Losing My Perspicacity September 6, 2024

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Good morning and Happy Free Friday! Welcome back to another edition of Losing My Perspicacity, the newsletter that allows me to dump all the thoughts racing through my brain as I try to fall asleep onto the screen for your consumption. Before we begin, a friendly reminder that you can get LMP in your inbox five days a week by upgrading to a Premium subscription (just $9.99 a month). While I hate groveling, I’m not above politely asking you to consider a paid subscription, because I don’t want to go back to working for a soulless media conglomerate run by private equity bros.

I promise we’ll get to the fun stuff (the NFL is back! Bros are so mad about how many times NBC is showing Taylor Swift!) eventually, but before we get there, I want to talk about a couple of not-so-fun stories in the news, mostly because I refuse to be the person who doesn’t say anything and acts like all of this is normal. It is very much not normal. That said, I, as much as anyone, am aware of the impact the constant stream of bad news has on our mental health, so I promise to lighten it up towards the end.

Today, RIP Rebecca Cheptegei; How ‘bout we stop giving children guns?; The NFL is back; Check out Travis Kelce’s new look; Maybe slow down on the Doritos; and Fare thee well, Alex Morgan.

Let’s go.

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Rebecca Cheptegei has passed away

More to the point, Ugandan distance runner Rebecca Cheptegei, who competed just last month in the Paris Olympics, has been murdered by her ex-boyfriend, who doused her with gasoline on Sunday before setting her on fire. No, I don’t care to include his name.

I wrote about Cheptegei earlier this week, when there was still hope she would pull through. If you read that piece, you’ll remember that Cheptegei was the third female athlete to be killed by a former partner in Kenya in the last two and a half years.

Cheptegei was burned over 80 percent of her body and eventually succumbed to “full organ failure.” But let’s be clear: What killed Rebecca Cheptegei was the misogyny and violence against women that is endemic to the world we live in.

Just last week, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater student and gymnast Kara Welsh was shot and killed in her off-campus apartment. Another student, a former member of the wrestling team, has been arrested. Last week, 28-year old LaShabra Plunkett was murdered by her boyfriend in Arkansas. In Australia, an aboriginal woman was found murdered by her boyfriend – police showed up nine hours after a social worker called and expressed her concerns. The article about the murder mentions the name of the man who killed her, but not the name of the woman whom he murdered. Two days ago in New York, a man left his young daughter waiting in the car while he murdered his ex-wife, Kelly Coppola, and her boyfriend, Kenneth Pohlman Jr.

It’s easy for us to imagine that violence against women, like that that took Cheptegei, only happens in what we consider to be far-flung places like Kenya, but domestic violence occurs in every society on earth, among every economic, racial, religious, and ethnic group. Just under 15 percent of women in the United States (and four percent of men) have been injured as a result of intimate partner violence. One in four women and one in seven men will be the victim of severe intimate partner violence in their lives. According to the United Nations, one in three women around the world will be subjected to intimate partner violence or sexual violence in her lifetime.

In Kenya, the statistics are similarly alarming:

Meanwhile, Cheptegei’s family has been reduced to begging for justice for Rebecca. "The criminal who harmed my daughter is a murderer, and I have yet to see what the security officials are doing. He is still free and might even flee," her father said. Cheptegei leaves behind two young daughters.

Rest in Power, Rebecca Cheptegei.

If you or someone you love is experiencing intimate partner violence, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) to get free and confidential support. Or you can reach out to me and I can help. juliedicaro (at) outlook (dot) com.

Maybe stop giving kids guns

As I sat down to write this newsletter, news broke that Colin Gray, the father of 14-year-old Colt Gray, who (allegedly) killed four and injured nine at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, had been arrested.

As I wrote yesterday, the FBI was aware of Colt Gray back in 2023 when they investigated him for potentially making online threats about shooting up a school. At that time, Colin Gray assured the police that his son, then 13, did not have access to the guns in the home. Gray, supergenius, then went out and bought his kid an AR-15 for Christmas. In addition to, you know, apparently not having any fucking common sense, Colin Gray also broke Georgia law, which does not allow children to own weapons.

That’s about the only gun law Georgia does have on the books.

As a picture of Colt Gray’s home life has begun to emerge, it seems that there were multiple chances for an adult, any adult, including Gray’s parents, relatives, law enforcement, and school officials, to get Gray some kind of help.

The big problem here, of course, is that Georgia’s laws don’t lean towards keeping guns out of the hands of children in the first place. A red flag law, for example, may have allowed the police to take guns out of the Gray family home back in 2023 when Colt Gray first popped up on their radar. Secondly, however, it seems that with all the adults around him ignoring his mental health struggles, this kid never had a chance.

I am keenly aware of the “white person = mental health struggles; Black person = craven murderer” meme, and I certainly don’t want to contribute to it. But if there’s one thing I learned during my time as a public defender, it’s that hurt people hurt people, no matter what their racial background is. According to FORBES, Georgia is among the bottom 10 states for mental health services, along with Texas, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, and South Carolina. In fact, Georgia is the state where those experiencing mental illness are the most likely to skip a doctor’s appointment because of the expense.

If state officials are going to insist on making guns available to everyone, the very least they could do is get their citizens the mental health help they need so they don’t go around shooting people to express their pain. And that goes for every kid. The kid who shoots up a school, the kid who holds up a 7-11, the kid who pulls out a gun at a party or a club, and all the other kids who fell through the cracks until they wound up forever in the hands of the criminal justice system. They all deserve help. How Colt Gray was able to get an AR-15 into his school after the school was aware of his potential for violence is absolutely bewildering.

If we care about peace in any way, if we want gun deaths to go down instead of up, we have to care about what is happening in the home, everyone’s home, and we have to be prepared to step in when a child is struggling emotionally. The cost of not doing so is simply too high.

I will be shedding zero tears for Colin Gray tonight. Instead, I’ll be thinking instead of Mason Schermerhorn, Christian Angulo, Richard Aspinwall, and Christina Irimie.

The NFL is back

For someone who spends so much of her time dragging the Commissioner, the owners, Jerry Jones, Andy Reid, and some of the players, I sure do get excited every year when the NFL gets going again. I blame America.

Long before I worked at Deadspin, I waited all year for Drew Magary’s “Why Your Team Sucks,” and I waited with bated breath for this year’s Chiefs column. It did not disappoint.

He started out hot:

And it only got better from there. Some of the highlights include:

I won’t share any more than that, as you should go read the entire thing for yourself. The whole thing is *chef’s kiss.*

It’s amazing to me that Andy Reid, Patrick Mahomes, and Travis Kelce all got away with not calling out Harrison Butker’s bullshit (was Taylor okay with that?). And how Andy Reid has not had to answer for his kid getting a pardon from the governor after leaving a four-year-old girl in a coma is absolutely beyond me. But then, Andy Reid has never had to answer for anything, really. After all, he has a funny mustache and calls chicken nuggets “nuggies” in commercials!

If the Chiefs have many haters, I am one. If the Chiefs have one hater, it is me. If the Chiefs have no haters, it means I am dead.

Speaking of the Chiefs

Funny, but I saw someone (I can’t find the social media post) say that Travis Kelce looks like a cop that routinely turns off his body cam and now I can’t unsee it.

You might want to lay off the Doritos

I really don’t know any other way to say this, but this seems bad:

The same dye that gives Doritos their orange color (what do you mean “Doritos aren’t born that color?”) apparently makes mice transparent. So… yeah.

Who am I kidding? It’s going to take a lot more than that to get Americans to give up Doritos. Does this also apply to Cool Ranch?

Fare thee well, Alex Morgan

If the 99ers taught us anything, it’s that you don’t get to keep your legendary players forever. But that doesn’t make saying goodbye to the members of a team that not only changed soccer, but changed the landscape for women’s sports, any easier.

One of the best to ever put on a uniform. Don’t be a stranger, Alex.

On your way out, please enjoy the worst fight song in the NFL:

Have a great weekend. See you all on Monday.