The Rambo Right sucks

The last post on the heroism displayed by so many of last week’s Westroads massacre victims reminded me of how many movement (as in bowel) conservatives so covered themselves in ignominy after the April horror at Virginia Tech.

Everybody should be armed like the Israeli Army. Kids today are infantilized. Those being shot up in Norris Hall ought to have gone after Sueng-Hui Cho like Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade.

Half a league, half a league, half a league onward!

Well, here in Omaha, out on the edge of the forbidding plains, non-infantilized grown-ups stood up to the madman. They all died. They had to have known that they were going to.

They did whatever they could, knowing they’d die, in the name of trying to buy more time for others to get away. They tried to distract the madman, Robbie Hawkins. They tried to talk down the madman, Robbie Hawkins. They stood their ground, trying to guide the authorities to the madman, Robbie Hawkins.

None of them stood a chance. All of them became martyrs.

I’M SURE John Derbyshire, Mark Steyn and all their ilk would be so proud. I’m sure their breasts are swelling as I type, all those Rambo Right-Wingers who think they have the right to demand the martyrdom of strangers in far away places.

All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred:
‘Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns’ he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’
Was there a man dismay’d ?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Some one had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do & die,
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

REMEMBER IN YOUR PRAYERS all those who died last week in my city. Remember especially those who so embodied Christ’s Paschal sacrifice — just in time for Christmas. Theirs was a sacrifice that only can be freely made, not offered up upon some ideologue’s command.

No greater love

This is what, according to an article in the Omaha World-Herald, several of those gunned down at Omaha’s Westroads Mall were doing at the moment they went to be with their God:

Firing away, the killer entered customer service, where he would end the carnage.

Hiding 15 feet from him was a 65-year-old grandfather and retired natural gas company manager, who suddenly emerged from the spot that concealed him and his wife and came into plain sight of the killer.

According to a family member’s account given Sunday, John McDonald stood and confronted the 19-year-old gunman. It was a spontaneous act of courage that soon cost the Council Bluffs man his life, although it’s possible that he helped spare more than a dozen people who were hiding nearby.

It appears that McDonald was one of the last of eight people killed by Robert Hawkins Wednesday at the Von Maur department store in the Westroads Mall.

Police are still investigating Omaha’s worst single day of violence and have not determined the order in which Hawkins’ victims fell.

McDonald was found in customer service, where Hawkins killed himself. An undisclosed number of rounds remained in his AK-47-style semiautomatic rifle.

Police released no new details of the rampage, but accounts Sunday from the families of McDonald and two other victims paint three portraits of courage in the face of chaos and terror.

The second involved Dianne Clavin Trent, the 53-year-old customer service worker who stayed on the phone with 911, describing the gunman until he took her life.

The third was customer Gary Scharf, 48, of Lincoln, who was on the first floor when he heard gunfire, ran up the escalator toward the carnage and shouted at Hawkins a floor above, “I called 911!”

All three were killed.

Omaha police declined Sunday to comment on the relatives’ accounts. A spokesman for Omaha Mayor Mike Fahey said the scope of the crime, the number of detectives involved and the forensic evidence were too great at the moment to piece together exactly what happened and when.

Dr. Joe Shehan of Omaha, married to the only daughter of John and Kathy McDonald, said he bases his account on a detail that his mother-in-law shared in the car on their way home from the mall that day. It was a detail he forgot in the fog of grief and shock, and it is one Kathy McDonald left out of subsequent accounts until an Omaha police detective told the family what a hero they had in John McDonald:

That he left the hiding spot that concealed Kathy. That he left whatever protection that waiting room chair could offer as more than a dozen Von Maur employees huddled in fear in a back room that had no locking door and no other way out, should the gunman enter.

The police detective told McDonald’s family that he stood and faced Hawkins. The gunman hadn’t seen the McDonalds hiding when he entered, firing into customer service.

Hawkins struck four workers there and killed two, including Trent. She was telling a 911 dispatcher that “a young boy with glasses” was coming toward the counter.

“Oh my God!” she cried.

Her call ended with shots ringing in the background.

“Why she didn’t drop that phone and run, we’ll never know,” said her sister, Kellie Schlecht.

AND WHAT was Robert A. Hawkins, 19 — you know, the guy who wanted to “go out in style” – doing right before he went to meet his Maker? He was gunning down unarmed, innocent people with a high-powered rifle in the Von Maur store at Westroads.

“Go out in style,” indeed.

Cat’s in the cradle . . . cat’s in the cradle.

And as I hung up the phone it occurred to me
He’d grown up just like me
My boy was just like me

Or us and our sick little culture . . . as the case may be.

Requiescat in pace

From an article in this afternoon’s Omaha World Herald:

Sunshine peeked through winter’s gray sky today, as mourners braved a bitter cold.

At churches in Omaha and Curtis, Neb., friends and family gathered to grieve the tragic loss of lives in Wednesday’s Westroads Mall shooting.

Mothers cried for lost sons and daughters, children wept for parents and grandparents, and strangers came to pay their respects.

Omahans Janet D. Jorgensen, Dianne Clavin Trent and Gary Joy were laid to rest today, as were John V. McDonald of Council Bluffs and Gary Scharf of Lincoln.

“To lose a loved one is always hard,” said the Rev. Harry Buse at the funeral for Trent this morning. “But to lose a loved one in such a violent and senseless way is particularly painful.

“This time, literally the whole world held you in their hearts. There were millions of hearts beating as one, sharing this huge loss.”

DIANNE TRENT was a fellow parishioner at St. Leo’s, and I stopped by her wake service there last night. The place was was as full as it usually is for a well-attended Mass.

Men and women wiped away tears as Dianne’s eldest niece eulogized her murdered aunt, as the entire corps of nieces, nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews gathered behind the ambo in solidarity. By the time the eulogy was done, I was profoundly sad that I had never gotten to know Dianne, who I’m sure I had seen from time to time in the congregation at Mass.

Death. Sorrow. Regret.

Broken hearts and no second chances.

A GAPING HOLE in the fabric of life, a gash where a loved one ought to be. Where a loved one was just a few days ago.

All of this is what is left behind when a mentally ill, 19-year-old punk decides to “go out in style” amid a culture in love with violence and death — a culture that turns out so much of what it loves most.