Six Degrees of Anguish

The people who live in my Independent Living building have a close connection with Michigan State University where the latest in a long line of mass murders occurred earlier this week. We even fly their flag on game days, we have viewing parties in our cafe and people walk around wearing their Spartan Green. But this week The Six Degrees of Separation Theory was on full display around here and both their flag and our American flag are flying at half mast. The joyful connections with the university have been replaced with prayer vigils and having clergy available to give grief support to those who need it. Many residents here have grandchildren who attend MSU and one of the five kids who was shot and is still in the hospital fighting for his life is the great-nephew of a couple living on the floor above me. My next door neighbor’s granddaughter was supposed to be in the class on the campus where the shootings took place but she had skipped school that night. Her parents didn’t know she was safe for quite awhile, though, so they are processing how close they came to her going through a horrendous experience at best or dying at worst. Her grandmother said, “We’ll deal with her skipping classes later.” They didn’t know she did that sort of thing.

The first time I wrote about a mass shooting was in December of 2012 when 28 people were killed including twenty kids between the ages of six and seven at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut. And here I am over a decade later. The names and ages changed, the problem of gun violence in America just keeps getting more and more frequent while (mostly) Republican lawmakers sit on their tusks offering thoughts and prayers. Although they don’t do that so much anymore since the Democrats recently called them out about their useless prayers and thoughts when they are in a position to actually do something to keep guns of mass destruction out of the hands of those who should not have them. We’ve all become numb by mass shootings just like we’ve become numb to the gridlock in Washington.

As long as Kevin McCarty can still stand behind a pathological liar like Republican Representative George Santos and a self-described Christian Nationalist and Conspiracy nutcase like Majority Taylor Green this country can no longer claim to a be a moral country. Whether you believe we lead from the bottom up or from the top down, when our lawmakers don’t seem to care about Ethics and Truth we are going to keep getting ruled by the self-centered people with the deepest pockets and right now that’s still the NRA and the Ultra-Far Right.

I’m glad Nikki Haley threw her hat in the ring but her pitting herself against seniors over 75 isn’t going to endear her to the aging Republican Base and it made her a prime target for 76 year old Trump. Who knows, maybe that’s the secret master plan in the party, let her take the first volleys from the x-President then let someone else step into the race who can be an actual, serious candidate. Does anyone really believe a woman could become the President of the United States in this day and age? If half the country doesn’t trust a woman to make her own reproductive decisions why would they trust a woman to sit in the Oval Office?

Enough politics, let’s talk about the parlor game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. It was developed by three college students back in 1994 and it’s based on a discussion Kevin had on TV and the six degrees of separation theory that goes back to 1929. It speculates that any two people on earth are only ever six or less connections apart, only in the game you had to link anyone in Hollywood to the actor Kevin Bacon with lowest numbers in between. Since he was a prolific actor for decades when the game was developed it was fun for movie buffs to play and my husband, while not a movie buff, was obsessed with the theory. Here’s an example from Wikipedia: "Elvis Presley: Elvis Presley was in Change of Habit (1969) with Ed Asner Ed Asner was in JFK (1991) with Kevin Bacon. Therefore, Asner has a Bacon number of 1, and Presley (who never appeared in a film with Bacon) has a Bacon number of 2." As long as I’d known my husband he could meet a stranger and after talking awhile he could more often than not come up with a connection. It helped that my husband had a scary good memory and never forgot anything he’d ever heard, saw, read or experienced.

You don’t need a good memory to see the Six Degrees of Anguish I've seen in recent days regarding this latest school shooting. My neighbor used to be a child psychiatrist and I have no doubt she knows the full range of trauma her granddaughter is going to be dealing with in the weeks to come, just knowing she should have been in that room where her classmates died. My neighbor is the sweetest, most grounded person living here and I hate this for her and for all the other relatives who are only one degree away from those who died and those who survived. ©