WHY DID THEY DIE?
The madman who attacked Orlando’s Pulse nightclub picked his spot carefully. Not any bar would do, not even any gay bar. He chose a safe space he knew well, filled with youth like him. The soon-to-be-victims danced beneath pink lights on Latin night, all smiles in the pictures they sent friends. Celebrating at closing time.
The 29-year-old killer came to send a message, as all terrorists do. He murdered 49 people and declared his allegiance to a grab bag of radical Islamists as he stood in a bloody bathroom. But the United States of America has a tradition more discriminating than the pipe bomb, more powerful than the long gun. The Klansmen who killed four girls in 1963 at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., were answered with the Civil Rights Act, which their crime helped make law. The hijackers of 9/11 brought out firefighters who raced up stairs as buildings collapsed. Charleston, S.C., responded last year to the murderous rampage of a white supremacist with a miles-long chain of brotherhood, while maimed runners on prosthetic legs returned to Boston to rekindle the spirit that bombers had tried to destroy. Unity and hope swamped fear and hate each time.
So after Orlando the resistance began, shared on Facebook and broadcast on national television: stories of friends who shielded friends from bullets, long lines of spontaneous volunteers to donate blood and rainbow colors splashed on cityscapes from Nashville to Sydney, Minneapolis to Tel Aviv. The next steps seemed easy to predict: national mourning, bipartisan shows of unity and a redoubling of resolve.
But somehow the script went sideways, and the country veered off track. It was not just that these murders struck at the tender inflammation of three long-divisive topics: guns, God and gays. The killer attacked in a season of turmoil as voters considered an election that was fast becoming a national referendum on the country’s very identity, its commitment to pluralism and its role as a beacon in the world. The terror this time did not unite. It tore.
As with anything else these days, you could divine your own meaning
