On first consideration, and on the second... maybe even the fourth, firing a laser out of a church's bell tower seems an odd method of honoring a person's memory. But the blue stripe that spanned the sky over Canonsburg's downtown this past week, which seemed to increase in brightness as the dusk sky fell into its mournful and inevitable black, turns out to have been the most apt metaphor for the role of law enforcement I can imagine -- the beam's path being indifferently and unrelentingly straight, sharp and idealistic but so maddeningly susceptible to deflection or even termination by any object that interrupts it. A sheet of paper. A naked hand.
At the end of a year which has seen the infuriating politicization of every last thing, standing together to honor an officer who died in the line of duty felt like our small town got this little taste of solidarity that all of society was thirsting for. If you hold a tragedy like last week's killings at arm's length (as I do) you can just use it to see and feel whatever it is you need to see or feel. Right now, I'm a junkie for consensus.
As such, I pushed aside the creeping sense that the observance of Scott Bashioum's death was disproportionate to the attention paid to Dalia Sabae, the killer's primary victim -- I woman I'd never and probably never would have met, but whose death is an obvious impoverishment to our community.
It felt right for Scott Bashioum to be foremost in the community's focus, because he aspired to protect US. He died in our service, whereas it felt like we were all on equal footing with Dahlia. We share some variation of the things to which she was susceptible -- all of us kind of at the mercy of chance and hoping to dodge the screaming madness that we know is out there past the trees. And while we can imagine ourselves, or someone we desperately love, being Dalia, there aren't a lot of us who can even touch the idea of actually being Scott Bashioum.
The excuses I made for Canonsburg were unfounded. Community donations paid for Dahlia's funeral, there was a candlelight vigil at her home. The blue ribbons along Pike Street was soon joined by a purple one commemorating her, and a lighter blue one in tribute to her unborn son. Canonsburg, for it's weird fascination with parade chairs and dumb arguments about, well... parade chairs, has mastered the task of commemoration and elevated it to art.
In its last night of illumination, the brilliant and fragile beam of the laser had been lit in purple for Dalia. That news found me at an inopportune time: as I was standing in a longish line at a Sheetz holding a bag of kettle cooked chips in one hand and scrolling through my phone with the other. The news tightened my throat and reddened my eyes. The guy at the register said "good morning" to me and I couldn't say it back, hoping that he'd assume I had some late-season allergy and not really expecting him or anyone to understand that I had once again fallen in love with this dumb, weird, beautiful town.
At the end of a year which has seen the infuriating politicization of every last thing, standing together to honor an officer who died in the line of duty felt like our small town got this little taste of solidarity that all of society was thirsting for. If you hold a tragedy like last week's killings at arm's length (as I do) you can just use it to see and feel whatever it is you need to see or feel. Right now, I'm a junkie for consensus.
As such, I pushed aside the creeping sense that the observance of Scott Bashioum's death was disproportionate to the attention paid to Dalia Sabae, the killer's primary victim -- I woman I'd never and probably never would have met, but whose death is an obvious impoverishment to our community.
It felt right for Scott Bashioum to be foremost in the community's focus, because he aspired to protect US. He died in our service, whereas it felt like we were all on equal footing with Dahlia. We share some variation of the things to which she was susceptible -- all of us kind of at the mercy of chance and hoping to dodge the screaming madness that we know is out there past the trees. And while we can imagine ourselves, or someone we desperately love, being Dalia, there aren't a lot of us who can even touch the idea of actually being Scott Bashioum.
The excuses I made for Canonsburg were unfounded. Community donations paid for Dahlia's funeral, there was a candlelight vigil at her home. The blue ribbons along Pike Street was soon joined by a purple one commemorating her, and a lighter blue one in tribute to her unborn son. Canonsburg, for it's weird fascination with parade chairs and dumb arguments about, well... parade chairs, has mastered the task of commemoration and elevated it to art.
In its last night of illumination, the brilliant and fragile beam of the laser had been lit in purple for Dalia. That news found me at an inopportune time: as I was standing in a longish line at a Sheetz holding a bag of kettle cooked chips in one hand and scrolling through my phone with the other. The news tightened my throat and reddened my eyes. The guy at the register said "good morning" to me and I couldn't say it back, hoping that he'd assume I had some late-season allergy and not really expecting him or anyone to understand that I had once again fallen in love with this dumb, weird, beautiful town.
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