by Joan Harvey The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world. —Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Violence When a young gunman murdered ten people at a supermarket in Boulder, a place I’d been in the week before the shooting, I was reading the letters of Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt. McCarthy and Arendt lived through terrible times, the worst being the Holocaust and then Vietnam; McCarthy lost both her parents to the Spanish Flu. In their letters I was struck by some parallels to our time: a friend and I had discussed, in letters, whether to stay or leave the country if Trump was reelected; McCarthy and Arendt did the same about Johnson and the escalating war in Vietnam; our fears of Trump echoed theirs of Nixon (though I’m not sure they could have imagined the disaster of the Trump presidency). But when the shooting took place, I realized that while both of them had lived through far worse atrocities than most Americans living today, neither Arendt nor McCarthy lived through these random mass shootings of children and civilians on American soil. There have always been random killings and serial killers, but not this massive meaningless mowing down of strangers.