As usual, Mike cuts to the heart of it.
Via Daily Caller:
TV host Mike Rowe offered up some words of comfort for survivors of the Las Vegas massacre in a Tuesday Facebook post.
A fan, Molly Carr, who lives in Vegas, wrote the host saying, “I live in Las Vegas, and I’ve seen you here often. Once, in the lobby at Mandalay Bay. We’re all shattered here, obviously. A comforting word from you would go a long way.”
Rowe responded by first explaining he wasn’t sure his words could ever properly comfort her.
“There are no words, Molly, at least in my vocabulary, to bring you the comfort you seek,” the Dirty Jobs host wrote. “But there are people among us who restore my faith in the species, even as others seek to rob me of it.”
“I’m not surprised you saw me at the Mandalay,” he continued. “I cleaned their shark tank back in 2006, and I’ve stayed there at least thirty times since.”
“Maybe that’s why my initial thoughts about this latest tragedy were so random and strange. Even before I imagined myself in the thick of the chaos, (as I always do,) and even before I thanked God that I wasn’t, (as I don’t do enough,) I found myself wondering if I had used the same elevator as the killer. Isn’t that odd?”
“As people were being murdered in the most cowardly way imaginable, by a creature I can barely think of as human, I lay in my bed at home, stunned and horrified – wondering if I had stood in the same box and pushed the same buttons as the man now destroying countless lives and families,” Rowe voiced. “Since I’ve ridden all the elevators at Mandalay, I determined that the answer was yes.”
“I then wondered if the killer and I had shared the same barstool in the lobby? Had we swam in the same pool, or chatted up the same bellman, or played a hand of blackjack at the same table? Had we slept in the same bed?”
It turns out that Rowe has even staying on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel, the floor the killer was on when he unleashed his deadly attack.
“I remember looking down at the sprawling, empty space 300 feet below my window,” he recalled. “The same sprawling space that was recently filled with thousands of people having a good time, right up until they weren’t, courtesy of a monster.”
Rowe stated he “was struck by how unknowingly we rub elbows with evil.”
“They look just like us. And so we dine with them in restaurants, unknowingly. We walk by them in shopping malls, sit next to them in theaters, and maybe even hold the door for them as they smile and nod in thanks.”