9/11 and Senseless Shootings

Here's my 9/11 story: on 9/11 a friend from college, Ryan McGlothlin, decided to drop out of his Chemistry PhD program at Stanford and join the Marines. On November 16, 2005 Ryan was shot and killed in Iraq, while he was shooting at Iraqis. I was asleep in my bed when a friend called early in the morning to tell me the news. Ryan was quiet and kind. He liked giggling contagiously at absurd fart jokes, he liked studying and excelling, mastery of subjects, and he liked hanging out with guys. Primarily I knew Ryan because he was friends with my boyfriend’s circle of guy friends. Ryan never dated while he was in college but he enjoyed the company of guys and masculine spaces in a warm, non-aggressive way: the silly joking, the camaraderie of playing team sports.

Apparently Ryan died with a poem in his pocket titled, "Don't Quit" and because of that President Bush made Ryan and his Don’t Quit poem the kicker of speech arguing that leaving Iraq was immoral. Cindy Sheehan, the mother of another dead soldier, had been protesting outside Bush’s Texas compound for months and somehow Bush gave a speech that off loaded responsibility for continuing the War in Iraq onto a 26 year old he killed, who had deep misgivings about the Iraq War when he was alive. Ryan's parents had given permission for Bush to speak about Ryan but they didn't know everything Bush was going to say and they did not love the speech overall. After the speech was over they went on CNN to politely, gingerly express their discomfort. Ryan had not voted for Bush or his policies, ever, he was a Virginia coalfield Democrat. When Ryan died, it felt like Ryan died for Bush’s lie about Weapons of Mass Destruction, senselessly and the entire national discourse told me that if I said that, I was a traitor to Ryan. I recall Ryan's mom was especially upset by the way Bush tried to pretend he knew what policies Ryan would have wanted. From my perspective Ryan was dead and Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld had senselessly, pointlessly killed him. As for, “Don’t Quit,” I wish Ryan had not quit his Chemistry PhD.

Two years after Ryan was shot and killed by Iraqis, while he was shooting at Iraqis, a Virginia Tech classroom my dad taught in at 10AM was shot up during the 9AM class. The Virginia Tech shooting was immediately labeled universally senseless. The demands of senselessness felt oppressive since I desperately needed to understand what had happened. I struggled to process that a student had filled a classroom where my dad taught with bullet holes and dead student bodies. For 10 years I struggled to make sense of the Virginia Tech shooting and eventually, I found sense. I am convinced that if the shooting happened today, the shooter would quickly be labeled an incel, motivated by misogyny. But making sense of events your society demands you find senseless brings me back to Ryan and his shooting death. Calling Ryan’s death senseless felt too radical to utter aloud at first but should I have ever become comfortable calling Ryan’s shooting “senseless?” I wish Ryan did not quit his Chemistry PhD but he did quit and he was motivated by 9/11 to sign up for the Marines. For years I could not shake the question, would I really feel better about Ryan’s death if he died in Afghanistan? Ryan's death and the Virginia Tech shooting were both in a way senseless, in that they were not morally justifiable but that's not the same as defying understanding or making sense. I made sense of the Virginia Tech shooting, it was motivated by misogyny, and I needed to make sense of Ryan's shooting death too.

I don't blame Ryan morally in the same way I blame the Virginia Tech shooter but it is still important to say that Ryan's shooting death and shooting were motivated by xenophobia, greed, imperialism, Islamophobia. Ryan's mom died a couple years ago, she wasn't old but she wasn't young, it felt like burying her youngest son shortened her life. Fuck empire, oil, and every politician and news squawker who makes some teen or 20 something American kid into a shooter who gets shot, that's my 9/11 story. Maybe if we remember, we won’t do it again.