Missed When Gone; Misfits with Guns, Metro

RantWoman is playing this wonderful Irish Gaelic version of "The Cups Song / You're gonna miss me when I'm Gone" in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination? The kennedys are Irish after all and keeping Irish Gaelic alive is awesome no matter who does it.

The Cup Song - 'You're Gonna Miss Me When I'm Gone'

Um, no. It's nice the Cups Song showed up in RantWoman's media stream on the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy Assassination. But RantWoman is not really playing the Cups Song for the Kennedy Assassination.

RantWoman was two, probably still in diapers and learning to wear glasses when Kennedy was assassinated. RantWoman is doing the historical walkback along with everyone else. RantWoman is grateful the radio walkback included meetings with A Phillip Randolph and Cong. John Lewis, a speech before a Mexican American group in Dallas, and an excursion to visit Lee Harvey Oswald's days as a misfit in Minsk before he joined the ranks of the maladjusted with guns, an interview with the police officer handcuffed to Oswald when Oswald was shot.

A friend old enough to remember and to remember even her very Republican family being transfixed went with RantWoman on a telephone tour of the sights and smells of other searing circumstances: fierce hurricanes, the city of NY after 9/11, all the tear gas dumped in downtown Seattle during WTO. So RantWoman is not really thinking of the Kennedy Assassination. For both local public and personal reasons, RantWoman is thinking ahead a few days to the anniversary of two awful bus events years and awhole continent apart.

The first, as far as RantWoman knows in words, never mind RantWoman feeling a punch in the gut from hundreds of miles away, was all unfavorable physics and lousy visibility and Blind Roommate, 5 feet tall, crossing the street in front of a bus at dusk. Apparently, according to Blind Roommate's parents, unfavorable physics and perhaps engineering issues had occurred before in the same location, but there was no single malevolent actor attached to the tragedy. So now we just play the Cups Song, though if it were in Turkish, that might better fit Blind Roommate and her family.

The other bus episode on RantWoman's mind is the year a gunman fatally shot a bus driver on Seattle's Aurora Bridge and then shot himself. The bus plunged off the bridge and fatally injured another passenger.

Readers who need the full trauma spelled out are invited to use their own search engines, but here are some sample links:

History Link
http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&File_Id=734


A nice sarcastic blog post
http://stalkingseattle.blogspot.com/2012/06/aurora-bridge-bus-shooting.html

The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/29/us/seattle-shooting-and-bus-crash-investigated-as-murder-suicide.html


As long as we are on the subject of misfits with guns and Metro drivers, a couple links from events a few months ago:

http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Metro-bus-driver-shot-in-downtown-Seattle-4725721.php

http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2021599613_busshootingxml.html

Maybe it's not fair to rate bus drivers getting shot at by passengers right up there in memorial importance with the assassination of a President, but there are more bus drivers to shoot at than Presidents and it's still WAY too easy for misfits and the mentally ill to buy guns. So for today, play the Cups Song again for everyone who needs to be remembered, remember, and try to think about ways to keep mentally ill people from getting guns.