All mass murders are terrible to contemplate. The fact that they are so terrible and seemingly without reason leads many to decry mental illness for no sane person could desire to perpetrate such an act but that significantly misrepresents what mental illness is and distances us from the reality of not only the events themselves but also the truth about our own human nature. Blessed and cursed with an active and detailed imagination when these dreadful murders occur I often find myself thinking deeply about what it must have been like, what the events themselves must have felt like to the people trapped in those living nightmares.
The recent, and it’s a sad commentary on our culture and our times that I refer to it as the recent rather than as a singular event, mass murder at the Borderline Bar in Thousand Oaks California dogs my thoughts more than other recent acts of horrendous evil and it comes down to a single fact, a single person; Telemachus Orfanos.
Telemachus, who was not even thirty years old and who had also served when his country called by enlisted in the United States Navy died along with dozen people when a gunman opened fired at the Borderline Bar but more than the senseless slaughter I am haunted by the fact that Telemachus had survived the Las Vegas a year earlier when scores of people were murdered.
He was not the only person at the Borderline that had also been at the Las Vegas concert. Both events were centered on Country Western music, thousands had attended the massive concert, and the locations were not that terribly distant but the sheer concept that people who had survived one mass slaughter were a year later subjected to another is truly horrifying and for Telemachus to die at the Borderline would seem to underline that horror with a specificity that refuses to release me. At odd times of the day, when mind may wander, I find myself thinking about that night. How must it have felt when those shots first began ringing out, what terrible flashbacks did that prompt, what thoughts if any passed though his mind before he died?
It would hardly be surprising if someone established a foundation in Telemachus’ name. I have written before on the power of individual identity versus an amorphous and intangible number. This undoubtedly is the reason this person’s story refuses to depart from my mind. Eleven other people died that night, each one had a full life with twists, turns, highs and lows, but Telemachus’ story, easily grasped and powerful transcends being woeful statistic and real tragedy is that it shouldn’t be that way. We can’t hold a dozen points of view, a dozen stories, a dozen lives in our heads but we can picture one smiling man, a veteran, and only time will tell if he becomes a symbol.
