Now is not the time to be on a soap box spouting opinions, but I feel it is relevant to share my perspective of the mass shooting event in Las Vegas last night. I was awoken late last night by my cell phone blowing up with messages from friends and family asking if I was okay. And then the stories started coming. It was a long night of horrific first hand accounts that I still haven't fully processed.
Those of you who are closer to me know that I work for a Country music radio station in the Los Angeles area, and yet again, I find myself way too closely involved with terror. I stood on those very festival grounds for the previous two years working at the Route 91 Harvest Festival, and this year, mainly due to my health, I decided to let others go in my place. There is a television news crew in our studio down the hall as I write this interviewing coworkers and friends who were shot at. This station sent 150 listeners to that show as winners of tickets. We still don't know if any were injured or killed. My close friend and producer of our morning show was in a crosswalk between the venue and the Mandalay Bay hotel when the shooting started. She and our promotions guy jumped into a nearby cab with three other people and escaped. They didn't get back to their room in the Mandalay until 4AM this morning. My good friend from Big Machine Records has more than one bullet hole in his car that was parked backstage. He told me he could hear bullets ricocheting off of the stage rigging for almost ten minutes straight. Another acquaintance of mine is a DJ from another Country station in Bakersfield CA and was standing directly in front of the stage when a young woman near him was hit in the shin by a bullet bouncing off of the pavement. He dragged her behind the stage with him where they ducked more bullets.
I can't believe I am recounting stories like this. This is the America we have created for ourselves. One where a single disturbed individual can unload hundreds of rounds of high powered ammunition out of an automatic weapon toward a crowd of 20,000 people from a hotel room window, and for what reason? The Force only knows. I can only hope that this leads to some serious conversations about our misguided policies concerning civil liberties, law enforcement, racial inequities and the right to bear arms meant for a battlefield, not our communities, much less anywhere near a music festival.
My town of San Bernardino continues to reel from a terrorist attack barely two years ago, and now one of my favorite cities in the world will be forever linked to the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. I'm sad, but I'm also pissed off. When does this stop? Or have we gone too far down this rabbit hole to ever come back? Right now I am truly lost, but I will find the light in this. As hard as this is now, I will focus on the good. I am a Jedi, an instrument of peace.
My thoughts go out to all those affected by this tragedy. I am with you.
