School shooting of the day
Some days, you don't have a school shooting; for whatever reason, nobody goes over the edge and takes their gun into the local school. You might even get two or three of those in a row, but don't get complacent; most mornings you wake up to
school shooting of the day, and you're wondering, who do I know at that school? I hope they're ok? Should I call them or check the victims list?
School shooting geography is not so much
where was it? in what building? where was the shooter from? as much as it is a much wider speculation about chance. At the rate we're going, what is the likelihood that one of my children's schools will be next? Is this a kind of random lotto where one out of thousand gets it randomly every so often? If it is really every day, or two or three a day, or you expand it to include other places besides schools, what does that say about your likelihood of making it to adulthood or dying a natural death?
With grim determination we read (in my case first thing in the morning) about the details. They're still looking for a
motive. Motive? What sane person could have a motive to take their gun into a school, any school, anywhere, and start shooting it? Nobody. We're not talking sane people here. We're talking mentally ill people in a world with more guns than people, in a world that's armed itself so heavily in the last few years that we have to trip over guns just to
get to school.
Now
that's a reason to learn geography.
Go Hawkeyes! Go Hannah!
This post has an agenda, I might as well warn you; it starts with some really nice stuff but then I have this forty-or-fifty-year grudge and I just can't keep it out of here, so I might as well warn you now.
The other night the Iowa Hawkeyes women's basketball team scored a stunning victory over the Maryland Terps, in Iowa, in front of over 10,000 people. That's
over ten thousand people. Women's basketball has apparently made it, at least in Iowa. Forty or fifty years ago when I went to a game, there were barely a hundred.
That's fantastic, because I'm an old Iowa Hawkeye fan, and a women's basketball fan, and it's nice to see it all come together. But there are two more cool things about it. One is that a rising star is a freshman named Hannah Stuelke, and she's actually
related to me, although it's a somewhat indirect relationship. She and my daughter are second cousins, though on my daughter's side it's a step-relationship, but the entire extended family is very close and they're all going to the games and totally behind her. Though she's a freshman, she has good chemistry with the team's star and they catch on fire and
can't be beat. That was the story with the Terps victory, apparently.
Second, I am now in the area again, only two hours from Iowa City, and have grandchildren who are playing girls basketball in small-town Illinois schools. So I am able to use Hannah as a role model and we can all cheer for her together. I can also hope these girls choose Iowa and stick with basketball.
I'm an old Iowa fan, having gone there twice, once in the seventies and once in the eighties, and this last story comes from then. See that big ugly bird up in the left-hand corner? It was brought to Iowa by Hayden Fry, a men's football coach from Texas who was hired to take the Iowa men's football program to great heights. He actually was a pretty good coach and many people remember him fondly. But he had a PR man, and that person had a condition of his being coach: we had to take that ugly bird, AND
we had to make all other hawkeye images illegal. I will never forgive him for that.
I didn't mind his brash Texas style; I didn't mind the way he painted the opponents' locker room pink just to make them mad. As I said, he was at least reasonably successful. But he shouldn't have made other hawkeye images illegal.
Forty or fifty years later, I am still a loyal Hawkeye fan. Go Hawkeyes! Go Hannah! But get rid of that bird. Or at least, let us wear some better-looking ones.
