(God Save It!)

That's Charlie Pierce's invariable utterance in first reference any time he mentions his home and native Commonwealth of Massachusetts. I've never seen an explanation of it, though others have riffed on it as well, but boy is Their Fair State in need of some saving right about now.

I've never lived in Massachusetts, or any state other than this one, but I probably know it better than any state other than my own. For one thing, it's next door. I lived with natives for three years and remain close friends with them. Through them, I discovered WBZ-AM,  a Boston blowtorch radio station I listened to for years, falling asleep to Larry Glick and waking up with Maynard in the Morning playing "Reville" at the stroke of 6 a.m. After that, but still twenty-odd years ago on a couple of visits sponsored by the AOL trivia group I'd joined, I met many more from those pahts, as well as my still closest unrelated friend Tink, who I greeted on first meeting by swatting her at Logan with a rolled-up newspaper.

Though I have justified hatred for their sports teams in the NFL, NBA and NHL, I am quite fond of the Red Sox in any year not ending in "1986" and will be rooting for them at the local Rogers Communications television studio two weeks from tomorrow. And of course the state, and particularly their Fairest City, have imbued themselves into consciousness across the nation and beyond, from NPR's Car Talk to NBC's Cheers to the current AMC offering set mostly in Worcester(?) titled Kevin Can *** Himself.

Through over 17 years of blogging, I've met even more, some of whom even still post a word or two here. liddle_oldman, kouredios and xparrot are (or at least were) cahd-carrying Bay Staters. It's two other LJ alums, though, who moved their writing elsewhere and who initially inspired this query into whether the Mass has lost its mind.

Their slightly shortened story, titled It CAN happen in your town. It happened in ours:

Last weekend Kelly and I were away from home at a craft fair in West Medford, Massachusetts when we got word that something had happened just around the corner from our house in Winthrop. It first it was not very clear – something about a truck crashing into a building, and then someone involved in that crash shooting at people. It took a few hours before we started getting a clearer picture of what had happened, and even then it was still just bits and pieces.

When we got back to Winthrop that Saturday evening, we had to find a different way to get home because the cordon around the crime scene extended far around the area, including parts of Cross Street, where we normally would have pulled up to get to our house on Almont. We knew things were bad because there were police cars everywhere, and not just from Winthrop. We saw State Police, Boston, Revere, and Chelsea police in addition to Winthrop police.

Within the next day or two, things had cleared up significantly. A guy had stolen a plumbing supply truck and sped through the streets of Winthrop, going about twice the speed limit. He turned from Revere Street onto Shirley Street, speeding down the street past all of the parked cars that narrowed the road considerably. As a result he hit a white SUV more-or-less head on, causing it to crash into a fence and some hedges literally within sight of our back deck. He then lost control of the truck and crashed it into an unoccupied brick building at the corner of Cross Street and Shirley Street. After he got out of the truck, he was met by people who had come out of their homes thinking they could help after the crash. But the guy was armed with two pistols, and at some point he started shooting. First he shot Ramona Cooper, an Air Force veteran and current VA employee, three times in the back. Then he apparently bypassed the opportunity to shoot several other people, and instead went after David Green, another Air Force veteran and a retired Massachusetts State Trooper. Both victims were black, and the shooter whose name I refuse to use was white. It became clear by Monday that there was some sort of racial motivation for what this man had done. He had targeted only black people, and had apparently was responsible for numerous racist and anti-Semitic writings.

Wow. I get the disconnect from having these be everyday experiences, as we privileged suburban white people simply don't expect that "it can happen here," but it does. Just in our quiet little subdivision in just the last decade or so, we've had a murder-suicide in a house three streets over, a coked-up dude fall out of the front of his house to his death, and another dead body found around the bend on our own street, also drug-related by some reports.  I then just learned that the dude whose wife hit my car last month, and who basically offered me a cash bribe to "take care of it" outside insurance? Sorry, guy, we reported it, and when I missed one detail for the DMV report, I looked up him and his wife in county records. He's a freaking police blotter of tax liens, foreclosures and strange looking real estate transactions. They live on one of the hotsiest-totsiest streets in all of suburban Erie County, surrounded by bank presidents and heiresses, but they haven't owned the house since 2000 when it got deeded to a now-deceased lawyer. Their fancy-schmancy street also includes at least one home that got busted last year for running a grow house out of the premises.

Lovely lovely.

PS:  we’ve already gotten the check from our insurance company, less the deductible that his insurance company is going to pay for. Unlike anything I might’ve gotten from him, I don’t have to worry about these bouncing.

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So when Eleanor mentioned a horrible story out of Massachusetts last night, I wondered if they meant the one that Kelly and Geoff had witnessed.

That would be a no. This is in another sleepy suburban town called Wakefield, or some thing even crazier happened:
 

All remaining suspects involved in an hours long armed standoff with police off Interstate 95 in Wakefield, Massachusetts, on Saturday morning have been taken into custody, state police said.

All 11 suspects had been taken into custody and were being transported for booking, police said. Two of the 11 suspects were apprehended earlier in the morning. All of them were described as being part of a group called the Rise of the Moors and referred to themselves as a militia, police said.

The moors in question has nothing to do with Othello. Rather, they are another brand of the “sovereign citizen“ movement that has been enabled and emboldened, particularly over the last five years, to claim immunity from things like gun laws and tax obligations. I first read about this particular flavor of crazy a few weeks ago, when I read about a woman in New Jersey, whose newly purchased home was hijacked by one of these "Moor" sovereign citizens and, amazingly, police didn’t take the word of a Black woman that she owned the place at first. At least nobody was killed in that incident. The crazy ones in Massachusetts could have taken out dozens if they hadn't been caught.

So what gives, Chowds? You have a generally progressive state government, you have rafters full of sports championships, and you have legalized weed already available for purchase.We in New York are only starting to get on board on those last two, so I really hope it will work.