Buffalo shooting: The places that provide sustenance are now targets for terrorism

Dang. I owe Mr. John King an apology.

As a kid, I’d pop into the family-owned King’s Grocery Store in Rockingham every time I had some change and buy packs of Now & Laters or 50 cents worth of three-for-a-penny cookies.

In retrospect, I imagine he must’ve hated seeing me come, since it took a loooong time to count out 150 “chokes.” (That’s the name we gave them because they were so dry that you needed a grape soda to wash them down.)

While he was counting them out, though, we’d sometimes have intriguing discussions. In addition to running his family’s store, Mr. King was the deacon at Providence Baptist Church who, every Sunday, guided the gospel choir in a mournful hymn.

I never understood a word they sung, but Lord, did the sound soothe the soul.

Oh yeah, back to that apology. More than once while counting out cookies, he’d proclaim “One day, Saunders, they’re gonna have armed guards protecting the grocery stores just like they do the banks.”

I think now that he was something of an end-of-timer, because he predicted a time when crops would wither in the fields, food sources would disappear, and a panicked populace would storm the Winn-Dixie, A&P and Piggly Wiggly and start snatching cans of potted meat and Vienna sausages off the shelves without paying.

Armed guards in grocery stores?

What a ridiculous notion, right?

Hmmph. I now smile ruefully every single time I walk into my neighborhood grocery store and see the strapped guards warily keeping watch over the maters, taters and Cap’n Crunch.

So, I’m sorry I doubted you, Mr. King, and if anything, you might’ve understated the problems we’d face.

After the grocery store massacres in Buffalo, N.Y. and in other places in recent months and years, many Americans may feel the need to arm themselves just to do this most fundamental of family functions.

Grocery stores and churches, both places that provide sustenance — one physical, the other spiritual — have apparently become the ultimate “soft target” for irrationally angry domestic terrorists: a day after the white man in New York allegedly murdered innocent people shopping for food, a hate-consumed, politically motivated Chinese man allegedly went into a church in California and shot six people of Taiwanese descent seeking spiritual nourishment. One died.

If you’re not heartsick over what is happening in this country and why, might I suggest a checkup from the neck up?

Me? For days now I’ve been sighing heavily and mainlining directly into my veins Stevie Wonder’s “Heaven Help Us All.”

An equally distraught friend called and mentioned that seemingly all of the victims were exemplary citizens, engaged in community betterment. Some of them were actually shopping for others.

Another thing they had in common was being Black: 11 of the 13 killed or injured were. The gunman had bought into the myth mainstreamed by some politicians and TV provocateurs and underwritten by major advertisers that a Jewish plot is afoot for minorities to replace whites.

If that is true — pssst, it isn’t! — by my calculations it’ll take about 750 more years at the current rate.

From childhood, one of my absolute favorite memories is of begging my aunt who raised me to take me with her to the A&P every Saturday morning or afternoon. Buying enough food for nine was bound to take a couple of hours. I’d beg her to let me go with her and she’d finally relent, but with the meaningless stipulation “Don’t ask me to buy nothing that’s not on this list.”

I knew she didn’t mean it, and she knew that I knew she didn’t mean it, because a couple of honey buns and an extra box of Count Chocula always ended up in the basket.

Now, though, when parents deny their children the bonding experience of accompanying them to the grocery store, it won’t be for fear of being pestered for the latest sugar-bombed cereal with a neat prize in it. It may be because they fear their children will end up shot down on aisle five.

Editorial Board member Barry Saunders is founder of theSaundersReport.com.