Earlier this week, a shooter murdered three students at Michigan State University and wounded five others. It was a day of terror, on that campus. I can tell you that the whole state of Michigan is reeling.

(Michigan is my home state, chockfull of family and friends, as is normal.)

From the Associated Press comes a report headed “Michigan State students’ training kicked in during shooting.” The details in it are astounding. They confirm that there is a new America.

When the texts began coming in about a shooter at Michigan State University, training that many students started receiving as schoolchildren automatically kicked in.

They ran. They found a place to hide. They locked and barricaded the doors. They turned out the lights. . . .

They are part of a generation that has grown up with active shooter drills.

As a rule, I am skeptical of claims of generational differences. People are people, facing their same problems, generation after generation. But this, to say it again, is new. When I was growing up, we had no such training. It was unnecessary. Unthinkable, actually.

More from the AP report:

Architecture student Clay Griffith hid in an office, then texted his friends about the best places to hide because “the shooter’s path was my daily walk,” he said. But he also said Americans are no longer shocked by mass shootings — or the preparations their children undergo.

“No longer shocked” — a shocking phrase in itself, really.

“I’m not surprised, especially when my 9-year-old sister comes home with a homework assignment of what to do if there’s a school shooter,” he added. “These past few days we’ve been saying all the slogans and mechanisms that we’ve been learning since we were children.”

A final paragraph, from the report:

For some students, it was not their first experience with a mass shooting. A few attended Oxford High School, where four teens were killed 14 months earlier, on Nov. 30, 2021, some 70 miles west of Michigan State.

This madness, this malice, has indeed become routine. Like car accidents?

The AP circulated this report yesterday:

One person was killed and three more were wounded Wednesday in a shooting at a shopping mall in El Paso, Texas, adding to the dozens of people already killed this year in mass shootings across the United States.

Dog-bites-man, rather than man-bites-dog? Yawn time?

Vexing issues, we are dealing with.

• “China sanctions Lockheed Martin, Raytheon for Taiwan sales.” The article says,

China on Thursday imposed trade and investment sanctions on Lockheed Martin and a unit of Raytheon for supplying weapons to Taiwan, stepping up efforts to isolate the island democracy claimed by the ruling Communist Party as part of its territory.

Commerce is very important, and it is also a contributor to the harmony of mankind. But there are things higher than commerce. And Western companies had better “stay strong” when it comes to the Chinese dictatorship. Or be made to “stay strong.”

Let me ask you: Did Elon Musk really need to open a new Tesla showroom and office in the heart of Xinjiang, where the ChiComs are carrying out their genocide (so designated by the U.S. State Department) of the Uyghurs?

• I was interested to see this, out of Seoul:

South Korea called North Korea “our enemy” in its biennial defense document published Thursday, reviving the label for its rival for the first time in six years, as tensions worsen between the two countries.

Consider this: You may not want to be the enemy of somebody. But if he insists on seeing you as his enemy — he is yours. At least on the level of international affairs. (Personal life is something else, I would contend.)

• What do you think of this?

The NCAA asked a federal appeals court on Wednesday to reject a legal effort to make colleges treat Division I athletes like employees and start paying them an hourly wage.

(Article here.)

I find myself getting radical. Radical-er every day, at least on this subject. I think there may come a time when we have to drop the “student-athlete” charade. Let’s just have professional sports — different divisions, different leagues, as in baseball. And let colleges, if they want, return to truly amateur sports — sports as extra-curricular activities, like, I don’t know, Glee Club.

As my regular readers know, I’m such a fossil, I still believe that the Olympic Games ought to be amateur . . .

• A report from the L.A. Times:

The California exodus has shown no sign of slowing down as the state’s population dropped by more than 500,000 people between April 2020 and July 2022, with the number of residents leaving surpassing those moving in by nearly 700,000.

The population decrease was second only to New York, which lost about 15,000 more people than California, census data show.

First, props on “data show” — “data” as plural. Second: I usually don’t like it when people urge “self-reflection” on others. My reaction tends to be, “Go jump in a lake, buddy.” (I have cleaned up my language, or my thoughts, for this family column.) But I must say: Political leaders in California and New York ought to think hard about their population losses.

And I say this as a lover of both states.

• This man is a U.S. congressman — a Republican from Florida. A modern-day expression of the Birchers.

William F. Buckley Jr. said, forthrightly, that the Birchers were nuts, and a blight on the conservative cause. His forthrightness cost him — cost National Review — a lot of money (because of the pique of donors) and a lot of readers.

Well done, WFB.

• This article put me in mind of WFB: “It was ‘haunting’: Ballard recalls mission to Titanic site.” “Ballard” is Robert Ballard, the oceanographer who discovered the wreck of the Titanic and other important ships. You know who went down to see the Titanic, of course? WFB. He wrote it up for the New York Times: “Down to the Great Ship.” Marvelous piece of writing, and utterly Bill.

• In a tweet, Joyce Carol Oates said,

(a neighbor in Windsor, Ontario once asked me, when he’d learned that I had written a novel, “Why would you want to make something up?” he was not unfriendly or ironic, but genuinely puzzled. one must suppose that many/most (?) people might make this inquiry.)

Sometimes, ladies and gentlemen, I wish I wrote novels. My excuse is: “I can’t make anything up.” I mentioned this once to a novelist friend of mine (great and famous novelist). He said, “I can’t make anything up either.” “What?” I said. “You’ve written a string of top-flight novels.” He answered, “At least 80 percent of the things that happen in those books, happened to me personally, or to someone in my family, or to a friend, or to someone I know about.”

Huh. (I’ll have to think of other excuses.)

• In the New York area, there are two Penn Stations. Two railway stations called “Penn Station.” One is in Manhattan; one is in Newark. They are about twelve miles apart. One name for two stations has caused a lot of confusion over the years, I can tell you. Confusion and tears on the part of travelers.

Seems to me a big mistake.

• Penn Station, Manhattan, is the busiest rail station in the United States. Do you know that the station in Newark is the seventh-busiest? Not bad, right?

• Spotted on the streets of Manhattan yesterday: a young man — 20 or so — wearing a sweatshirt that said, in big, bold letters, “Virginity Rocks.”

Huh.

• Jean Anderson, a major author of cookbooks, has died at 93. I would like to excerpt something from Penelope Green’s obit in the New York Times:

So dedicated was Ms. Anderson that early in her career, when she was working in the test kitchen of Ladies’ Home Journal in the late 1950s and early ’60s, and the magazine published a recipe for a cranberry nut bread that omitted the baking powder, she “personally reimbursed every cranky reader who wrote in to complain about the ‘gunky gray mess,’” she told Ms. Altman.

(Elissa Altman is a food writer and memoirist, who interviewed Jean Anderson in 2008.)

“You learn fast,” she added, “when you’re on a slim salary and have to shell out to disgruntled readers.”

Isn’t that extraordinary?

I hope you have a good weekend, my friends. Check you soon.

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