3 Strikes

Today has been a busy day.

This morning's news was full of talk about the ongoing teachers' strike in nearby Hayward, the school district that pays the least in all the tech-rich Bay Area. The School Board went on vacation during Spring Break while making a public announcement that they were contacting the teachers' union as they spoke. Now school is theoretically back in session and substitute teachers are in place, but the majority of students were not foolish enough to show up for classes today, and those who did will not be back tomorrow; they may be slow learners, but they're not that thick.

This afternoon I finally logged on to find that the now customary news of violence and death overseas had found its echo here at home. I couldn't help noticing how much larger the picture coming out of Virginia seems than those that have been coming out of Iraq in recent months.

I had just started reading about the Virginia Tech situation in which authorities believe that one gunman struck twice on the same campus: first in a dorm, then in a building full of classrooms chained shut from within. As with many other troubled mass killers, he turned his weapons on himself, but only after sending far too many others on ahead of him. Is it any more or less horrific that his violence was syncopated, as opposed to the immediate and finite destruction wreaked by suicide bombers?

As I was reading, I was notified that Andre Agassi had accidentally struck his wife in the face with his tennis racquet during a charity fundraiser yesterday. She required a towel and three stitches, but she walked away to play another day. I suppose it is worth noting that while both husband and wife are left-handed, he was wielding his racquet in his left hand, whereas she was playing with her right, yet it was still he who erred and she who was struck.

There is much news today but little logic. The Boys of Summer live and die by strikes in clusters of three. So, evidently, do many others . . . in situations far more literally life and death.