Saying the quiet part loud

The way it feels to watch an attempted assassination on Saturday and still go to work on Monday.

A little over a month ago, on an otherwise uneventful Saturday in Pennsylvania, a young man climbed onto the roof of a warehouse near Butler Farm Show grounds with an AR15 and fired eight rounds at an older man on a stage about 400 feet away. 

Four of the bullets missed, three of them hit bystanders (one fatally), and one hit the older man on the stage in the ear just fractions of an inch away from taking his life. 

All of this is captured in vivid detail from just about every conceivable angle and within moments it is uploaded to play on all of the many screens that we Americans look at for an average of seven hours and three minutes a day. 

Within an hour, it was hard to open any device and not see a man getting shot in the head. 

Within 36 hours we were all back at work, pretending like none of it happened. 

And that is just objectively weird and dystopian and fucked up, so I made a video about that feeling. 

blakeoftoday

A post shared by @blakeoftoday

Below is the script, what I got right, and what I missed: 

Over the past few years there has been this viral tweet that goes around every time there is some sort of large-scale crisis - 

6 words - 

‘I miss living in precedented times’

The first time I heard this was in 2020 and I thought it was hilarious and clever, however now it feels like it’s become a softer version of the Onion headline “No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens” (which turned ten years old in May of this year by the way). A guaranteed viral tweet whenever another paradigm-shifting event takes place, but also a testament to the fact that they seem to happen so frequently these days that we have the perfect soundbite to lob into the digital abyss. 

And recently Hank Green may have provided the best reply I’ve seen to date and that is “I’ve got some bad news for you about ‘times’” 

Sadly I was never able to find Hank’s tweet again, if you come across it, please leave a link in the comments. 

It reminds me of this conversation between Chuck Klosterman and Mike Eagle during 2016 shortly after Prince died. Mike points out that it feels like a lot more famous people seem to be dying lately, and Chuck points out that it’s likely because there are way more famous people now than ever before. We have, in many ways, democratized the means to achieve fame, so there are more famous people and thus more famous people dying. It was mind blowing to me at the time, an example of how there has never been a stable baseline, yet it is so natural to have nostalgia for one. They are always unprecedented times, etc.

The funny thing about history is they don’t talk about the guy who owned a bar next to the Ford theater who had to go to work the day after Lincoln was shot, 

The family who sold flowers outside the Arlington, when they buried Kennedy, 

So this was my way of trying to get around saying the thing that everyone was thinking about. I did this because the algorithm really does not like it when you talk about that thing and also because I think there is more opportunity to open the story up this way. 

For the record, I made these people up. I have no idea if there was a bar next to the Ford theater or if they are even allowed to sell flowers next to the Arlington, but I do know that we have all pre gamed at a watering hole next to the venue and we have all seen people selling flowers next to graveyards and that makes these people and situations a little more relatable. We have all studied about the assassinations of US presidents, but we likely haven’t ever thought about how it would feel to be a normal person in that world, because history isn’t told from that perspective - and that is part of the reason I think that it is hard for us all to understand that we are always living through history. They are always unprecedented times.  

The folks who had their daily marketing team stand ups this morning, after a weekend of trying to keep their kids from accidentally seeing a video of a guy getting shot in the head on your phone. 

Again, I didn’t want to say the guy’s name, because I think the nature of who he is and what his name evokes distracts us from the reality of what happened - of what trauma we all were exposed to, whether you love or hate the guy. It’s insane that we all watched this over and over, that it was probably harder to not see it, than to see it, that we have zero images of Lincoln getting shot, a handful of Kennedy, and now we probably have enough footage of Trump to watch it on repeat for days and never see the same angle twice. They are always unprecedented times.

If you are feeling uncomfortable and anxious today, if that feeling is amplified by the fact that no one else seems to be feeling that way -I think most people are. I think we are all buzzing with the same terror and shock and joy and pain until we can clock out and be still again. 

The only thing the I can tell you about times is they are never precedented but most of us have to go to work anyways.  

No notes here, really other than it felt so weird to pretend like none of this happened and just go to work, knowing full well that this is what we all were thinking. It was dark and sad and lonely, so I felt like I needed to say something and I’m lucky that some people listened to me. 

Thank you so much for reading these, they are actually really cathartic for me. I hope they are for you too.