Taking Someone's Pulse Has New Meaning in Orlando

The front of Orlando’s Pulse nightclub a year after the devastating shooting that left 49 people dead.

Forever, the word pulse had a specific connotation and usage.

“What is your pulse rate?” “Who has their finger on the pulse of this issue.”

In other words, what’s the real story? What’s really going on?

Over the past year, pulse took on a new meaning. That was never more evident than at any of the memorials, vigils, prayer gatherings, interviews and discussions about June 12, 2016 – the day a gunman killed 49 people at a nightclub here called Pulse.

It was not a gay night club. It was not a Latin night club. It was a variety club. A chameleon. Whatever specialty night drew people in, that’s what it was.

So on some nights in early 2016, Pulse featured its Latin Nights. It quickly became a club night popular with Orlando’s Hispanic community and our gay community.

The club sat smack in the middle of a neighborhood mixed with residents and commercial businesses. It was a few yards from a fire station and directly across from an Einstein’s Bros. bagel location. Few people took issue with it.

That’s all changed, of course. The club is gone, replaced by a barrier-guarded memorial filled with flowers. Visitors – mourners, tourists, curious locals – can be found studying photos, flowers, notes and letters left at the site by others who were there before them.

When 49 people die in one place, it’s not just a scene of death. We see those everywhere, a roadside cross from someone to remember the place where a loved one died in a car accident. When 49 people died in one place in Orlando, it was an awakening.

That terror exists. That hate can be tangible. That extremism, intolerance or just mental illness are things that, even in a land known by others as a Theme Park City, must be acknowledged and dealt with.

Now, pulse is Pulse.

Pulse Shooting Is Time-Marker

For so many people here – not everyone, to be sure – Pulse means that their world is even more divided by time and events: pre-9/11, post-9/11, pre-Pulse and post-Pulse.

Orlando sits in Orange County, which is a blue county in a red region and a red state. Orlando discovered some new sides to itself in the wake of Pulse. Although the mass shooting devastated the local gay and Hispanic communities, an overwhelming majority of people who showed up to donate blood and pray for those who were lost, those who were recovering and all their families, were not gay or Hispanic.

They were just . . . people who wanted to help in some way. Judging by the millions of dollars that the One Orlando Fund raised to help Pulse victims and survivors, the same is true. It’s still true.

The one-year anniversary of this shooting brings to mind a recent project by author Eric Beetner, who last year published Unloaded: Crime Writers Writing Without Guns, a collection of short stories that features all sorts of dastardly deeds and bodies – but no guns.

I fear that for those who like to write mystery and thriller fiction, plotlines about home-grown terror attacks will grow to be more routine. “What’s the book about? Huh, I think I’ve read something similar already.”

By happenstance, the anniversary also coincided with me meeting a couple people from the UK and a few others who had recently spent more than a decade in the UK. It also coincided, sadly, with the recent terror attacks in the UK.

Their horror at America’s gun laws is palpable. (And don’t get them started on American healthcare.) Their reactions only underscored the sadness surrounding June 12, a date that now has a permanent place in a city that not too long away was a sleepy town with an unused interstate.

We wanted to acknowledge the date and remember the lives lost, the lives altered. We also wanted to put more distance between then and now.

One-Word Designation of a City

This city is changed forever. A routine commute from the south into Orlando now encompasses more than Chik-fil-A, Starbucks and an Einstein Bros. location. It’s a trip past a nightclub-turned-makeshift-memorial, one soon to become a permanent one.

I can be thankful for the marketing machines that accompany Disney World, Universal Studios and Sea World. For millions around the world, Orlando will remain the theme park capital of the world. For those of us who live here, it’s something else now. It’s more resilient and accepting than ever. That’s the positive.

But it’s also changed. Watch the news and listen to politicians rattle off mass shootings identified by their location: Columbine, Sandy Hook, San Bernadino, Orlando. We do the same thing around town but with one change: Columbine, Sandy Hook, San Bernadino, Pulse.