Your American Mass Shooting Calendar

This week marks the anniversary of a couple of recent mass shootings: The massacre of innocents in Uvalde, Texas, last year, and the slaughter of transit workers in San Jose two years ago. Naturally there will be coverage of the anniversaries. We’ll revisit the trauma. We’ll hear hopes and prayers that we’ve learned something about how to prevent similar tragedies.

The anniversaries made me think about how many dates mark major mass shootings. I kind of had it in the back of my head that you could make up a calendar of all these episodes where, when you look back just a little way, you could see the hundreds of lives taken, the thousands upon thousands altered forever, at the whim of well-armed strangers. What I had in mind was something like the Roman Catholic calendar of saints’ feast days. Or more darkly, one of those “page-a-day” calendars. This one would be “A Massacre a Day.”

It sounds like fun of the grimly ironic sort, if you don’t think about the people involved. But when I sat down to write down the incidents I recall off the top of my head — starting with one in 1966 and then continuing through those that occurred over the many years I’ve been in newsrooms — there’s little irony and no fun involved. The most sobering thing is that there have been so many of these mass killings in recent years that each new one seems to be making less of an impression.

Here’s the list, in calendar order — 36 separate dates (which, just. to be clear, I had to look up). I suppose the really grim thing about this is that if you searched a little and went beyond the most notorious recent and historic incidents, you’d probably have no problem filling up a 365-day calendar.

You Never Know Where You’ll Be

Janson grave, Mount Olive Cemetery, Chicago.

You never know where you’ll be when the next mass shooting or schoolhouse slaughter takes place.

We’re out of town on a family visit. Around noon, I went out for a walk. I got an alert on my phone about some breaking news: a school shooting a few hundred miles away. The only question I have after seeing something like that is not, “How could it happen?” It’s, “How bad will it be?”

About the same time I was taking in that news, I started to hear sirens. I happened to be walking up the street toward a high school. A fire truck passed, then an ambulance. I wondered with a certain dread whether they might be responding to something at the school, and if so, whether the “something” involved firearms.

But there were no more emergency vehicles rushing toward the school, and I encountered a bunch of kids going about their day in what I took to be a happy, unconcerned way — just enjoying their friends and their day.

So at this hour, at any rate, tragedy is far away, out of earshot. But never out of mind.

‘I Bequeath Myself to the Dirt …’

Whitman tomb, Harleigh Cemetery, Camden, New Jersey, November 2012.

“Forum,” KQED’s daily discussion show, is doing reruns this holiday week. And today one of the topics covered was titled “Would You Consider Becoming Compost?” The subject was a new California law that allows people to choose to compost their remains instead of embalming and burying or cremating them. One of the guests was from Recompose, a Seattle company that does “ecological death care,” aka human composting. One of the facts she shared is that the company’s process renders a body into about one cubic yard of soil — enough to comfortably fit in the bed of a pickup truck. That sounds like a lot of “material”; she explained that the volume is due to soil used in the composting process.

Composting sounds all right to me. And the show topic reminded me of one of my favorite pieces of poetry, a section from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” It comes from the famous “I sound my barbaric yawp” passage:

I bequeath myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love;
If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;
Missing me one place, search another;
I stop somewhere, waiting for you.

Ah — what an optimistic vision of how we might persist on this Earth we love and link ourselves to the future and future-kind. I am not looking for an epitaph just yet, but those last three lines certainly ring in my mind.

Whitman touched more than once on the process that would allow him to “bequeath myself to the dirt.” In “This Compost,” he mused on how the earth disposes of “those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations? Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?” He marvels at the “chemistry” that purifies these leavings and turns them into new growth and life so that “when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease, though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease.”

Given his declared enthusiasm for the soil and leaving himself to future generations, it’s kind of ironic that Whitman wound up building a tomb in a Camden, New Jersey, cemetery for his final resting place (his brother George, a Union officer in the Civil War, and other family members are also interred there).

If you want to visit, the Harleigh Cemetery in Camden is pretty easy to find. Failing to fetch him at first, check your map apps. He’s stopped right there, waiting for you.

Journal of Holiday Greeting Studies, Boxing Day Edition

On Christmas Day, we went out to a spot on the other side of the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge to check out the bird life on a trail around a tidal marsh and channel. There was lots to see — mostly waterfowl and shore birds with the odd raptor and corvid thrown into the mix. We encountered many two-legged mammals, too. Generally speaking, when I find myself passing someone else on a trail, I make it a point to acknowledge the other person in what I hope is a friendly way. That just means saying hi as we pass. If the greeting’s returned, that makes for a small moment of grace in which my fellow walkers and I are no longer strangers. If the greeting’s not returned, I try not to take it personally. Some of the people we passed the other day responded to a “hi” by saying “Merry Christmas.” Nothing wrong with that, but I admit that to me the phrase feels a little stilted, and I didn’t lead with it myself because, you know, not everyone you run into along the way is celebrating that particular occasion. In any case, it was a good walk with lots of birds and perhaps people were feeling a little less shy about greeting each other because of the day.

Then yesterday, December 26, we went for a walk in the Berkeley hills. I turned our conversation toward the topic of two observances that fall on the day after Christmas: St. Stephen’s Day and Boxing Day. Would it be appropriate, I wondered, to wish someone “Happy St. Stephen’s Day”? When one recalls the occasion commemorated by the day — the stoning death of the man reputed to be the first Christian martyr — no. But how about saying “Happy Boxing Day”? It’s a curiosity, for sure, dating back to the 18th century English custom of giving employees and tradespeople gifts or cash the day after Xmas. But despite its obscure origins and non-American provenance, I figure lots of people have heard of it. So I decided to try it out as a greeting for hikers we met along the trail.

And I’m delighted to report that the general reaction (from about 10 parties we passedo n the trail) seemed to be, well, delight. People laughed or smiled and said “happy Boxing Day” in return. Why? I’m thinking because it was unexpected and just arcane enough to be recognized as an attempt at humor, at sharing the fun of being outdoors together on a holiday. Or something. You can try it yourself in 364 days.

In the meantime, Happy National Fruitcake Day.

Growth of the Nut

Back in August, I took a drive along some rural roads in Yolo County, on the edge of the Sacramento Valley, that I’d become familiar with on long bike rides 15 and 20 years ago. Most of the county is on the flat floor of the valley and was given over to agriculture — crops that even a city dweller like me could identify on the move included rice, sunflowers, alfalfa, tomatoes. Some nut and fruit orchards, too. That’s still a lot of what you see.

Northern and western parts of the county are hilly, though, and when I’d ride through, most of those areas appeared to be used for pasture with the occasional appearance of a grain crop wrapped around the hills’ contours.

In August, I was surprised to find that a lot of that former pastureland has been transformed into what I assume are almond orchards. I drove past a spot where, long ago, a couple of other cyclists and I had taken a break from riding against a fierce north wind. Back then, in 2006, it was a big open field with some abandoned-looking farm equipment that we ducked down behind to get out of the wind. Now that spot is all nut trees.

I stopped to take pictures along one of the routes I traveled, Road 6. Looking at the result — it’s the black and white shot below, which I just had developed — I realized that maybe Google Streetview would show the same scene over the years. The most recent shot Google has is from May 2012. Here’s a little of what the change looks like (and a before/after slider of the scene is here).

Along Road 6 in the Dunnigan Hills, Yolo County, May 2012. Credit: Google Streetview.
Along Road 6 in the Dunnigan Hills, Yolo County, August 2022. Credit: Dan Brekke.

The transformation is not shocking; it’s part of the vast expansion of almond and pistachio acreage that’s overtaken much of the Central Valley.

If you live here, the puzzling thing about this changed landscape is that the last decade is one of the driest periods, if not the driest, since California was colonized 250 years ago. The state’s water supplies are dwindling, a situation that’s supposed to become more challenging as the effects of climate change accelerate. Given that there’s not a lot of visible irrigation infrastructure here, I assume that water is being pumped out of the ground to support these thirsty orchards. I haven’t looked into who the adventurous growers or hedge-fund investors are who have launched this experiment in the middle of our drought. It’s quite a gamble.

Dawn of the Toot

Like many others put off or revolted or … — what’s stronger than “revolted”? — by developments at Twitter, I’ve started a Mastodon account — mostly to see if it’s a viable alternative to what I’ve gotten used to over the last 15 years as a news and information tool. This is still Day One, but early signs are that it might.

My major first-day “learning”: Individual messages are “toots,” not tweets. Did Mastodons really sound that way?

Reprieve

Six-day precipitation forecast produced by the California-Nevada River Forecast Center. According to this, published Thursday, Sept. 15, 2022, much of the San Francisco Bay Area and Northern California will get an inch or more of rain.

So now we get to the part of the story where we’ll grasp at nearly anything as a sign of hope, or reprieve, or simple delay of the inevitable.. Last week, much of California was blasted with 110-degree temperatures, day after day after day. When you look that in the face, you ask yourself how much worse can things get and how much this corner of the world, a world where more and more people are suffering under more and more extreme conditions, will change. Then things cool down. Some areas will have high temperatures over the weekend nearly 50 degrees lower than the all-time highs registered last week. This weekend, all the weather models and their interpreters say, it’s going to rain, and rain enough that it will put a bit of a damper on (but won’t end) the fire season.

I’ll take it — just a day of rain to take the edge off the harsh, dry end of summer and our drought. I call it a reprieve, knowing that a reprieve can be just a postponement of what’s to come.

What We All Know

I’m old enough to remember when Charles Whitman hauled a footlocker full of guns and ammunition up to the top of the University of Texas tower and started shooting people. It was the summer of 1966, and part of the horror — and fascination for my 12-year-old self, to be honest — was that the mass murder Whitman carried out was unique. Nothing quite like it had happened in many years, and it would be years before we saw anything similar.

But now?

So many massacres have happened so frequently over so many years that the details now blur and each episode of death and destruction brings to mind others that aren’t so far in the past. A massacre at a Texas school? Without thinking too hard about it, several other school massacres come to mind: Newtown, Connecticut; Littleton, Colorado; Stockton, California; Parkland, Florida. To name just a few.

We’ve gotten used to that — the sudden appearance of the teenager or 20-something bent on slaughter, the death, the litany of thoughts and prayers, the outrage and vows of action. And we wait for the next killer to make his entrance. (I started trying to write this the evening of the white racist 18-year-old’s terror attack on the supermarket in Buffalo. Even though it is just a matter of time before the “next killer makes his entrance,” I’m stunned at how quickly the Texas attack followed the one in New York.)

As a people, if that’s what we can be called, we’ve surrendered to those who insist that their freedom means you accepting the minute-to-minute possibility that anyone you stumble into — on the street, at the store, at work, at school, at church, on the train — can murder you and everyone around you on a whim, for any reason or for no reason at all.

Kate, my wife, went off to spend the day as a substitute teacher this morning. I kissed her goodbye, and when I did, I thought about the possibility that she might not come home later today because someone with a gun had settled on her school as a target. I didn’t say anything, and off she went. The odds are everything will be fine. And that’s exactly what the children, the parents, the teachers and police and everyone else in Uvalde, Texas, thought when they began their routines yesterday morning.

None of this is beyond our capacity to begin changing it. It’s hard to have faith in that notion right now. But would it be so hard, for instance, to ban the sale of assault rifles to people under 21? Or to finally move on a bill to require universal background checks? Will it take a 10-million-parent march on Washington to make those things happen? I don’t know. But one way to ensure that changes like that never occur is to remain silent. And we all still have a voice.

Saturday Rabbit Hole: The $100,000 Bill

The $100,000 gold certificate, printed for only three weeks in 1934-35.
Reverse of U.S. $100,000 note.

The question came up a few mornings ago: What’s the largest denomination currency the U.S. Treasury has ever released? I had vague recall of a $100,000 bill with Woodrow Wilson’s picture on it. Or was it Salmon P. Chase? It was easy to find out.

Per the U.S. Treasure’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing:

“The largest note ever printed by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing was the $100,000 Gold Certificate, Series 1934. These notes were printed from December 18, 1934 through January 9, 1935 and were issued by the Treasurer of the United States to Federal Reserve Banks (FRB) only against an equal amount of gold bullion held by the Treasury. These notes were used for transactions between FRBs and were not circulated among the general public.”

And Salmon P. Chase is on the no-longer-circulated $10,000 bill, if you were wondering.

In any case, I liked the images of the 100-grand note and thought: That’s a quick, easy post I can put up without spending most of an afternoon on it.

Or maybe not.

A second page on the engraving bureau’s site advises that the $100,000 note “cannot be legally held by currency note collectors.”

Is there a rabbit hole I can go down here?

There is. So let’s get to it.

A Smithsonian Institution page on the $100,000 bill also mentions the prohibition on private individuals owning these notes. The page allows public comments, and a few have been left there over the years. The most recent comment is signed by a Richard M. Sales, who said this:

I possess several of these 1934 Gold Certificate Banknotes presented to me personally by former Heads of State and Sultanates. I would like to know the specific legal statute that states I cannot own or sell them. It is my understanding that the 1974 Executive Order issued by President Gerald Ford released the restriction of owning, trading or selling of all gold certificate banknotes issued by the US Bureau of Engraving. Can I sell these publicly or must I redeem the face value from the US Treasury?

Richard M. Sales

Thu, 2021-12-09 10:05

What an intriguing possibility — someone out there in the world who actually has gotten their hands on not just one, but several of these notes.

Following standard rabbit-hole protocol, I pondered that possibility for a few seconds, then googled “Richard M. Sales.” If you do the same — use the quotation marks — you’ll find United States v. Sales, a federal criminal prosecution, near the top of the results.

The case involves a December 2017 wire fraud indictment issued by a federal grand jury in Eugene, Oregon. The indictment alleges Richard M. Sales scammed would-be investors out of $900,000 as part of a scheme that promised as much as 100 percent return on investment within as little as 60 days.

From what source was this incredible river of returns supposed to flow?

“Although Sales’ description of the details of the investment varied,” the indictment says, “generally, the investors were led to believe that Sales possessed the ability to recover hundreds of millions of dollars worth of U.S. Treasury Notes that were located in East Asia and the Pacific.”

And according to the grand jury, Sales assured investors he was well connected:

“Sales represented that he was the ‘Commissaris’ of a secret group comprised of heads of state, world-renowned economists, the Vatican, and others. He claimed the ‘doctrine of our syndicate’ carried the signatures of John F. Kennedy, Pope John Paul VI [sic], Golda Meir, Chang Kai Shek [sic}, Lee Kuan Yew, Queen Victoria and many others.”

Queen Victoria!

Federal agents arrested Sales in Indonesia and brought him back to the United States to answer the charges in early 2018. As the case proceeded, his fanciful claims about his access to heads of state and immeasurable riches raised questions about whether he could assist in his own defense. U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken ordered a competency evaluation, and two M.D.s and a licensed counselor met with the defendant. Aiken’s later opinion summarized their findings:

Both Dr. Truhn and Dr. Guyton diagnosed defendant with delusional disorder, grandiose type. Defendant’s alleged delusions involve his self-reported previous work and life history. In short, defendant told his examiners that over later portion of his life he was involved in high level international diplomacy and humanitarian efforts. He represents that he has met, interacted with, and advised world leaders such as Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Boris Yeltsin among others. According to the reports, defendant maintained that he has access to large sums of money and assets related to the Bank of China which he used for his humanitarian efforts. At oral argument, defendant explained the history of some of these beliefs which involve thousands of years in history and assets worth trillions of dollars.

But Judge Aiken noted “the diagnosis of a mental disorder alone does not mean defendant is incompetent to proceed to trial.” She found that other evidence — Sales’ clear understanding of the proceedings and the charges against him and his ongoing consultations with his defense counsel — showed he was competent.

In the end, no jury heard the case. Sales pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud and in October 2021 was sentenced to time served in jail and three years of supervised release and ordered to pay $1,028,010 in restitution to his victims.

Sales’ attorney noted in his sentencing memorandum that his 72-year-old client was recently divorced, that he was suffering from heart trouble, and that his sole source of income was a $924 monthly check from Social Security. I’ll add that the terms of his restitution agreement require him to pay at least $25 a month to help liquidate his $1 million restitution debt.

And that’s that, except to note that Judge Aiken passed final judgment on Sales on December 13, 2021. That was four days after Sales, or someone using his name, was inquiring about the legality of the “several” $100,000 notes he claimed to have in his possession.

Ukraine in the Classroom

Mrs. B— not her real name — has been a schoolteacher for some time. She’s retired from full-time work, but continues as a science curriculum consultant, as a substitute and as a volunteer for a very program called Trout in the Classroom.

The program is the work of Northern California conservationists and fishing groups and teaches about one of the native wonders of our state, the rainbow trout, Oncorhynchus mykiss. The program distributes specially prepared fish tanks and other equipment to classroom and delivers rainbow trout eggs. The kids get to study the fish as they emerge from the eggs and grow just big enough over a couple months to release in local lakes. (Given the state of some of our urban East Bay lakes , sometimes that doesn’t seem like such a great deal for the baby trout. But I guess Nature and Science Education have a plan.)

The other day, Mrs. B was at a nearby school where she was helping an elementary grades science teacher set up her trout tank. When she was done, she was invited to stay for lunch, and she did that.

She went and asked a group of second- and third-graders if she could sit at their table. “Oh, sure,” they said. “We’re just talking about the war in Ukraine.”