New Perspectives Gratefulness – Learning Via The Safeway Shooting In Bend, Oregon
When my sister approached the nurse in the hospital and told her that she needed to leave, the nurse was a bit skeptical. She could still see the staph infection running up and down my sister's thighs. This type of staph infection is one of the leading killers in a hospital. She could see little black blisters on my sister's legs, kind of about the size of your thumbnail with veiny lines, running between them like a dark star constellation; the skin around it was red and puffy.
This was my sister's third round of antibiotics since the last two hadn't worked, and the nurse told her she needed to stay again overnight. My sister said that she couldn't, she was late to pick up her daughter. They had to go pick up broccoli for her daughter's birthday at the local Safeway. This had become a custom for them. At her daughter's fifth birthday, my sister called ahead and said she was bringing broccoli, kind of like coal in the stockings for Christmas. And when she got home, after making the joke Santana asked, where's my broccoli? Since then, as sort of a gag they go to the store every birthday and get her broccoli.
At about 7 p.m., with a staph infection, my sister arrived at the store with her daughter. At about the same time, Ethan Blair Miller was leaving his home in a neighboring apartment building. Before leaving, he loaded an AR-15 style rifle and a 12-gauge shotgun and he exited his house. On his way out, he stopped in front of his Ford F250, his own pickup and unloaded the rifle into his vehicle. Ethan Blair Miller was not planning to come back. If you're wondering about the broccoli, my niece is an interesting kid. Santana has an Ozzy Osbourne doll that she has carried around since she was very young.
Most kids carry around Barbies or maybe a plush doll. She used to sleep every night with a plastic Viking battle ax. And one time, we were having a family get-together, my sister told her you need to go to sleep, and she collapsed on the floor, arms crossed over the battle ax and told her, “drag me." Around this time, she was getting out of her kickboxing class. She's nine and although she takes kickboxing, she does try to restrain herself from beating up on her older brothers. Even though she is getting older and picking up new hobbies, she still insists on broccoli every year because she still thinks it's funny.
The Safeway in Bend, Oregon is pretty well insulated. You wouldn't hear a gunshot from the outside, especially if the shooter's initial shots are so random that none of the police responders can pinpoint where it comes from. Ethan Miller shot at my sister's apartment buildings, which bordered the Safeway parking lot, and are across from his own apartment lot. Ethan Blair Miller also shot at the Big Lots across the way. But as he went towards Safeway, he narrowed his focus. He started actually hitting people.
Just after 7, my sister went through the checkout line. She put the receipt for the broccoli in her pocket; a receipt which she kept as a memento of how close they came. Because about five minutes after they walked through that line, they drove across the parking lot, backtracking without knowing it, where Millard just came from right at the moment that Miller was taking his first victim - 84-year-old Glenn Edward Bennett, a customer at the west entrance.
The gunman then went farther into the store, firing aisle by aisle as he progressed. He eventually reached the store's produce section right next to the broccoli. Instead of finding an easy victim there, he found Donald Racer Junior, a 66-year-old employee of Safeway who, when hearing the shots, pulled a cart in front of himself and crouched behind it while drawing a small produce knife.
When the gunman looked in the opposite direction, Donald jumped out and stabbed him with the produce knife in an attempt to disarm him. The gunman eventually overpowered Donald and shot him to death. Other people during the shooting suffered non-life-threatening injuries. But when the police arrived, they found Miller was already dead. He committed suicide at 7:08 p.m. Apparently, after receiving the stab wound, he felt he couldn't go on with his rampage.
Needless to say, this all could have been a lot worse. It could have been another top supermarket shooting. It could have been five minutes prior, when instead of a hero with a pocketknife by the broccoli, he could have found a mother with a three-week battle with a staph infection and a nine-year-old dressed in kickboxing gear ready for her birthday cake. I don't think the word gratitude is big enough for what my family feels.
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To say that our family feels a profound sense of gratitude for my sister's cosmic timing would be an incredible understatement. Santana will probably feel gratitude when she's older. In the moment, she was just thrilled by the SWAT team that she saw marching through their apartment complex. It was one block over, connected to an apartment sprawl, and Santana waved at the SWAT team in their full gear. And she told him it was her birthday. One of the members waved back and wished her a happy birthday. And it made her day. As an introvert and a natural cynic, I struggle with gratitude. I grew up below the poverty line. I went to a public school that scored a d-minus in national ratings. I worked as a night guard for over a decade while completing a degree, an investigators license, and then some writing awards. The word gratitude isn't even in my vocabulary most days. If you're an American who has to fight for every inch, it's hard to feel gratitude for the struggle of having to pay extra when so many people don't seem to pay anything at all. But we can all learn gratitude. At least, I hope I can. We're going to start today with a few myths about gratitude.
Myth One: Gratitude seems like a simple equation. If I were happier, I would feel grateful. If there's nothing to be happy about, there's nothing to feel grateful for, right?
Joe: When I first went back after listening to my sister talk about this, I read about the guy who stepped in and stopped the shooter. The more I dug and the more the news dug, the more complicated it got. Everybody was ready to set up plaques and awards for this guy, but then people started learning his history. So, I was wondering if I could get kind of your reaction and your take on him as a “hero”.
Todd: Well, how do you feel about somebody who saved lives? The shooter was ready to do as much damage and take as many lives as possible and this produce employer gave his life to save other people. Do you think that kind of trumps all other life things?
Joe: That's the complicated part. What we will inevitably be asking is can you wash out a horrifying wrong with an incredible right?
Todd: Donald Ray Stewart Jr. was a military veteran for many years. And he waited for the gunman to look the other way, and then he attacked him with his tiny produce knife. And he eventually got overpowered and got killed. But that act of bravery made the killer lose his momentum and decided to take his own life. He worked at the store. Lisa Morrison worked there with him in the floral department, and she said every Thursday, he would stop in and get stargazers flowers for his disabled wife. Now, on the flip side, he is a registered sex offender. He was sentenced to ten years in one of the harshest prisons in this country, Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, for sexual relations involving a minor.
Joe: So we have somebody who has done basically the worst crime we have a sentence for and yet reformed himself. Three decades after doing this horrible crime, he hears gunshots, and he wheels his little produce cart in front of himself and just crouches behind it when everyone else is running.
Todd: I think that's the big thing. You don't have time to measure and think. I think it just happened and in that second, he made a decision; that's a total Act of Bravery.
In the rest of this episode, we're going to get into the science of gratitude and how feeling grateful makes you happy. Because that's really what I want to pull out of this extraordinarily dark story. I want to know something deeper and more common in the American experience: can you still feel grateful if something is so dark and so horrible? Like our intro said, if your life is currently a train wreck with a plane crash on top, can you feel I'm grateful for that and is it still good for you? Everything we're going through as Americans, can we still feel grateful?
There's a German phrase, “For he who smiles too much is either insane or American.” I love that phrase, but here in America, we have a term for it called Pollyanna or being pollyannaish - all of life's problems can be solved by being positive. In blatant terms, it means you are choosing to be positive even when it's hurting you, when being more realistic and being aware of your chances would be better. I kind of want to go back to primitive man. Primitive man is not designed to be Pollyanna or positive. It's not designed to be grateful. Our brains are built for speed, not for gratitude. Our brains are designed to be problem-solving machines. Anxiety is built into us so that we can focus on a task that will help us survive and to worry about what's not going to let us survive. Every inch of our brain is designed to reward us for basically eating good things, having sex, and nothing else, and it's designed to worry and to be concerned and to solve problems like a machine.
Myth Two: Why try to feel grateful everyday if my life is a train wreck with a plane crash on top? Are there any health or financial benefits to forcing yourself to feel grateful?
So, we have already sort of hinted at the benefits of feeling grateful, if you can get over that early man programming. It improves sleep, mood, and physical immunity. I don't think positive thinking can overcome cancer or anything like that, but your immunity goes up makes sense to me because you're not constantly anxious. You sleep better, eat better, you take better care of yourself. If you lower your anxiety and depression by practicing gratitude, you lower your cortisol levels, which equates to lower odds of a heart attack along with risks of pain and disease. You live longer, period.
Reading up on the science of this, I've learned that you don't feel grateful because of good things in your life. You have to practice gratitude and that's what makes you happy, not vice versa. We're not built to be grateful. Every time you get something good in your life, you will never really feel grateful, and you have to practice gratitude to be happy. So, that's our next step. We found out that people who build their self-esteem around external values oftentimes crumble later in life. Journaling values made students perform better. It made people realize what their values were, and it slowly helps you sort of fine tune and hone them.
That's the first step in gratitude. If you want to practice gratitude and you're not good at it like me, journaling about what you're grateful for builds up your social well-being, according to a 2016 study. Start a gratitude journal, and write three things in there every day that you're grateful for. Try to make them new things every day and it boosts your happiness and life satisfaction. If you intertwine it with your values, it starts building up your cardiovascular health and your stress. Literally, your inflammation goes down and your pain receptors aren't as active. Like we said before, there are these micro-practices you can do. And they basically are superpowers to improve everything in your life. This is one of them. If there is anything we're going to take away from this, it's gratitude makes happiness, not the other way around, and we should start a gratitude journal.
Myth Three: If gratitude is an exercise that we do for our health, like working out, then where's our gratitude Peloton? Are there best practices for gratitude, like gratitude training?
Joe: I just want to point out again we have seen so many shootings in the last couple of years in America. There was a statistic I was reading about from the Department of Justice when I was working on my PI license; there are so many mass shootings. It could have been so much worse than what happened in Bend. And that's because of Ethan Blair Miller. I was wondering, Todd, if you have the same feelings about this. It just felt pure evil to me.
Todd: Yeah, this was very planned. Just terrible that his head went to this place. There were signs, though. He published on a website called Wattpad, and he had a detailed plan for the sheet shooting and blamed covid-19 for worsening everyone's mental health. He was also making a lot of references to high school shootings, and his goal was to kill over 40 people.
Do you think gratefulness could have stopped any of these guys, these “Arthur Bremer’s” from reborning over and over again? Could gratitude about nothing work for them? Because that's what we're talking about. You can feel grateful even when you don't have anything. Living in this country, we are the top 2% richest people in the world. I think it boils down to loneliness and friendships. I'd like to think Ethan must have some socially awkward things, and just doesn't have a friend group that he's getting this attention in, and this is his only way to show dominance and power and his significance.
There is a very unpopular Ted Talk I saw. I want to promote him because he had such a good message. It was David Steindl-Rast and he is a monk. He talks about gratitude and his whole speech is about gratitude. He talks about going and visiting third-world countries and not having light and power. It gives you a new perspective on being grateful. In this country, we have so much. But everyone says that in third-world countries, the people have so little, and the people are so happy. And everyone who goes anywhere will always say the same thing. I just said it. They're shocked at their gratitude.
I want to be able to recognize that without having to go to a third-world country. I don't want to use another country and culture as my stepping stone to gratitude. I would rather figure it out by just having good practices. So for me, what I'm going to do is I'm following monk David's what he calls gratefulness stop signs. He takes sticky notes, and he cuts them into squares and then he puts them on, for example, a light switch. And so after months of being back in America, it reminds him that I didn't have this, and it reminds him that he gets water whenever he needs it. I don't know why, but grateful is stop signs. If you can't put yourself into the mindset to journal about what you're grateful for every day, this is an easy hack.
Final Thoughts
Joe: This whole situation could have been a lot worse. It could have been a Parkland shooting. So I was wondering if Todd could share a couple of stories with us, basically like helping each other and doing what they're supposed to do.
Todd: A lot of these employees were just there working in the produce stocking cashiers. So, one of the employees, Robert said he and three other employees ran into the refrigerator, closed the door, and huddled up for warmth. And they probably didn't care about how cold it was and just banded together and survived. There was a customer named Josh Kaaba, and he was one of the survivors. This man had four kids with him at the store. Now, his sick wife was too ill to come in and help him shop. So she was waiting in the car. So he fled the store with his kids, but his wife wasn't there waiting for him where the car was. So he's even more freaked out. He found her out back and she was screaming at him to get in the car. But he only had three kids with him. So then he bravely rushed back to get the 4th kid and did find him. I hope the kids didn't know what was going on. I hope they were just kind of being rushed and shocked, but I know the parents did, and I just can't imagine the fear.
Joe: I can't find a stray kid in a store when it's normal and they're in the toy aisle. I can't imagine trying to do that during this chaos.
Todd: Another thing, they showed that surveillance camera from outside the store. Two people who had left the store when the man killed himself, ran back in and dragged Bennett, our hero of the story, out and tried to resuscitate him. It is worth mentioning that the police arrived and headed into the building while shots were still being fired. The cops were there promptly, unlike what we see in the school shootings where they sit in the parking lot.
Joe: That’s something my sister was saying, they were there immediately. They swarmed the apartments and the store. And when she was talking about waving at the SWAT team and my niece being like it's my birthday, and I'm saying, happy birthday…it made me feel better. I'm currently living in Texas. Hearing the recent shooting and the lack of response, hearing this restored some of that faith for me. In the case of Donald, I can't help but think that is sort of like a movie arc sort of redemption.
Todd: And I hope he's remembered that way. I hope Donald Ray is seen as a hero with no Asterix.
You can be grateful anywhere for any reason. You don't need to win the lottery or narrowly escape a tragedy to feel grateful, You could feel grateful for a good meal. You can feel grateful for your friends and family. You can be grateful for a beautiful sunrise when you're out walking early some morning. And feeling grateful isn't some self-help Guru shit that we're trying to push on you; It's for your health. You literally live longer doing the short simple mental exercise. It's not mind over matter. It's mind over death. When co-workers come back from a beautiful vacation, they talk about how relaxing it was and how grateful they are for getting some peace and quiet. And how incredible it is to sip Margaritas by night and watch a sunrise on the beach by morning. But guess what? The sun rises everywhere, and you don't have to pay for gratitude.