I still lost something that day.

On Sunday, I strolled with Shane into the mall here in Tulsa to do some back to school shopping. I realized very quickly, that this scenario had started out the same way the day before in El Paso. My day played out a lot differently, but I still looked around at where the exits were. I thought about where I would hide. Would I shield my son from the bullets? Of course I would, without even thinking about it.

I thought about all of these things because, if it can happen back home where everything is so “safe”, then it can happen here. It can happen anywhere. That’s what I lost. My ability to feel safe.

And I am sad.