“YOU’RE THE ONLY PERSON WHO’S BROUGHT UP THAT QUESTION IN THIRTY YEARS”

by Ron Riekki

Protest #3—block of Professional Dr., Ann Arbor, MI, September 27, 2026 (approximate number of protestors: 31)

 

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

“God is a kite”

—Kelly Rose Hoffer

 

I went to three protests this month that turned out to be only one protest.
The first was billed as a Detroit Anti-War Committee Public Meeting.
It turned out to be an anti-meeting. It happens every Friday at 6 p.m.,
which ensures participants will face breathtakingly horrid traffic,
traffic that, on the way, just got comically more dangerous, potholes
getting deeper, people going from rolling stops at red lights to just
simply blasting right through them, illegal turns, and signs that, as
you got more to the center of Detroit, just got more confusing, as if
they were designed to make people get pulled over.  I stopped to get
gas, paid, and, walking away, the person at the counter yelled,
“No rewards?” I didn’t know what she even meant, saying, out loud,
“No.” Adding, “Just punishments.” I got to the protest, which was
a plague of abandoned buildings, a maze of haunted-house buildings,
buildings that were the opposite of building, were tearing-downs,
slowly-rottings, passersby rare, and not any clichés of pimps or
prostitutes, but instead white joggers doing white jogging in white
socks under white clouds with white ghosts hovering in the dark
broken-glass windows. One of the buildings had a Michigan
Historic Site plaque, in MSU Spartan green and white with maize
lettering, letting me know it’d previously been a recording studio, for artists
like John Lee Hooker (memorable album title of It Serve You Right
to Suffer), Johnnie Ray (memorable chart hit “What’s the Use?”), and
bad-ass Dizzy Gillespie (memorable everything). This place is holy
and abandoned. Imagine areas of Heaven where the angels have all lost
their jobs, diaspora elsewhere, dispersion to the point of no person, or
rare person, medium rare, pale, pulled by their jogging route and gone.
Pearly Gates weeded, locked, closed. Across the street is the protest.
A can’t-miss building I found hard to find, but then this window
with a NO MORE WAR sign that, the first time I misread as
NO MO’ REWARD. Signs of punishments lining the window, about
Palestine, martial law, racism, Ukraine, Ukraine again, Venezuela,
 
the Pentagon, Black Lives Mattering, genocide, apartheid, Detroit,
Iran, and a final sign I couldn’t read. Global-minded. Concerned about
the world. But absent. No one. Noon-bright in the empty evening.
Police siren noise pollution fading. The building closed. The meeting
offering no one to meet. I was interested in anti-war, but this is just
anti-. The opposite of a protest. A pre-test? A practice? Just a test?
To see if you’d come. I’ve come. For nothing. For no one. I think
of how disappointing this would be for a protestor.  Know there’s
an hour drive back. To think about wasting time.  I think of the close
to one-trillion-dollar US military budget. One trillion. Do you know
how much Republicans and Democrats have to work together
to create a one-trillion-dollar military budget? I think of the RATM
video for “Testify,” how Gore is Bush, Bush is gore, how they bore,
gush, the same rhetoric, the same party pretending to be two,
the dichotomy of the two-party system really being a craniotomy
one-party system pretending that it’s two. I sat in my car,
realized how many of these protests are absences, one protestor
in Iowa, no protestors in Detroit, where two protests equal one
person, how the listing of protests online might be fake, done
to pretend there are the 66 upcoming events posted on findaprotest
for Michigan, but how many are there? Nothing? 0.0 protests?
Or is it conservatives posting fake protests? How much of it
is smoke-and-mirages? Across the board. I think of the Ann Arbor
Human Rights Commission, how I’ve heard of complaints that it’s
fake, how hard it is to find any information online on how to file
a complaint against the quote-unquote ‘Human Rights’ Commission
that seems to be a Corporate Rights Commission, whose mission
seems to be omission. Could they form another Human Rights
Commission that will examine the practices of the Human Rights
Commission? I sat in my car thinking maybe we just sleep now in the fire.
It’s a powerful thing to show up to a protest and have no one be there.
 
It speaks volumes. Except those volumes have been book-burned.
That was the first protest. The second protest was a Jewish gentleman
standing in front of the U of M library. He looked like he was protesting.
I wanted to hear his voice. I approached, asked if he was protesting.
“No,” he said, shocked, actually, honestly, looking afraid. I apologized.
There was something about his presence, the pacing, the waiting,
where it felt he was standing there to be seen. He was. He clarified.
“It’s a Jewish holiday,” he said. I didn’t know, found out it’s Sukkot,
celebrating Israelites forty years wandering in the desert, from what
I found online.  And that’s what he looked like, felt like, like he
was wandering, wondering. When I spoke to him, there was
gentleness, but mixed with fear. He reminded me of one of the newly
partially paralyzed boys in the movie Murderball, one of my favorite
documentaries ever, deceptive title, but a film about disabled
empowerment, but a boy in the film who’d just had his accident,
freshly dealing with the reality he’d never walk again, and how
quiet-voiced he was, this revelation of how deeply life can hurt you,
how vulnerable we are, how much more vulnerable he is now
that—as a scene shows in the film—he struggles with Velcro,
how taking on and off a shoe is struggle, a motocross competitor
now competing against everything. Jesus Christ, did I cry during
viewing that film. Even though it’s filled with comedy. But this man,
telling me he’s from England, married an American, why he’s here,
shy, shyly, everything humble, but fear, this feel of fear, him asking me
why I’m talking to him, me telling him I went to Brandeis, looking
for some connection, him telling me he’s heard of it, barely, and my
shock, saying, “Brandeis?” as if the word is just filled with Jewishness.
I leave him alone. It’s not a protest. But it is, sort of, a protest.
U of M, to be honest, when I studied there, and I’ve taken classes here
and there, random, multiple universities, sometimes just one class,
a dozen universities, but University of Michigan, by far, was the most
 
anti-Semitic college I ever studied at, comments in class where I was
just shocked—from subtle anti-Jewish microaggressions to abrupt
Holocaust denial—where I turned to a student who told me she’s Jewish
and asked, after one comment, whispering to her, “What do you think
about that?” (about what was just said) and she said, “I’m used to it.”
Stayed silent. Always silent. I couldn’t believe how quiet she was.
A scared sort of silence. That was the second protest. I was done.
This was the poem… Except, driving, I saw a group of thirty or so
people walking, carrying signs. I pulled over, parked illegally, walked
quickly to them. A week ago, there’d been a couple of Palestinian protestors
and I’d tried to hurry to interview them, but they had disappeared, driving
with human-sized green-white-and-black flag with red triangle, pan-Arab
colors, young boys leaning out car windows with the energy of the maybe-
most-beautiful-woman-ever M.I.A. with her “Bad Girls” video with its
“Live fast, die young” repetition, and Moroccan keffiyeh drivers doing
drifting stunts, cars balanced on two wheels with tanker fires and land-
scapes that seem to hint at a Detroit Persian Gulf, and, like the editing
of the video, a blink and the boys were gone, impossible to interview.
So I parked quickly, rushed, not wanting to miss this obvious protest,
especially as I’d not been to one with the month ending, nothing official,
and this was. There’s a way that protestors walk, like they own the area,
and that’s what happened, as I approached, them coming down the side-
walk, with two elderly white men in crossing-guard gear acting as security,
walking straight towards me to let me know they were not moving off
of the sidewalk. I walked up, asked if I could interview one of them.
As always seems to happen, there’s a leader. A guy pointed, didn’t
want to be interviewed, said he was busy praying.  He pointed to a woman—
Sandy. The second protest I’d gone to led by a Sandy. This conjuring up
of Sandy Hook. Of Navy Seal surf torture. Of Sandy Olsson turning from
prim and proper to black skintight leather by the end of Grease, where
you felt it was Janus. I went to the wrong woman. They corrected me.
 
I tried talking to Sandy, but it was too loud with the chanting recitals
through a mic and speaker. She told me to wait three minutes and
the protest was done. We walked and arrived, nowhere, the middle
of a dead-end, a cul-de-sac, this feeling like somehow we’d arrived
somewhere, but I looked around and it felt utterly random. They prayed,
“We want you to close this place down.” What place? They prayed
more. The realization that this was an anti-abortion protest. Shirts
of PRAY TO END ABORTION and I WAS ONE WAY AND NOW I’M
COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. Their ages everything, from eight
to eight decades. It ends. I talk with Sandy. As I do, men come over,
interrupt. I know this is just my opinion, one I’m sure people would
love to argue with, but I kinda think any abortion discussion should
be women-led. When the men would come over, they wanted to control
the conversation, yanking it in completely different directions than where
Sandy was heading, so that I asked her just that, “Should men listen more
when the discussion is about abortion?” She said, basically, no, that
they’re just as much invested, that abortion affects mothers and fathers,
and, especially, the babies. The word ‘babies’ gets spoken of a lot
during the talk. I ask the hard questions. What about rape? She tells me
“Eighty percent” of raped women don’t want an abortion. I don’t know
about the accuracy, but ask, using that figure, about the twenty percent
who do. They talk about “all” the alternatives.  “Like what?” I ask.
“Give the baby up.” To? “Foster care.” I talk about foster care statistics,
how much abuse happens in foster care. A man takes over, says, “You just
have to do the research.” But about forty percent of foster care children
do experience abuse. I ask about poverty. How what we’re really talking
about is doing forced pregnancies on the poor.  Sandy tells me that women
who’ve had abortions have increased statistics for alcoholism, suicidality,
drug use. I wonder if it’s chicken vs. egg, if it’s more complicated than
what she’s saying. I ask about overpopulation, that if there’s the 73 million
abortions globally per year, that it means by 2040 we’d have an added
 
increase of one billion people to the population, a population already
estimated to be 9.2 billion, so it’d make it 10.2 billion, and how those
pregnancies would directly impact some of the poorest areas of the world,
that you can’t talk about global banning of all abortion (always) without
discussing an obvious population explosion caused by it. She says,
“You’re the only person who’s brought up that question in thirty years.”
I tell her that it needs to be discussed. She’s honest, tells me she’s never
considered it, hasn’t done the research. I encourage her to do the research.
I ask her hard questions. She never turns to emotion, never shouting at me,
no frustration, anger, an anger I’ve seen so common at other protests,
one in Berkeley I remember where what was shouted through megaphones
had nothing to do with logic, but just sheer rage. I ask her why,
why she’s being so grounded, even when I’m pushing her about real
problems with global banning of all abortion that doesn’t consider
how it’s so much more complex than that. She tells me two things.
She says the left doesn’t come from logic, but only emotion, because,
she says, “They don’t have the truth.” She also says she’s coming
from “love,” not hate, telling me, “I hate no one.”  She tells me
about women coming out of abortion clinics post-abortion and
not judging, but asking if they could pray with the women, how
they’d cry doing that, appreciating it. To be honest, she feels like
her main root issue with doing this is because she loves family.
The problem, of course, is that it’s her conception of family
and her choices she wants everyone to follow. But her heart
is worlds away from anti-abortion violence. I ask what she’s
doing to create change. She says, “Praying.” I ask what else
and she says that she works to get other people to pray too,
to stop this, says it’s succeeding, that abortion clinics are closing
across the U.S. I ask the statistics for that and she says nine
abortion clinics have closed in Michigan. She feels it’s because
of prayer. I ask if it’s because of Trump. She smiles. I say,
 
“You love Trump?” She says, “What’s not to love?” I think
about that question. What’s not to love about the President?
I ask if the Planned Parenthood nearby’s open, figuring, perhaps,
they might supply me with some responses to that question.
She tells me it’s closed. I ask why she’s here now, why she
isn’t here when it’s open. “Oh,” she says, “We’re here for
forty days.” Tells me from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. For forty days.
I think of Sukkot. I think of the world population in 2040.
I think of forty percent of foster care children being abused.
I think of 40-oz. malt liquor. I think of less than forty percent
of rape being reported to law enforcement. I think of Jesus’
forty days in the wilderness. I think of the forty days of rain
of Noah’s flood. I think of the more than 440,000 rapes and
sexual assaults occurring in the U.S. each year. I think of
two in forty women in the U.S. experiencing a pregnancy
from rape or sexual coercion. I think it’s more complicated
than forty days of prayer, from September 23 to November 1,
the Day of the Dead. I think of the Bible quote for Matthew
2:40, how the quote from Matthew 2:40 says so much, and
what it says—as I’m sure you all know—is that it doesn’t
exist, because Matt only goes up to 2:23, but it doesn’t matter, 
because it could be any quote and I’ve heard Bible quotes taken
in every direction you could imagine, one of the most brilliant
things I’ve ever experienced being a New Testament class at CMU,
with Dr. Reader, a man who was exactly that, as well-read
as any human I’ve met, who knew ancient Greek, Hebrew,
Aramaic, destroyed anti-gay misinterpretations, mistranslations
where he’d say, “Let’s look at the original language,” and you’d
realize the quote wasn’t talking about homosexuality, but about
pedophilia, which is different, monstrously different,
and how he knew the language, did the work, didn’t just
take the Bible in whatever translation was offered, but
realized every choice the translator was making. And
there’s a translation that happens when talking about
abortion, a translation we do with our lives, where what
we’ve experienced and our view based upon our experience
becomes the answer for everyone else, when, my God,
it’s a lot more complicated. But my hat’s off to who can
discuss it with love. Romans 12:2: Do not conform to the pattern
of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.

 

MY ONLY FRIEND, THE END

by Ron Riekki

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

“How do you know what’s on the other side?”

—Alex Vartan Gubbins,

“Kufr Qa’ra, Palestine”

 

“just the flat snow of endurance”

—Ron Riekki,

“the poem where I am lit on fire and hauled up high in the air for all of Negaunee to see”

 

“The world heals”

—Jonathan Johnson,

“In a New Grief”

Michigan to me is sometimes home

and sometimes a toilet

and sometimes where I had my first kiss

and sometimes is where I was attacked by a group of boys (on Croix Street—the goddamn nonstop violence of streets—the crucifixion in the name—like a Nail Road—a Suffering Street—a 39 Lashes Boulevard), with my collarbone shattered so that the doctor said if the bone shard had gone over a little bit more it could have punctured a lung and I could have died

and sometimes it’s a lake, a teal lake, a lake named Teal Lake, where I ached and hurt and cried and laughed and leaped and swam where I felt I was flying and flew off the rocks into the Negaunee water that was hotter than the air there and there were days I felt happy there

and sometimes felt horrid

and sometimes felt nothing,

numb

in the winters where it got so cold that the radio actually warned cows’ ears could freeze and break off

and summers warmed and saved me

and

often, no, every time I write I feel the pain in my shoulder

so pain, I suppose, should

enter into everything I write.

And it does.

 

For the last year, I’ve gone to every mass shooting in Michigan

and I’ll never do it again,

never go to a mass shooting

ever

again—

aging

with nothing to gain.

My insides deserted, tundraed, hurricaned,

sick with memory.

I did it because I was afraid of mass shootings.

 

In July of 2018, 8

years ago,

my girlfriend and I were looking online, deciding

if we should go to a Kite Festival or to a Garlic Festival.

We decided on the festival for kites, simply because it was closer,

and it was getting later,

and we’d only make the tail-end of the Garlic Festival,

so we went to the kites that were beautiful and boring

and I went to the water because the ocean was more beautiful, kites soaring

behind me as we looked out at the San Fran Bay water,

and we didn’t know,

but at the Garlic Festival

that we didn’t go to

a mass shooter opened fire on everyone there

with a semi-automatic rifle and AK-47,

39 rounds

firing into the food area,

reports that someone yelled to the shooter why he was doing the killings

and the mass murderer yelled back,

“Because I’m really angry.”

 

And America keeps getting angrier.

 

It feels like I have a bullet inside me.

It feels like there is a bullet in the center of the city where I live,

the city where the company where I work refuses to give any special accommodations

to the disabled,

because the company says, We see you as contractors

and not employees,

so you have no rights.

Yes,

it feels like there is a bullet in the forearm of

God.

 

In paramedic school, the instructor told us about the time he was shot,

and then asked if any of the students had ever been shot

and one student raised his hand

and told us what it’s like to be shot,

and then they taught us how to stop bleeding,

because, they said, this was Orlando.

And

in the last three days in Florida, 8 people have been shot.  4 dead.  One of them a 4-year-old girl.  And a 2-year-old girl injured.  Less than a two-hour drive to Disney World from where they were shot.

 

And when I lived in Virginia,

in Charlottesville, I went to deliver a pizza

for my part-time job

and when I got to the trailer

someone yelled to open the door

and when I opened the door

the guy had a shotgun pointed at my chest.

He said he did it for a joke

“to see the expression on my face.”

 

I remember a Democrat in a social justice class saying in class

that Democrats need to start acting more like Republicans,

that Democrats need to be angrier.

It was a class where the teacher didn’t want to hear from me,

would purposely not call on me if I raised my hand, so I

learned ‘learned helplessness,’ helplessly

sitting there, thinking, no, we don’t need more anger,

thinking that I think it’s to love more.

I think.

This year I went to Enterprise to rent a car and the guy behind the counter called

me a misogynistic curse word I won’t use here, because it’s disgusting, his anger

that I wanted to rent a car on my birthday, angry, he said, that my license

would expire the next day, pissed off at me,

so strangely

angry

and inappropriately misogynistic,

and a kayaker was angry I was inner tubing on the river,

wanted only kayakers on the river

so he ran his kayak straight at me, puncturing my inner tube,

and a grocery store clerk, after I asked her how her day was going, telling me

a story of two customers who got in a fist fight in the line

to buy groceries,

and a woman shot in her right elbow last month, a 14-minute drive from where I live,

and when I was young

in Michigan

there was not one single road rage incident

I ever witnessed in my life

and

this month

I’ve seen two,

drivers driving

like they hate the world.

And I don’t know what’s happening.

 

A prisoner called me.

From prison.

I wasn’t sure if it was a mass shooter,

wanting to tell his story,

but I’m not interested in speaking with the mass shooters.

This year, I was interested in speaking with the survivors,

the resilient.

 

I’ll be honest: I’m afraid of this world.  Very.

 

I contacted every single one of the Lansing city council members

after the Lansing mass shooting,

the secretary who answered my call telling me the council is “very”

interested in lessening gun violence.

Not one city council member called me back.

Not one.

In fact, I reached out to over a dozen gun violence reduction organizations this year.

Not one single one of them contacted me back,

except one,

that said they were “too busy”

to talk to me.

 

I previously went to a Republican meeting.  Just to see what’s it’s like.

What it was like was organized.

What it was like was accepting.

There were shared beliefs in God,

shared beliefs in marriage,

shared beliefs in guns.

Shared beliefs I didn’t believe in,

didn’t share.

But they were shared

there.

The meeting went smoothly.

Everyone was on the same team.

And

I went to a Democrat meeting

to see what it was like.

It was chaos.

It was anger.

It was disarray.

Arguing.

It was walking on egg shells.

Your language had to be perfect or the room would flare up in anger.

It was cancel culture on top of cancel culture.

I couldn’t wait to leave

both

meetings.

 

I went to a gun violence organization meeting.

One of the big ones.

I won’t say the name.

But it felt tense.

I could tell one of the people there was some form of security,

pretending not to be,

but it was obvious.

At our table, I asked someone in the group

how the conversation about guns is complex.

They wanted to know what I meant.

I said that I’d looked up info and saw that more whites were killed by police in the last year—

and they interrupted and said that, no, percentage-wise, it was black people.

And I said percentage-wise, it listed, actually, indigenous people as the most disproportionately killed by police,

and then the table exploded.

Someone came over, said they were an organizer, and asked what I’d said

that had caused so much anger.

I restated it and she told me to never say that again, that it wasn’t what we were here for

and I asked her thoughts on it, if we need to complicate the discussion

and she told me, “Enough.”

Which was the slogan of the organization, a word on their shirts.

And I wonder if we can’t talk about guns.

 

So that’s why I wanted to talk about guns this year.

Because we can’t.

 

I’m not as afraid of mass shootings anymore.

I’ve gone to areas

with some of the highest crime rates in the U.S.

and asked the people there

if they’re afraid of mass shootings

and over and over

I’d hear, “No.”

I’d hear that you don’t get drunk, don’t get high, don’t hang around with

people who are drunk or high or both and who have guns.

But what about Garlic Festivals?

And Route 91 Harvest Music Festivals?

And Virginia Techs?

And Sandy Hooks?

And Orlando night clubs?

 

I’d quit being an EMT

right before the Orlando Pulse mass shooting.

2016.  107 people shot.  A 20-minute drive to Disney.

I remember driving by that club

in the ambulance.

South Orange Ave.  11-minute drive from my company.

I remember one of the EMTs calling Florida

The Gunshine State.

I remember transporting gunshot victims,

How bullets enter everywhere,

Exit everywhere.

The randomness of it.

Who lives.

Who dies.

Roughly about 25% of gunshot victims die.

Unless if shot in the head.

Then roughly about 90% of them die.

Roughly.

I’ve talked to people who’ve been shot in the head.

Multiple.

Seen the scars.

I wonder what they were like before they were shot.

 

I quit the ambulance company right before the Pulse shooting,

otherwise, we’d have probably gone there.

I can’t imagine the Hell.

 

When I lived in Dearborn,

there was a guy killed for his watch at a restaurant a block from my apartment,

to the north.

And a driveby shooting at another restaurant a block from my apartment,

to the west.

And so I moved,

because the shootings were too close to my apartment.

 

I remember when I lived in Fort Myers, Florida.  How frequent the gunshots were.

17 people shot in Fort Myers in the last year.

A shooting on Boy Scout Drive.

Yes, Boy Scout Drive.

 

And when I lived in Florida, a son murdered his father

in a house close to mine,

tried to bury his father in the backyard,

in the rain,

a neighbor looking out her window and seeing this.

Could you imagine looking out your window and seeing this?

 

And when I lived in Chicago, I remember talking to an extremely friendly theater artistic director who, less than a week later, would be murdered in his apartment.

And a murder in the apartment across the street from where a friend lived,

my friend pointing to which apartment it was.

 

I have no idea what’s so wrong with the world.

 

I wanted to be a Beat writer like Kerouac;

Instead, beat reporting.

Either way, I’m beat.

 

When I set out with the idea of going to every mass shooting in Michigan for a year,

often trying to get there as soon as I could after it happened,

even if the shooter hadn’t been caught,

I thought,

You know, I could be killed,

but I was called

to do it, honestly, even if it was painfully cold

on so many of those keelhauled nights where I could

have done something else, but I had no one.

The Garlic Festival took my girlfriend

in a way,

ex- now,

how

she was from France, found

America a bit disgusting, with its politics and violence

and violence and politics

and so she left

and I stayed.

Alone.

 

I have nothing

to lose

because I have

nothing.

 

I remember when I was a student at the University of Michigan

and I called in to get counseling

and the person on the other end of the phone made fun of me,

said in this mocking voice, “Oh, looks like someone needs a little attention.”

Honest to God.

This was a person in mental health care there.

I didn’t go.

I couldn’t get in anyway.

Wait lists that never end.

I’ve heard other complaints.

I went there, visited, recently, to see what kind of treatment I’d receive,

went to U of M’s Wellness Center

and the people there were rude,

telling me I had the wrong place,

just by looking at me,

judging I was too old

to be a student,

telling me this,

so I walked away

and thought of nontraditional students,

the discrimination of nontraditional students,

how often it’s later in life, maybe when you’re starting over, going to grad school, where you realize, ‘Well, maybe I should try therapy, it’ll be good for me,’ but then

to not be welcome.

 

Michigan is a nightmare.

Michigan is a struggle

and it’s coasting and floating on an inner tube on the Huron River when the people have faded behind me on the shore with their pot and loud music and barbecue smoke and their coughing and their laughing and

it’s the stillness of the river

where you float away

and the quiet comes

and the animals come out

on the shore

and the turtles on logs

and it’s so incredibly peaceful

and I look up at the sky

and God’s up there.

I’m sure of it.

God’s up there,

bleeding.

But God will survive

too.

 

And I thank God for every single person on this planet who’s kind.

I actually get a bit shocked nowadays when someone is kind to me.

I don’t expect it.

It jars me.

It reminds me of

goodness

and hope.

 

I hope Democrats start looking more to love,

and actually being brave enough to stop this gun epidemic, pandemic, disease, abuse.

 

The gun owners have blood on their hands, all.

Ha, they pluck out mine eyes.

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood

clean from my hand?  No, this my hand will rather

the multitudinous seas incarnadine,

making the green one red.

 

I truly hope and pray

That we’ll prioritize mental health for men.

I know.  Again.  Controversial to say.

The “manosphere” holds no air.  Hypoxic masculinity.  You die there.

What I’m talking about is the revelation that America creates mass shooters.

It manufactures them.

It manages to

mandate it.

It maneuvers everything in its power to ensure we have men who are so lost, so angry, so unheard, so abandoned, so abused that they feel they have to turn to horror, terror.

The news loves to talk about ‘veterans’ with mass shooters,

the news fetishizes that,

but ignores the poverty of the mass shooters,

the abuse, the neglect, the abandonment of their histories.

Why?

 

I’ve heard too many therapists say they won’t work with men as patients.

Whenever I hear that, I always think in the back of my mind,

‘You’re creating mass shooters.’

You can’t abandon men.

Otherwise, horror rises.

 

One out of every six men are victims of sexual violence.

Except I’ve heard it’s higher—that it’s actually one third of all men are victims of sexual violence.

I’ve attended hundreds of hours of in-person and online lectures and classes on trauma and violence and how we counsel survivors and the conversation ignores men.  Always.

Always.

It just does.

I’m worried that there is so much violence against women

because there is so much violence against men

that no one seems to care about.

Loops loop.

 

Can I say this?

Can I say this if it will help?

If starting the conversation will help?

 

Help!

 

Online, I ask why there’s so much gun violence

and the responses are that it’s due to the alignment of some planet and some planet,

something like that, some astrology bullshit,

and someone else says something about prayer

and I’m disappointed, hoping for something real,

something specific, something accurate,

and I wonder if it’s too complex for social media

and it is.

 

After a year of doing this,

of talking to people

and searching

and researching

and analyzing

and reanalyzing

and thinking

and rethinking,

the issue of why we have so many mass shootings in America

is

 

the poverty

 

the racism

 

the absolutely inability to understand how violence/neglect/abuse affects men

 

the ridiculously sickening prevalence of guns

 

and the brutally difficult barriers to get mental health/therapy access.

 

And the complication that Republicans love guns, adore guns, are married to guns, brush their teeth with guns, shower with guns, make love to guns, kiss guns, kill with guns, drive guns, breathe guns, view stray bullets as the same as cigarette smoke (fuck if it harms other people)

 

and the complication that around 20% of Democrats own guns

and that it feels like Democrats are doing NOTHING to combat guns

that kill our children

more than anything else.

In the U.S., guns are made to kill children.

How can I say that?

Because that’s what they do.

Daily.

7 children killed by guns daily.

Daily.

Daily.

Daily.

 

If you’re a Democrat and you ever step foot into a Walmart,

you’re not a Democrat.

Do you know how many children have been killed by guns sold by Walmart?

Ban Walmart for life.

The store has blood all over its everything.

Bloodart.

Walblood.

Blood on its shampoo.

Power adapter blood.

Credit card blood.

Blood on its stacking mugs.

Dehumidifier blood.

Ice maker blood.

Water slide blood.

Blood bratwurst.

Ragdoll blood.

Blood Walton.

 

That’s it.

This is the end.

It’s been a year.

Seventeen mass shootings in Michigan.

In the last three days, we’ve had shootings in Jackson, Detroit, and Flint.

That’s impressive for Michigan, to only have three shootings in three days.

It’s usually more.

In the last three days, there’s only been one mass shooting in the U.S.  In Chicago.

At a gas station.

Where so many of the shootings were this year.

Guns.

Gas.

Gaza.

Guns.

Gas.

Gaza.

 

.

 

To the truly kind people of this world,

you are saving us

from Hell.

You are giving us glimpse of Heaven.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.  

Editor’s note: Ron Riekki covered every mass shooting in Michigan from July 2025 until today for The New Verse News.

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.