Today is Saturday, August 26, 2023. Today marks another nadir in America’s fascination with guns in that three people were killed today in what is being described as a racially motivated attack at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida. The assailant, a white man in his twenties, has not been identified as of yet, but Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters said at a news conference early Saturday evening that “This shooting was racially motivated and he hated Black people.”

This sad story is reported on in an online article for CNN by Andy Rose, Ashley R. Williams, and Isabel Rosales entitled “3 people dead after gunman targeted Black people in Jacksonville, Florida, officials say.”

The reason Sheriff Waters identified the gunman as a white supremacist is that the cowardly, disaffected youth left behind three manifestos outlining his “disgusting ideology of hate” and his motive in the attack. All three victims, two men and one woman, were Black.

Waters said the shooter lived in Clay County, Florida, south of Jacksonville, with his parents. Jacksonville is located in northeast Florida, about 35 miles south of the Georgia border.

The shooting started shortly after 1 p.m. ET, blocks away from Edward Waters University, a historically Black school where students living on campus were told to stay in their residence halls. No one was injured on the campus.

The sheriff said investigators believe the gunman acted alone and wore both a tactical vest and mask during the attack. He was armed with an AR-15-style rifle and a handgun. Unfortunately, this description of this hateful and diseased person is all too common in America’s embrace of white supremacy that is more of a threat today than that posed by foreign-born terrorists.

The deceased shooter’s guns were swathed with swastikas that were drawn on one of the guns with white paint, according to Jacksonville’s sheriff.

Special agent in charge of the FBI’s Jacksonville office, Sherri Onks, said, “We have opened a federal civil rights investigation, and we will pursue this incident as a hate crime.” Pretty obvious, wouldn’t you say?

This explosion of violence on the heels of the sixtieth anniversary of the March on Washington today serves as a stark reminder that the work of the slain civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is far from over.

As of now, there have been at least 470 mass shootings in the United States so far in 2023, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The nation surpassed the 400 mark in July – the earliest month such a high number has been recorded since 2013, the group said. This is totally gross, in my opinion, and yet nothing is done about the obscene number of firearms in this country.

This one incident in Jacksonville marked one of several shooting incidents in the country over the last two days, including in Massachusetts and Oklahoma. “Shots rang out across several cities, bringing a startling halt to normal summertime activities like high school football games and weekend shopping.”

In Boston, at least seven people were injured this morning in a shooting that interrupted a popular parade, police stated. A high school football game in Choctaw, Oklahoma, took a deadly turn Friday night after a possible altercation led to three people being shot, authorities say. One of them – someone’s child, a 16-year-old boy, died. And four people were killed, including a 17-year-old, were killed at an apartment in Joppatowne, Maryland, Saturday morning, officials said.

As reported in several of these news reports, the cycle of American violence is unceasing. Not until our political leaders grow a spine and pass some sort of commonsense gun control legislation will this scourge ever diminish.

Since it’s getting late, I can quickly report that Elliot and I spent the evening with our good friend “Gene” who drove back yesterday from Truro, Massachusetts, to get his Bayside house ready for possession by its new owners. Yes, Gene has sold his Bayside property after living there with his now-deceased husband for almost 40 years. Gene faces the overwhelming task of packing and decluttering many of his objets d’art scattered all around the house. Elliot and I have offered our services in helping Gene with the task of wrapping the many pieces that he will be taking with him to his new townhouse in Provincetown. But seeing Gene move will be such a horrible adjustment for the two of us since we have always depended on Gene being in his Bayside house for a number of months before flying down to Florida to his winter enclave in Miami. To remedy not seeing him in Queens, we will just have to drive to Provincetown to visit him in his new digs more often then.

So we met at a Thai establishment on Francis Lewis Boulevard called BKNY Thai Restaurant. We then drove to a local ice cream/gelato parlor where we had the cool treat and then drove back to Gene’s Bayside house where we sat in his porch room and watched a Travel program on “The Mysteries of Cuba,” which was very intriguing. We left Gene at 10.

The hour of midnight is drawing near, and I can’t even write about yesterday’s play The Shark Is Broken, which we saw at the Golden Theatre, on 45th Street. The play delves into the experiences of the three major actors on the Jaws set: Richard Dreyfuss, Roy Scheider, and Robert Shaw, as they shared close quarters on a fishing boat as production on the soon-to-be blockbuster hit was halted because of technical problems with the mechanical shark being used in the film. What was amazing about the play is that Ian Shaw plays his own father in the production. He is the splitting image of his booze-soaked, virile father (Shaw fathered 10 children, it says in his biography) who died at age 51 from a heart attack.

I will tell you tomorrow, possibly, if I enjoyed the play if you can wait that long. I might not be here again tomorrow because Elliot and I are attending a memorial service for “Rob’s” father in Clifton, New Jersey. It’s called for 6 and I have no idea when we’ll be back.

Have a good Sunday.

Stay safe and be well.