Luby's Cafeteria. Ever heard of it? If you're not from Texas, then the answer is probably, "no." For those of you who don't know, it's just a simple chain of all-you-can-eat buffets in Central Texas that catered to "morbidly obese," buffet fans, and most people outside of that world will have never heard of it, with just one minor exception. It's not the food, nor the value that you would have heard of, it's the buffet's famous atmosphere.
For over twenty years, Luby's hasn't been known as "Your neighborhood gathering place" or "Where America eats." It isn't where you go after work for food and fun, or where you take a date on a special occasion. Luby's, sadly enough, is known for something so completely tragic that even I wouldn't eat there because of it, and I love buffets! Luby's is the place where, twenty years ago, a man walked in with a bunch of guns and shot 22 people before killing himself. The only reason this particular shooting is so memorable is that it WAS the record for number of deaths in a single shooting spree until yesterday's Virginia Tech shootings.
Previous attempts at the title:
McDonalds - San Diego.
Day Trader - Atlanta.
Columbine - Denver.
University of Texas - Austin. (Pre-dates Luby's, but it's memorable nonetheless.)
Amish School Yard - Pennsylvania.
Junior College - Montreal.
High School - Portland.
Indian Reservation - Bemidji.
All of these were spree shootings. NONE of them... Have the celebrity of Luby's. Columbine does have some celebrity but that's because it was a rarity in spree shooting lore - it had two shooters. Other than that, most spree shootings are a two week story on the major media sources and then they are shelved in a vault among the sex scandals, political scandals and scare tactic reports. They only see the light of day when the next spree shooting comes along and some news bunny reporter needs it to contrast the present to the past, or if TV needs a good gore tale for one of their hour long series on blood lust, brought to you by Valtrex.
There is in our world a dark, sinister part of the imagination that creates what we like to humorously call "morbid fascination." It's the part of our souls that slows cars so we can look at a car crash on the roadside perchance to see a poorly covered or neglected part of the carnage. It's the part that can't get enough of Dealey Plaza - the site of John F. Kennedy's assassination. It's the part that wants to see famous gravesites. It's the part that watches "America's Funniest Home Videos" and all of the spin-off shows of that ilk, that like to show us regular people getting kicked in the balls by a small child. We like the darkness of a moment. Why? Cause we are fascinated with the death of it. Morbidly fascinated with it. We, ourselves, have never died and we are curious to know more about it. Especially since we all know that it will find us one day. We want to know more about it. To have answers to unanswerable questions. Why else would so many of our television shows be predominately death-based, or have dying as its central theme? CSI, Monk, Law and Order, etc. etc.
How do you explain the cavalier attitude that we carry with us after a tragedy? "We will never forget" is the most commonly abused claim that we throw around after a tragedy. It's meant to be a sensitive courtesy towards the recently deceased, but in all actuality it's just our tongue-in-cheek way of saying, "Awesome! Do that again!" We're all stunned in the moment, like a slap across the face that we didn't see coming. But what we think is sorrow is really more a misguided and poorly timed self-pity. It's an ugly desire to share in all the attention that people mask as sympathy. They want everyone to see how this has affected THEM! Not the victims, but to THEM! Two months later, those who were barely affected, but made the most noise and burned the most candles, will hardly remember the incident at all. They will have, "Moved on. Made peace. Come to grips" or, more frighteningly, "Accepted" the pain and the terror. Meanwhile, the truly affected will still be in an emotional coma, barely able to move, eat, speak or feel anything at all. Their candle, it would seem, will never burn out.
Two years later, the whole tragedy will be a television movie or a two hour Dateline special report or a footnote to some study on spree killings or an American Justice episode or a kitchy trading card or internet joke or a reason for more government regulation of [Insert scapegoat here: Music, movies, terrorism, immigration, television, religion, ADHD, video games, Anne Murray].
There is a new record holder: Virginia Tech with 33 dead. That's how we will remember it: The record for the WORST or MOST PROLIFIC spree shooting in American History. Sadly, this means we will forget about Luby's. Now just the second worst - which is nothing. (Can you name the third or fourth...or the previous second worst?) This record - like all records - will one day be broken. And one day we won't remember Virginia Tech. So we have that to look forward to. I guess this record isn't really broken, maybe it's just scratched.
