Schoolhouse Shooter

Awoke this morning to find on CNN, FoxNews, and every other media outlet on TV an aerial view of an Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster, PA. Amish men, women and children stood outside under the wind and noise of helicopters and corralled away from onlookers and press by armor-suited police.

Seems a truck driver by the name of Roy stormed the one-room schoolhouse early this morning, let the boys and some adults go free, took little girls (in grades 1-8) hostage and barricaded himself inside with them. He shot and killed three of them, shot and critically injured seven more, and then turned his gun on himself.

The police chief in Christiana, the close-knit Amish community just East of Lancaster, said Roy's wife came home and found him gone and gibberish-laden notes left for her and their children. Something about a beef dating back 20 years. Cops believe he chose the Amish schoolhouse because it was nearby and because it lacked the security of public schools, but have no other ideas as to Roy's motives in this horrific attack.

I'm here to take care of some business and observe Yom Kippur. I just found out at my doctor appointment that a "worrisome" cyst exists in my right ta-ta requiring rather immediate attention. Superfly is here, too, because he's a superfly boyfriend. We are shocked, aggrieved.

My step-mom works at a hotel roughly one mile from the site of the shooting and observed the police and emergency vehicles speeding by and helicopters zooming overhead. Usually, there's tour buses and heavy tourist and outlet-shopping traffic to complain about, or gripes about people from New Jersey.

Today she sat on the sofa all day in her work clothes, silently watching up-to-the-minute coverage of the shooting. She's lived her whole life in Lancaster County and probably thought she seen it all when it comes to the Amish when 'Witness' was filmed here in the '80s. She's the kind of woman who never sits still, least of all silently.

This senseless tragedy--especially the accompanying media onslaught--is the last thing Lancaster's beleagured Amish community needs. Government and developers relentlessly push for their land; disease, attrition, and farm accidents decimate their population, and encroaching modernity threatens their way of life. A lunatic acting on a twenty-year old grudge in shooting Amish schoolchildren is just too much.

Leave the Amish alone. Let them grieve in peace and go research your stories at Roy's house, get your quotes from his wife and the police. Don't take photos of crying Amish mothers or the grisly schoolhouse. Don't invade Christiana in your efforts to get some kind of "scoop". Don't be despicable.

We're headed back to NYC tonight, to a place where it is perfectably acceptable to be despicable. Just don't bring that shit to Lancaster, it doesn't belong.