Tainted Love Day

I have to confess that I've always been cynical about Valentine's Day- it really comes across as a made-up holiday engineered to make people in committed relationships feel obligated to spend a lot of money and to make people not in committed relationships feel bad about themselves. I'm not as down on romance as the guys in Gang of Four, but I'm not really big on commercialization/commoditization. As a hilarious aside, one of my cousins used to put her relationship with her boyfriend on hold from Christmas to Valentine's Day so as to avoid the whole present-buying kerfuffle. She can't do that with her marriage these days, but she had a good run while she was still single.

A scant year ago, though it feels like a longer time, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting eclipsed the romantic holiday with its utter horror. The original St Valentine's Day Massacre could be snarked about, it was a gangland slaying and the victims were, as Dotard would put it, bad hombres. Another mass shooting in 1977 in my beloved New Rochelle remains largely forgotten.

The Stoneman Douglas massacre seemed to have marked a shift in the national discourse about gun violence- the survivors were eloquent and media savvy, the victims were heroic, those who lost their lives trying to save their students, their friends. Sadly, though, nothing substantial has been done, and mass shootings still occur regularly. There were attempts, thankfully failed, to portray the shooter as a victim of bullying, and repeated attacks on the survivors' character, which helped to make this past year seem like a slog. The real tragedy is that there will never be a normal for these kids, never a February 14th which will be about overpriced roses or chocolate samplers. Title taken from a classic of my adolescence.