When I got online today I immediately saw the glaring headline signalling that 12 people were killed and 31 were wounded at Fort Hood Army base in Texas.
My first thoughts when to a friend of mine who resides on an Army base with his wife and son. I was relatively sure that they weren't at whatever base this was, although I wasn't 100% on where Fort Hood was off the top of my head. And fortunately for him and his family, they weren't there.
However I had that same feeling that I got when I first heard that 32 people had been killed and many others wounded at Virginia Tech back in 2007. My mother used to be a professor there, and she still knows many people there. My brothers both have been there and I believe they had friends there that they visit.
I was going crazy trying to get ahold of my family to make sure they weren't there. And fortunately they weren't.
Unfortunately not everyone can say that today in relation to Fort Hood. I don't know what made the man or men who did this snap. There are varying theories by people who don't really know what they're talking about. Whether it had anything to do with the Stop Loss program and someone just snapped because they didn't wanna go back, or that type of thing.
As I said I don't know and won't venture a guess. I can't imagine what it would take to make me want to kill people. I've gotten angry at people before, and I've wanted to put my hands on some people and just really let them know how I felt, but never with the thought of killing someone.
As tragic as this day was, I have a feeling that it's going to get a lot worse in one specific way. After 9/11 the instances of anti-Arab American violence skyrocketed. All over the country we saw instances of perfectly peaceful Arab Americans getting harrassed, beaten, and even killed due to the overwhelming anger and frustration that we as a nation felt that day.
And reviewing the information today, I have a feeling that there may be a bit of something like that in store, only not on as large a scale obviously. There was one man killed and two more or in custody. The man's name, who is the one who is the alleged shooter is Major Malik Nadal Hasan.
Can you imagine what's going to happen? And sure enough, it's already begun. I had to look up an article to find out the correct name of the soldier, and already Fox News is going forth with the expected comments.
Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo has a good post about that in which he writes the following:
The fact that the primary assailant has an Arabic name and is presumably, though we don't know this yet, of Muslim extraction if not a practicing Muslim, is going to be the focus of attention. That is an issue that speaks for itself. And I'm sure it will be the focus of much discussion over the coming days.
And that's exactly what I thought as soon as I saw his name. I thought, "oh shit, this isn't going to be pretty". We have a tendency to want to narrow things down to the smallest labels.
When people hear his name, the VERY FIRST thing that will pop into many of their minds is "that's not an American name" or "that's one of THOSE people". And not all of those people thinking that will be doing so out of a racist viewpoint, but more because that's sort of where our society is at this point.
And sure enough, Fox News has already started putting out that meme. Shepard Smith, who I actually LIKE, and is pretty much the only guy on Fox who has a backbone and will buck the GOP talking points that he's shoveled, unlike other people on that network, fired the first shot in this situation:
Via RawStory:
In an interview with US Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), Fox host Shepard Smith asked: "The names tells us a lot, does it not, senator?"
"It does," Hutchison replied. "It does, Shepard."
And that really disappoints me, because while I fully expected many on the fringe of the right wing to pick up that ball and run with it full steam ahead, and perhaps even some of the Fox News people such as Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck, Shep was the very last person I would have expected that from.
