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Ali Martin
The Monitor brokers in hope. Some weeks it takes a little extra effort to find some.
California was in the spotlight over the weekend for a Lunar New Year shooting that killed 11 people in Monterey Park. Debates on gun legislation started up immediately, even as the community tried to make sense of the celebration-turned-tragedy.
Then Monday afternoon another gunman killed seven people about 400 miles north in Half Moon Bay. The suspect shot up two separate mushroom farms, where victims included workers – many of whom lived with their families on one of the properties. A short while later the gunman surrendered to local police.
Just a week ago, a family of six was killed in the tiny town of Goshen, in the central part of the state. Authorities have linked that massacre to drug cartels.
And this is on top of the winter rainstorms that killed at least 22 people and wreaked billions of dollars’ worth of damage throughout the state.
But even in tragedy, hope finds roots. Francine Kiefer found it in abundance in the aftermath of the Monterey Park shooting: in local churches, at a nearby grocery store, and at the crime scene, where people came from all over the city to pay their respects.
We could take hope from Brandon Tsay, who averted further killing at a second location near Monterey Park. Armed with nothing but courage and adrenaline, he wrestled away the shooter’s weapon and ran off the attacker. Mr. Tsay told “Good Morning America”: “Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the ability to have adversity to fear when fearful events happen.”
And hope is emerging in Half Moon Bay – a rural town on the Northern California coastline just south of San Francisco, where “everyone knows everyone,” according to locals. Within hours of the shootings, residents were delivering blankets to a reunification center where families are sheltering.
The West Coast is thick with heartbreak, digging deep to tend to the realities that follow these types of events. But hope is anchoring those next steps. As Democratic Rep. Judy Chu said on Sunday, not far from the scene of the shooting in Monterey Park, “We’re a resilient community.”
