“Watch out, he’s got a gun!” a desperate voice called out.
POP-POP. The gunman took down two brawny bouncers at the fast food restaurant before most of us 143 patrons in Nathan’s eatery on Times Square even realized that fictional, vicarious T.V. and movie violence had just vanished as the gunman barged in the front door and opened fire to give us all an immediate lesson in the actual reality of violence. The lives of 143 people and the hundreds, perhaps thousands of interconnected people in their lives changed forever in a matter of seconds by a Sole Man firing a legally registered pistol.
As the shouting and guttural screaming out of the names of loved ones began, most patrons ran away from the entrance where the gunman indiscriminately fired the 9mm pistol into the terrified crowd. I had to watch. I don’t know why. Perhaps I watched too many Western movies as a kid and truly believed you could “duck a bullet.” I overturned a table, for imagined protection I suppose. My 20 to 25 foot proximity to the killer allowed our eyes to lock after the third shot was fired into the crowd. As we gazed into one another’s eyes my thoughts sharply moved to how a person could be so desperate that mass murder in a hamburger joint seem like a good way to answer his problems. I can’t get my head around why this is happening. Learning later that he was an unemployed Civil Engineer did not help me understand. All I know is that his eyes were not intimidating. If anything, they were just sad and desperate.
Suddenly he broke our gaze, moved the gun’s barrel from me, just to the left, and shot the face off of the man standing at my right shoulder. He proceeded to empty the clip. Five people were killed and four were wounded. Certainly, their deaths and injuries are a tragedy, however, I sometimes think of the fact that no one will ever have the slightest idea of how many other people’s lives were also forever changed by this single act committed by a Sole Man in a single moment of time. So much change brought by one person.
In my case, another Sole Man, the massacre has been a part of who I am since 10:30 p.m., December 30th, 1978. Due to the fact that I let the horrific images fester, I have been both disabled and enabled since those few moments. My life has been one of nightmares, false perceptions, and mostly, feelings of victimization and vulnerability. However, the events perpetuated by Frederick Remings on that December night also provided me with an understanding of a part of the culture in which I live that is certainly not available in books or sociological journals. I am an Ethnographic Sociologist, by profession, a believer in Participant Observation, but this research was not academic, it was traumatic to the bone. It is still a part of my life in February of 2011. It is part of who I am.
Today, as I watch the media images of hundreds of thousands of Egyptians packing the central square of Cairo, I once again begin thinking about numbers and change, which of course got me to thinking about Frederick Remings and the 1978 killings and massive consequences the act or acts of a Sole Man can have on an untold of and un-thought of number of people. I was thinking that if one person can have such an impact on changing the lives of people, why is it so difficult for hundreds of thousands of people to bring about change? Personally I think they will. But then as I look through my “Thought Mirror”, the reverse image supports my original idea of the potential of the Sole Man, or woman, and change. President Hosni Mubarak has had a nearly incomprehensible influence on millions of Egyptians as well as people throughout the world during his thirty years of dictatorial rule of such a sensitive geo-political country. It is also true that I am only looking at half of the Disco Ball of my culture.
I also think of Sole Men such as Mahatma Gandhi and the hundreds and hundreds of other Sole Men and Sole Women that do great things for great numbers of humanity. It is truly astonishing when great changes come to large numbers of people, such as the break-up of the Soviet Union or the end of apartheid, but I will leave that one to the political scientists and historians. So, here is my big question; “Why are there so few Gandhi’s and Mother Theresa’s and seemingly so many Frederick Remings?” Maybe we only hear of the latter because it sells papers and keeps media ratings up, but maybe there is another reason worth examining. Although I am a “more than young” sociologist, I don’t have a clue as to the answer. Do you have any thoughts on the matter? I hope so because none of us know when life will become more complicated than deciding what to buy next of what flavor of Ben and Jerry’s works best for the Munchies. So, what do you think? If you want to kick this idea around a bit, I would love to hear your thoughts. But keep in mind that I don’t have any answers, just experiences. After all, I am just a “Sole Man.”
*The use of the term “Soul Man” in this blog is a literary choice and is in no way intended to diminish the significant contributions “Sole Women” have made and continue to make in human cultures.
