Morning Thoughts: October 4, 2017

As one whose graduate education was in public administration, I’ve nothing but praise for the women and men who work for and protect the City of Las Vegas.

They have, in my viewing of the news, operated on a professional scale that could be a model for all. They must all be exhausted, shocked, and operating on pure adrenalin, but they press on. They are simultaneously working to discover the facts, analyze the facts, report the facts (accurately), and support and comfort the survivors and their families. I’m in hopes that someone will chronicle their actions from the first shots until the final resolution.

It is with dismay that I see the “conspiracy theory worms” already crawling from beneath the rocks and out of the cesspools around the city, anxious to spew their noxious filth. It is insulting beyond belief that they do so. It cheapens the acts of heroism and professionalism displayed by the elected officials and public personnel of the city, from the brave public safety personnel to the office workers. They all deserve better, as do the victim and survivors.

I can only hope that it will stop, but I doubt that it will. The urge to rewrite history to suit our own notions and prejudices is a strong one, perhaps best described by author William Manchester while discussing the decades-long efforts to distort the facts of the assassination of John F, Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald. After publishing his famous work, The Death of a President, he wrote:

“In the end I concluded that [the Warren] report was correct on the two main issues. Oswald was the killer, and he had acted alone.… Those who desperately want to believe that President Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy have my sympathy. I share their yearning … if you put the murdered President of the United States on one side of a scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the other side, it doesn’t balance. You want to add something weightier to Oswald. It would invest the President’s death with meaning, endowing him with martyrdom. He would have died for something.”

As the beleaguered public workers of Las Vegas enter their third full day of a special kind of hell instigated by a special kind of twisted mind, my hope is that we give them the undiminished support that they deserve. This includes our not paying the slightest attention to the ill-reasoned attempts that will surely emerge, attempts aimed at disparaging the findings of the professionals and confusing a stunned and stupefied public.