I’ve discovered some startling weirdness in the news of the day: A shooting rampage massacre was carried out this morning at an American military base in Washington, D.C., by a serviceman from the Dallas-Ft. Worth area of Texas, and has resulted in the deaths of thirteen people.
A shooting rampage massacre was carried out four years ago at a military base in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area of Texas, by a serviceman from the Washington, D.C. area, and it resulted in the deaths of thirteen people.
It’s early in the investigation and information is still coming in, but as I sat down to write my report of today’s drama for ClashDaily.com, it occurred to me that the incident featured more odd correspondence with Major Nidal Hasan’s jihad attack at Fort Hood than only the number of confirmed dead.
Nidal Hasan was born and raised in the Arlington, Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. He shot dozens of his fellow U.S. Army personnel, killing 13, at Fort Hood, which is located just outside the greater Dallas-Ft. Worth area in Texas.
Aaron Alexis, this morning’s Navy Yard shooter, is reported by NBC News to be originally from Fort Worth, Texas (although, other sources have him from Brooklyn, NY). He shot dozens of his fellow U.S. Navy personnel, killing 13, at the Washington Navy Yard, which is located just across the Potomac River from Hasan’s hometown of Arlington, Virginia–incidentally, the site of the Pentagon.
I’m not suggesting any particular kind of conspiracy here, but it does seem like a bizarre set of ironic circumstances among the two attacks.
I live and work in the Washington, D.C. area, and I was driving past the Navy Yard on I-295 this morning as the horrific incident took place there. Not only was the highway scene chaotic with police vehicles screaming to try to get through the heavy rush-hour traffic to the base, there were multiple wrecks all over the place, and police had certain exits blocked off.
Later, in the afternoon, my work had me driving past the base again, and I contemplated the evacuated federal facilities and police-barricaded highway ramps.
I reflected on the 9/11 attacks of a dozen years ago, the anniversary of which we observed just last week, and how the Washington, D.C. area was affected so much by that event. I also recalled how the “Beltway Snipers” held the entire D.C. area in their grip of terror for three weeks in 2002, as they drove around the District, and the suburbs of Maryland and Virginia, picking off random victims. Their victims, by the way, also happened to number thirteen killed and wounded–with additional victims suspected (but not completely confirmed) to be associated with the sick sniper spree jihad of John Mohammed and Lee Boyd Malvo.
As we learn more about Aaron Alexis and about the exact details of what happened at the Navy Yard today, we can be sure that various parties will politicize (already have, actually) the awful loss of innocent life to their own cynical advantage.
Today I witnessed and heard a couple of my fellow Beltway-area denizens seek to downplay and even ignore completely what was going on at the Navy Yard. Such people seem, to me, to be so jaded and calloused to the nearly routine terrorism threats and occasional occurrences of random, mass violence associated with life in and around our nation’s capital that they try to act as if they just can’t be bothered to focus their personal alertness on such events, possible or actual, anymore, much less meditate upon their meaning…as long as they can somehow distance themselves from the occurrences, and from the victims and perpetrators, in whatever way.
I can’t. I have to focus and meditate on the import of such happenings. It’s my work, and apparently it’s my nature. Furthermore, I have to wonder what the patterns mean, and what else–coincidences, conspiracies, and/or confluences included–we might find out about.
Stay tuned, stay vigilant, and stay weird. More will be revealed.
