Orlando. Istanbul. Dallas. Nice. And now, again, Baton Rouge. Ever since a gunman opened fire on Florida nightclub goers five weeks ago, killing 49, we’ve been buffeted by images of bloodshed.
The scenes of the violence are often far away and disconnected from one another. But all too often, the victims — whether they’re patrolling the streets or out for an evening of fireworks — remind us of ourselves, our families, our neighbors. To many people, the barrage has started to feel inescapable. As non-stop news coverage and social media confront people with video of conflict and death, the images have begun to exact a collective toll of exhaustion and anxiety.
“The world is crazy right now. It is complete chaos,” Lauren Rose, sister-in-law of Montrell Jackson, one of the three police officers slain in Louisiana, said Monday. “And it all needs to stop, everything. We all need peace.”
Such feelings reach far beyond Baton Rouge, which has been rocked since the July 5 killing of Alton Sterling, the first of two recent, highly publicized shootings of black men by police officers. It doesn’t matter if there is no connection between those shootings and last week’s fatal truck rampage in France. Together, they contribute to a sense of turmoil that seems beyond easy resolution.
“It’s scary but yet I don’t know how, like in Nice and stuff, how that can be prevented,” Terri Smith, a legal secretary from Richfield, Minn., said Monday. “You get tired of it after a while, I mean, and you’re kind of helpless.”
Cheri Lovre, a Portland, Ore., crisis counselor who specializes in working with children, teachers and communities after school shootings, said conversations in recent days increasingly convince her that even people far removed from violence are experiencing a vague, but unsettling sense of angst.
“The effect is trickling down to all of us,” said Lovre, who has counseled people after shootings at Colorado’s Columbine High School, in Newtown, Conn., and in other communities. “When you have the TV on and it (the violence) is in your living room, Nice is suddenly right here.”
“There’s no sense to this,” said secretary Rita Donovan, 63, of Nutley, N.J., while on a lunch break. “This time has reminded me of the bad time of the 1960s.”
In Grandview, Mo., Sean Hanan, a 48-year-old equipment operator, said the past few weeks’ events worry him that people are being split into opposing camps. Hanan lives on the same block south of Kansas City that Gavin Eugene Long, who killed three law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge, La., did when Long was in high school.
“Things are going a little bit crazy,” said Hanan, who’s between jobs. “Most people are just trying to feed their families and not get shot by someone with an ideological agenda.”
He added, “It’s all just starting to blur together.”