 |
No self-respecting fan of alternative music hasn’t heard the 1979 song “I Don’t Like Mondays” by The Boomtown Rats. No person with a soul can listen to it and not be moved.
“The silicon chip inside her head
Gets switched to overload
And nobody’s gonna go to school today
She’s gonna make them stay at home”
According to co-writer Bob Geldof, “I Don’t Like Mondays” was composed after he was interviewed at Georgia State University’s radio station, where he read a telex report on the shooting spree of 16-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer, who fired at children in a playground at Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, Calif., on Jan. 29, 1979, killing two adults, while injuring eight children and one police officer.
Spencer showed no remorse for her crimes. When confronted by media, her only explanation was, “I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day.”
“And daddy doesn’t understand it
He always said she was good as gold
And he can see no reasons
‘Cause there are no reasons
What reason do you need to be shown?”
The latest person who apparently didn’t like Mondays was Audrey Elizabeth Hale, 28, who reportedly fired 152 rounds in 14 minutes while gunning down three children and three adults on March 27 at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tenn., before being killed by two heroic police officers who bravely and quickly responded. We will probably never know why she picked that Monday to make the world a worse place.
After The Covenant School shooting, some offered thoughts and prayers, while others demanded action. I’m not interested in debating the politics of these horrible tragedies. But I am interested in why few meaningful steps have been taken in the last 44 years to stop them.
“I don’t like Mondays (tell me why)
I don’t like Mondays (tell me why)
I don’t like Mondays
I wanna shoot the whole day down”
There were three school shootings that resulted in injuries or deaths in the United States in all of 1979; so far in 2023, there have been 13, according to edweek.org. There have been 157 such shootings since 2018. Since 1999, more than 300,000 children have experienced gun violence on their school campus; nearly 300 of them died.
“It was such a senseless act,” Geldof told the BBC about “I Don’t Like Mondays.” “It was the perfect senseless act, and this was the perfect senseless reason for doing it. So perhaps I wrote the perfect senseless song to illustrate it.”
Nothing about watching our children and educators suffer violence makes sense. I’m tired of crying about it. But I have little to no hope that this will finally be the time something gets done about it.
“And all the playing’s stopped
in the playground now
She wants to play with the toys a while
And school’s out early
and soon we be learning
And the lesson today is how to die”
David Brown is publisher of the Cherokee Scout. You can reach him by phone, 837-5122; email, dbrown@cherokeescout.com; or on Twitter @daviddBstroh.
Words in italics are from the song “I Don’t Like Mondays,” written by Bob Geldof and Johnnie Fingers. Listen to it at https://youtu.be/8yteMugRAc0.