For those of you who may not be familiar, I’m not just a space rock junkie. I also manage a stray and feral cat colony in West Philadelphia; since 2007 we’ve found homes for about seventy cats, and have provided food, shelter, medical intervention and affection for several dozen more.
Two celebrity suicides shocked the world in the first week of June 2018. Kate Spade, New York fashion designer and sister-in-law of actor David Spade, was found hung by a scarf in the closet of her Manhattan apartment on June 5, and Anthony Bourdain, celebrity chef, food critic and global travel guide, was found unresponsive in his Strasbourg, France hotel room, an apparent suicide, on June 8.
April 4, 2018 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, assassinated by James Earl Ray in Memphis, Tennessee. The much-lauded civil rights leader, whose impact on legal racial equality in the US cannot be overstated, had spent the better part of his adult life fighting for freedoms which White Americans took for granted, but which were habitually denied to Blacks.
On Valentine’s Day, 14 February 2018, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz shot and killed 17 people at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, wounding 14 others. A former student, Cruz began his rampage at 2:21 PM, after taking an Uber to the school.
Here we go again. No disrespect, but how many of these do we need to experience before we make some substantive changes in this country regarding gun access?
“It was like an asteroid fell from the sky.” — Eric Paddock, brother of the Las Vegas shooter, on his stunned reaction to the news
Unfathomable. The amount of carnage one determined human being can wreak, in ten minutes of indiscriminate shooting into a crowd, is simply unfathomable. 59 dead, 527 wounded, in the worst mass shooting in US history.
