YOU’LL FORGET SAN BERNARDINO
My hometown, San Bernardino, was already in crisis before the attack
There was no hashtag or meme or Facebook artwork on Aug. 1, 2012, when San Bernardino, Calif., filed for bankruptcy protection after a long fiscal breakdown. Massive budget cuts followed. The police force was reduced by a quarter, and murders predictably went up. City Attorney James Penman later told residents at a public meeting to “lock your doors and load your guns.”
San Bernardino, where I grew up and where President Obama is scheduled to visit Friday, was already famous for violent crime and drug-dealing. So when I heard the words “there was a shooting in San Bernardino” on Dec. 2, my initial thought was: What’s new?
The violence is why people leave. I moved from San Bernardino to neighboring Redlands, hoping to escape.
And so I wound up living about 75 yards away, and nine doors down, from the townhouse rented by Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik. I walked my dogs by the place but don’t remember ever seeing them.
That Wednesday, the day of the attack that killed 14 people at the Inland Regional Center, I stayed inside and listened to my hometown next door become a worldwide talking point for the first time in my life. AN INDIFFERENT WORLD My childhood friends and I, all living elsewhere now, texted each other. We shook our heads at the misspelled #SanBernadinoShooting (the second “r” in Bernardino had disappeared). We noted the irony that such a hashtag could have described most days in the city, only now the world was no longer indifferent.
Within hours, MRAPs — military-grade mine-resistant vehicles — were circling my neighborhood. Helicopters were overhead. I am used to these vehicles and noises and sirens. San Bernardino had come to me. By night I was locked down, and by next morning the area was a federal investigation site.
Two days after the massacre, I walked outside and found that the police tape had been taken down. I could move freely, so I chose to go see my neighbors’ house in person. I stood at the edge of the news media pit and watched landlord Doyle Miller peel back plywood on the home he rented to Farook and Malik. Watching news crews crawl through the shooters’ realm was a perfect crystallization of how fast the media eye flickers.
Many times last week, I was asked by reporters “what I would
do now” and how I felt about Farook and Malik “living in my neighborhood.”
Well, I live amidst all kinds of people here from all kinds of places. Some of these people are older, Caucasian and have lawn signs for Republican candidates. Then there are young families. I am good friends with a Tunisian family a few doors down. A single father lives across the street from me; we get along because we’re both young. A DIVERSE NEIGHBORHOOD Generally, I don’t know most of my neighbors because people are always coming or going. We live within walking distance of the headquarters of ESRI — the largest global mapping company — which has an international workforce and brings in employees on H-1B visas. Many ESRI employees are of South-Asian or North-African descent. Seeing men and women in traditional garb is not different. This is why Farook and Malik fit in.
After the shooting and the home search, I was interviewed by a Los Angeles news station. “How does that make you feel,” the anchor asked me, “that they were right there? That they had bombs?”
My answer: “That’s the world we live in, I guess.”
Was I shocked that terrorists lived in my neighborhood? Not really. Growing up in San Bernardino, you live in a radius of violence, so you come to expect horror being within walking distance.
But I worry what will become of San Bernardino when the national conversation turns elsewhere. Won’t things go back to the violent normal?
I ask myself where the calls for prayer, the memes and assertive Facebook posts were before the Inland Regional Center shooting — the darkest moment of a tragedy that has been going on for a long time, in slow motion.