Shots Fired in Terminal 2

My family was in the shooting in Florida at the airport. I saw my twelve year old hiding under a plastic bin and my wife and kids flat on the sidewalk. I just finished a book on mass shootings in America, Shots Fired in Terminal 2. Here is the bad news. When you send your kids to school they are not safe. One in 300 is the statistic that each of us will be in a firearm related incident now. It gets worse. The front lines of this undeclared war on the American populace is the very place we send our children. The schools. This is the free fire zone of our times.

Being in a shooting is like being in a war. You do think you will die. Your heart does race. You breathe like you ran a marathon. And you cannot shake the feeling that something terrible will happen to you any second. And that feeling can come back any time. You may think it happens to other people it does not. The statistics are closing in on everyone. AR15s Assault Rifles make those statistics narrow because they kill with such efficiency and intensity. They are the Tommy Gun of our times which by the way the Thompson Machine Gun was called, The Annihilator by it's inventor.

This may sound grim. It is. It is a time bomb because every day more people buy assault weapons. Of the ten shootings I studied every one one of the shooters was considered mentally ill. So there you go. Here is the math. 350 million people. Even if 5 percent of the population is mentally ill that is 17 million people. There are 310 million guns. That one in 300 will soon be one in 200 then one in 100... then it will come into your life.

Channel 32

Shots Fired in Terminal 2

The Driving Vacation

We recently went to Florida. We drove. Plane fares were high. You know so let's take the family vacation and drive. This goes all the way back to when I was a kid and we took driving vacations across the country. Fond memories of being in the back of a station wagon with dad driving and mom navigating What fun! So we begin. The drive immediately asserts itself as an exercise of interminable boredom. That is what you forget. That there is absolutely nothing to do for twenty three hours. Except to eat.

And we ate. McDonalds. Panera. Burger King. Every gas station under the sun where we bought just about every thing they had to offer. And then you sit in your electric chair and don't move. I drive and drive and drive. The landscape is interesting for a while and then it is not. It is just scenery to the brain thudding exercise of driving a car down a road with trucks and cars and people honking and cutting you off. What fun!

And the car becomes a rolling garbage truck. Amazing the amount of garbage such a trip can produce. But we start to fill up and have to unload at every stop and fill fifty five gallon drums with  our fast food detritus. And then we get close and push through and by now you are bleary eyed and bloated from sitting and eating for two days. You have come to hate the capsule you have been stuck in for two days and swear never ever to do this again.

And when you arrive you feel like a voyager who has reached a distant planet. You will never do this again. NO more Wallyworld. No more Chevy Chase in Vacation. You are done. Sure you are.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

The American Dying Grounds

Florida is the American dying grounds. Dress it up how you will but this is where our people go to finish out their lives. The modern corporate state needs lots of workers and once the workers are finished they go down into the boot of the country to watch Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune and wait to die. Of course American retirement is not painted this way. It is painted as the Golden years or the time to do what we want. But Florida belies the lie. Here is where people are parked under a tropical sun among the alligators and swamps.

It is our modern Casa Blanc with no flight out except for one. The final flight to the great unknown. And so there is no culture. There is only what people bring to the dying grounds and  while away their time trying not to become senilitic. Because America is for the young. On this we can agree and our country has a funny way of disposing of old people. Forget the Death Panels of Obamacare. The Death Panels were here long before in the form of a people without purpose in a land without soul under a scorching sun.

We are a funny country. We have decided in the American Dream our lives should begin at the end. In truth our lives are what we live during the working years. This is the real retirement in all its connotations. This is the best years of our lives. Banished to Walt Disney's Swampland with nothing to do for years on end is the hell capitalism has created and sold to people looking for the golden watch at the end.

And so we will play Bachi ball and smoke our cigars and drink our wine and watch the sunset. Take our meds and get our operations and trundle down to the Southern most tip of America. The great boot full of the last gasp of our collective effort; the American dying grounds.

Rocket Man...the American Dream upside down

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

Spring Break

Maybe spring break is different for other people but in the Midwest it is truly SPRING BREAK. We are frozen. Stiff. Over worked. Tired. Beat up after a long winter. And of course March has been the coldest yet and so we take off warmer clime for a week. Florida. California. Hawaii. The Caribbean. Everyone just wants to get away from the cold dreary Midwest sky that seems to push down on you after four months of unrelenting weather. And it hasn't even been that hard of a winter but the grind of it all just wears you out and you start to get that Gulag pallor and those hollow eyes. All work and no play.

So for a week you disappear. You go to where people swim and bike and can actually go outside without freezing. Paradise right. I get it. I get why people come here when they retire. Sandals. Shorts. Yeah. And  work seems very far away. And those big Midwestern homes with their basements and their fireplaces and furnaces seem ridiculous. How could anybody live that way? Always huddled up inside eating massive amounts of red meat to stay warm. The bears hibernating away another five months of life.

And it goes fast. You just start to get used to it and then it's gone and you are back. Snow. Ice. Rain. Gloomy skies.Why Why do we live here? Then you go to work. Slit my throat now. Ah well. Only a few more months until summer. Right?

www.williamhazelgrove.com

Will George Zimmerman run?

You wouldn't think the guy would just take off, but it is sure strange that George cut off communication with his attorneys and now is MIA. And the prosecutor said she will be releasing information within the next seventy two hours. And George is talking to Sean Hannity. I'd run. Sounds like a desperate man to me and the fact that all his former attorneys would say is that he is somewhere in the United States. Wow. I bet that prosecutor is nervous now.

It would be a hell of a thing if George just disappeared. But really can you imagine what is running through his mind. He shot and killed a seventeen year old. Now something along the lines of guilt and a sneaking suspicion that Stand Your Ground might not be as Teflon as it is cracked up to be would get him checking his passport and eyeing freighters bound for ports unknown. Because in the three AM moment, George has to have that final reckoning that he stalked a kid with some Skittles and a can of tea.

Even if you fool yourself into thinking you needed your nine millimeter to defend yourself against the unarmed highschooler you still have to wonder what would have happened if you had not followed him in the first place. And if you did follow him and were the aggressor, didn't you bring on the push back that might have occurred when one human tries to stop another? Even George must have started doubting his very thin rational that he needed deadly force against the Skittle man trying to get away from him.

But maybe we will never know. Maybe right now, George is on a plane or a ship or waiting to slip into Canada or going up into the mountains never to be seen again. If he is lucky he can get a new identity, start a new life. Something Trayvon will never be able to do.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Hunting Trayvon

Yeah ok it's self defence so the lawyer says. Trayvon turned on Zimmerman and he had to pull out his gun to defend himself. If you ever have gone hunting then you know an animal will turn when trapped. Did Zimmerman trap Trayvon with his relentless pursuit, chasing him on foot, reaching out and grabbing him? And when Trayvon tried to get away, pushing Zimmerman away, did he shoot him? Bam. Just shot him because that's what you do when you have a gun and your quarry doesn't.

And that is at the heart of the matter isn't it? One guy had a gun and one guy had a pack of Skittles. One guy had a car and one guy was on foot. One guy was trying to get away and one guy was pursuing. Sure sounds like hunting to me. When you hunt you track your prey. You follow him or her through the woods and try not to make a sound until you are ready. That was the surveillance part. Where Zimmerman is telling the cops about the young black man in the hood. He describes him and starts to trail him. Now he is in the chase part of the hunt.

You are done tracking and see your quarry. You are now figuring out how to take a shot because there is a chance the animal will get away. So you close the gap. This is the part where Zimmeran ignored the cops who told him not to get out and pursue and he did it anyway. Because now he thinks Trayvon is getting away (see 911 tape"they always get away) and now you are confronting the animal and it sees you. And if the animal is trapped or smells danger and cannot get away... then they turn. They bare their teeth, they may even charge.

And here is where Zimmerman demands to know who Trayvon is. Here is where he pulls his gun as Trayvon struggles to get away from him because we all know he went to apprehend and that's where the struggle took place. And it doesn't matter whether the animal struggles or not because you are armed. Here is the part where you shoot the animal you have been hunting. Here is the part where the hunt ends.

Here is the part where you kill.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Gun Owners Hold Us Hostage

Yeah ok. NRA. I get it. They protect the Second Amendment and all that so I can have a bazooka if somebody crosses my yard or if someone comes into the gated community I am in right now in Florida much like the one Trayvon Williams passed through and some vigilante nut ball can trail me and if he decides I look the wrong way can send me to my maker ala Mr. 357. I get it. But here is my question. Why don't we non gun owners have an organization for our rights? After Trayvon Williams man we need one and we need it now.

The NRA is and has been the bully on the block. Everyone is afraid of these people and why? Because they are ARMED! You sure don't hear the President taking them on. Can you blame him? With enough nut jobs with guns to fill a state would you want to tell them you are taking their guns? And how about all our school shootings? We pride ourselves on putting our children first. Yeah. Right. If we did we would start an all out campaign to get the guns. Yeah we would take on the Second Amendment and all the twisted logic that says someone can purchase a Glock or an automatic weapon and go shoot kids.

But no one says a word. No one wants to take on the NRA. So I say lets form the NGOA. Non Gun Owners Association to stick up for us. We need it now. With Stand Your Ground laws in many states we are all just sitting ducks for dudes looking for a little moving target practice. Hunting humans is the greatest high after all...just ask Zimmerman.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Cabin Fever

I get it why Hemingway lived in Key West and then Cuba. I mean I really get it watching the snow swirling outside my window in the middle of April. Cabin Fever. This is when it is the worse. You have done your time. You have suffered through the sub zero days and the snow and you have trudged through gale force bone cracking wind and now it is April and you should be rewarded for living in the Midwest and going through weeks without sunshine and days so dark and cold you feel like slitting your wrist. But NOOOOO. It's snowing and its raining and the sun wont be back for a week. Cabin fever hits you like a dark night.

The real thing that gets you is going to Florida. You come back and your first question off the plane is: How stupid am I? And you answer it quickly. REALLY STUPID. Why would you live in a place where basically people spend seven to eight months indoors and then run outside like hysterical lepers at the first sign of sun only to get rained on or snowed on or blown away in a tornado. In Florida you get up and go for a run and sit on the beach and yeah it's full of retired people and everyone is transplants and the alligators and swamps are a little weird, but WHO CARES! It's beautiful man and you are not stuck in doors.

And yeah when you get older you come to realize that the Midwest is where all the coalminers live. People work in the Midwest. And then they work some more. And then they work some more. Then they get old and die. GREAT. It's not as bad as all that but it's close. Just ride the Metra in the dead of winter with all the commuters and it looks like something out Russia with everyone trudging toward the Gulag. And then you to this place where it is sunny every day. Nobody seems to work. Cars don't rust. You wear shorts and eat seafood. And the ocean is there just for you.

But that is not where you live. You live in the Chicago land area. Everyone does work including you. And you cannot figure out how to escape. So you wait. You wait with everyone else. You wait for the sun and grit it out until...June, maybe July...August?

www.billhazelgrove.com

Rocket Man will blast off in July

The Great American Payoff

A man lifts his garage a third of the way and lets his dog out. I can see his ankles and hear the baseball game on the plasma he has mounted on the wall. The dog sits in the driveway in front of the home identical to a hundred other homes and driveways. A man pulls in his garbage can and it takes him a good fifteen minutes because he is in pain. The drugstores are overrun, a flood of humanity rolling toward the pharmacy as it opens. Sun beats down on the empty streets and bungalows, the pools heating, no one swimming. Inside thousands of people take refuge from the sun and live in television or cyberworld. In the evening people emerge in Escalades and Mercedes for the Blue Light Specials, flooding downtown Naples briefly, but by seven PM the restaurants are mostly empty. Empty shopping malls bake under the long sun and foreclosure signs abound. Welcome to the great American payoff

We work for one reason so that we may one day do what the hell we want. My apologies to all who work for passion, mission, a greater good. But by the main the American worker is looking toward a day when he can kick back, make the twenty four drive down into the boot of American and call it a life. Naples is the destination for many. Here are the people who have truly cashed in on the American Dream. They do have the money to do what the hell they want. They have worked and built up sizable nest eggs. You see it in the cars and the smart half a million dollar bungalows with pools. Here then is the great American Payoff. Kids launched and savings intact along with pensions bonuses and good old cash, this group of people are cashing in on the promised pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

After years of thudding toil they have the ability to tell the world to stuff it and while away their hours doing whatever they want in neighborhoods built over swamps that resemble the old Midwestern neighborhoods they spent most of their life in. This group of people have won the lottery of jobs and 401 Ks and the vicissitudes of the market and the sacrifice of putting money aside for the great American retirement. The only problem is that ninety nine percent of these hard working Americans have become too old to pull in their garbage can. The Great American Payoff has become a mirage in the tropical heat of our Disney World state.

There is something wrong here. We are in our prime in the so called working years, able to love and laugh and enjoy life. But we are told in our culture that the real party will begin once those savings are cranked open and we can golf and swim or read a book to our hearts content. But the truth is that by the time it arrives, most of us will not know what to do. Like the man who raises his garage by a third and lets his dog out and watches television in his garage, the promised leisure settles into a routine established by the working years. We don't suddenly become bohemians who can enjoy life's nectar in wild abandon. We put that part of our self away long ago to get through the thirty year grind. We turned off our hedonistic pleasures in favor of the Puritan ethic that promises reward at the end, not the beginning.

I think with this recession a lot of people will not reach Mecca anyway and maybe we should rethink the whole thing. Who held out this carrot anyway? People who invest money that's who. Isn't our time now? Isn't this the Golden Age when we are physically able to enjoy the fruits of this life? What is all this guilty deference anyway? Surely with 401K falling by half or two thirds and AIG executives laughing to the bank we see the game is rigged anyway. Maybe what John Lennon said is right, life is what happens between the things we plan. Maybe right now is the Great American Payoff. Maybe we better get living.

http://www.billhazelgove.com