Bodies bodies bodies: Happy Halloween from the New York Times.
The New York Times has poignant tribute to the victims of recent mass shootings.
After 3 Mass Shootings, a Thanksgiving With 14 Empty Chairs
The victims’ lives paint a picture of a uniquely American holiday’s ideals. Their deaths reveal how routinely those dreams are dashed.
The reporters interviewed victims’ friends and family. We’re told that the victims of the uniquely American phenomenon of mass shootings are: “White and Black, gay and straight, old and young.”
Kelly Loving had promised her friend to bring deviled eggs, collard greens and baked mac and cheese to Thanksgiving. The three young football players gunned down by another student at the University of Virginia were, “vibrant, beautiful young men."
A victim of the Q nightclub shooting was:
Sweet.
Nice.
Smile.
Vibrant.
Beautiful.
Friend.
It’s a beautiful tribute. And our coward politicians should take note of the fact that in the midterms gun violence was a top concern for one in ten voters.
Far, far lower down on the Times site is a story about another uniquely American phenomenon of gruesome deaths in jail (OK fine maybe in this category the Russians, and Bashar al-Assad are contenders).
Jail Is a Death Sentence for a Growing Number of Americans
In Houston’s jail, where the population is at its highest in a decade, 24 people have died this year. More than half had a history of mental problems.
Here, the stories are stomach-churning. There’s a diabetic man who died because jail staff refused to give him his insulin. Diabetic ketoacidosis is not a nice death. People suffering from diabetic ketoacidosis are in severe pain and vomit until they die.
There’s a woman who killed herself after being held for more than a day in a holding facility without a toilet, running water or a mattress. Thanksgiving morning a man in a Houston jail died after being assaulted by other inmates. More suicides, including a man so desperate to die he managed to smash his head open in a padded cell by violently ramming his skull into the walls.
Look, I finally worked up the guts to watch the movie Smile. It’s about a demon or something that makes people kill themselves in brutal and disgusting ways. I don’t know, I’m not a film critic but it seems like if a major American institution that we support with our tax dollars has similar outcomes to a literal horror movie trope (mass suicide is also the conceit in The Bird Box and The Happening) we have a problem.
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