There’s a point in any crisis-saturated society where the words stop hitting.
“Man stabs 11 people at Michigan Walmart. Six in critical condition.”
You read it. You blink. You scroll.
It’s not that we don’t care—it’s that we can’t process it anymore. The shock we’re supposed to feel has calcified into something else. A dull ache. A flinch before the numbness sets in. A Michigan sheriff described the stabbing spree as “seemingly random.” That word—seemingly—is doing a lot of work. As if we’re trying to make sense of chaos while pretending we haven’t been warned.
Because this isn’t random.
It’s familiar.
Walmart as Ground Zero
There’s something quietly damning about the fact that this took place at a Walmart—again. The place where we buy dog food, laundry detergent, and back-to-school notebooks has also become a recurring backdrop for bloodshed. Walmart, with its massive footprint, represents America’s promise of affordability and access. It also now doubles as a symbol of how exposed and unprotected we are in our most ordinary routines.
No one signs up to get stabbed between the produce aisle and the clearance bin.
The Myth of Randomness
Calling it “random” feels like a bureaucratic reflex—an emotional sedative. But if we step back, the pieces aren’t so hard to see:
- We are a country with no real public mental health infrastructure.
- We are a country where people snap quietly until they explode violently.
- We are a country that doesn’t address root causes because root causes aren’t politically expedient.
So when someone walks into a Walmart and turns an everyday Saturday into a trauma scene, it isn’t a one-off. It’s the result of a thousand ignored warnings, broken systems, and systemic disinvestment in human wellbeing. We pretend these events float outside of context so we don’t have to do anything about them.
Victims in the Headlines, Forgotten in the Aftermath
Right now, eleven families are reeling. Six people are fighting to survive. And in a week—maybe two—the media will have moved on, the store will reopen, and most of us won’t remember the names, the stories, or the quiet shattering of life as it was.
But for those families? This is the moment the world split open.
And for the rest of us?
We will either forget, or finally ask: Why is it always “random” until it isn’t?
The Uncomfortable Truth
We don’t need more “thoughts and prayers.” We need systems that catch people before they collapse into violence. We need language that reflects the seriousness of what’s happening, not the distance we’d like to pretend exists.
Because what happened in Michigan doesn’t live in isolation. It lives in us—in our policies, our numbness, our unwillingness to name what this is:
A country that keeps calling the fire “unexpected,” even as the whole thing burns.