We can just say that United States has always been a violent society.
We can just say there have always been school shootings and that no matter how many draconian laws are set up, no matter how many watchful vigilant eyes can exist in a land of +300 million people, no matter how much effort is made to try and float the cork to the top of the bottle, no matter how much surveillance is enacted, we may as well concede that events like these that shock and horrify a campus, a town , a nation and a country and the world...will always be with us and that we may as well negate our efforts to at first understand what creates homicidal maniacs, to ask what are the various types of motivations for these killings, how many differnet varied backgrounds can you think of at the top of your head? A student who had been abused by his father, a man seeking revenge from a jilted relationship, a student ostracized and unaccepted who was abused by his parents who blindly vents his rage on a roomful of women, a group of kids influenced by video games and Nazi-ism, a washout from the Army given to dark gothic persuasion, a heavily medicated naitve kid with a disciniplary father. Why always the young? Why always and always a school? We may as well neglect to summon rationality and instead return to our deep basic primeval impulses and instincts. You can Google "deaths guns africa statistics" in the NEWS right now and return zero hits. None. You can also Google 'deaths guns africa' and Google will also actually ask you in italics:
Did you mean: deaths guns america
??????
Watching the news broadcast from CNN on this side of the border strikes a peculiar chord in me. I am struck by the amazing tenacity within the constructs of the media empire to remain coldly defiant as merely a sqwuak box out of which television news erupts and is not delivered. To its inbred inherent use and tool as both a slash appliance and device; a box that can keep us entertained but also numbed for hours on end. Faster than the speed of thought, CNN marches passed our shock our horror, passed the time it takes for thorough detailed assesments, past questions of who when why what. Too late for that. A nation is in instant mourning over the sudden loss of more that 30 of its brightest most aspiring minds.
Within minutes of the lock down order on the dormitory campus, students are being emailing updates and instant messaging one another to keep informed and up to date from one point on the campus to the other. The area covered by the Uni covers 22 acres.
I feel so sad and sorry for the parents of these students.
(God bless America; today.)
I read with interest that comments from the usual crowd at the Black Flag Cafe, the group of message baord affciandos who for one reason or other gravitate towards the dangerous seamy side of things to trade views on politics and occasionally diverge into a discussion about travel. Its kinda like arguing over a window seat.
I was shocked and dismayed as well as enlightened at the reactions.
In the back of my mind I held the thought of how nice it would have been, if there was such thing as even a moment of silence on the Flag or even hours of it. Within minutes and hours of the shooting the board is kaboshing with misinformation, calls to counter gun control advocates who havent said a thing, spurious assumptions and shoot from the hip responses.
Thats fine. This is what the Internet allows us to do.
By early evening the thread had blossomed into nearly 200 replies and 11 pages and I had only waded to page 3 before my compulsion to write overtook me.
I have this to say. That I think people in general are going to grow weary and wearier than ever of merely being accustomed to yet another school shooting.
I dont agree thats theres more that American society can do to help itself, whether its through gun control, increased surveillance or whatever. There are too many interchangeable variables at work here from one shooting to the next.
This latest shooting might even stiffen up calls for not neccesarily tighter restrictions on immigration or better screening but more watchfulness and not wariness about people who wish to live in America; the so-called land of endless dreams and opportunity yet still riven with death and beset with violence.
I dont agree that we can "finish the job" for our young people. I dont believe that we can odd out the whack jobs any society can produce (no advanced society is immune) and arm ourselves in an effort to curb/prevent/lesson violence. Why? The answers are delicately laid out for us in history books while at the very same time that armed shooters disrupt our navigaton through life through their own inability to find wayfinders, anchor themselves and manage each station in life with social support the way all students should. History has lessons in it beginning with shots heard round the world that were in the year 1914 in a place called Serbia. Serbia. And yet, all it takes is a single killer on a murder spree to unlock us from our deeper rationality and unseat us from our thrones, so that we return to that page in history, only after being so subsequently shocked with news of another school mass murder..a little smarter than we were before.
How? What lessons are there left to be learned? Do we literally "know it all"? How many school shootings will I live through over the next 20 years. 20 years is an awfully short period of time compared to a whole lifetime even though and even if its (still!) only one fifth of its mass index max.
I think that a time will dawn where events will turn so much that parents, teachers, principals and vice principals, board of education directors and chair people will have to do something fearful. Not something drastically scary nor through a fear imposed upon them but from a relinquishing of those fears, a letting go of them. We will all get tired of living and breathing in fear, fear for our lives and childrens lives as they grow up; go to school, go to University.
"Oh my , -...another campus shooting". Tsk tsk tak.
Maybe the time has arrived to put just a little more faith in our young people. This world we have created, been a part of..with its ceaseless wars from everything from a war on drugs to a war on in Iraq to a war on this and to that...obesity, bulimia...we cant fix and patch up this world for them. We have to open our minds our hearts and most importantly our ears to really listen to the voices that come out.
Theres probably not a single better gift of device that we can give on laon to our kids than that ability to listen so that we too can instill that in them as well.
Its not sometihng we take easily too. We were all once young ourseles. We remember the fire through our own veins. That rushed insisntence to grow up and validate ourselves as adults. Be heard, recognized, appreciated. We didnt like being told what to do. So I suggest that the time has come to allow ourselves to depart from the scene for a while. To quit acting like we automatically know whats best for our kids. What proof of that do we have anyway really, when for the past 30-50 years, this has been nothing but a recurring and consistent problem.
"Oh my , -...another campus shooting" . Sigh.
I watched some of the interviews on tv with some of the students. I heard even more over the radio interview and long distance phone call. What surprised me the most was the level of steadfastness to remain characterable, to remain human, no playing to the cameras or the mic, to allow feelings to soak in live, to even laugh with a nod towards how inane it is to combat rising feelings to the surface while faced with the unimaginable and dreaded horror that the majority of us will never experience. (How crazy is that? To be trying to contextualize your personal feelings while relaying your emotions to assist the media? To be human while navigating a terrain so foreign but where composure is paramount to the testimony of your take on live events that have happened. To serve people so that they feel informed. So that their curoisity is satisfied. Their burning desire to know: quenched.)
But I was amazed to see such sparkling intelligence brimming in our young people. Just by the way some of them understood the conditioning we have been placed into. They seemingly contradicted the norms of what we have been given to expect from events such as these.
Its there that I carrried , from that point there and to hereon in, that perhaps its time to quit trying to steer. Maybe its time to release the reins. Maybe its time we quizzed our students more and graded them not with how many answers they get right on a history exam and fail them at that, but maybe we should quiz them on why it is they think we have failed them all and so miserably on this issue.
I dont believe myself that the answer relies on more gun control. The answer is independent to the right to bear arms. I dont believe the answer lies in more policing and more sherrifs or training to quicken response time. I think the answer is independent of our efforts to improve procedure. I dont think the answer is to allow our students to further arm themselves. I think the answer is independent of our desire to help students feel safe and protected.
I think the answers we al seek to crave and hear lie within the minds of the young peoples themselves, and not we adults, all of us who are supposed to know better. What proof do we have?
"Oh my , -...another campus shooting". This was the one that made me change my mind about what we can do for our kids in schools and Universitys. What can we do, but expand the boundaries of our awareness to include a forethought that if we put some faith in them that they can possibly look after us, look after themselves, instead of us looking out for them, that we can reply on their insights and help us get along..we will have taken a grand leap of faith that just might disprove our theories about how to solve long standing problems and be shocked and amzed indeed. Not in a horrific way as we have seen today, but in a grander unexpected way.
I may wait my 20 years and it may be supremely naive to hope so. Unassailable . Unrealistic. My hope can be an undistinguishable thing.
And I can always count out the next 33 days of my life...trying to imagine a world for each day, what might have become of those bright and aspiring lives that the worlds light was robbed of thereof.
In that way, I am trying to imagine the world that might have been. And those same 20 years might go a little slower, last a little longer.
My condolences to the people of America on your sudden and tragic loss.
- - - - -
a-ok
caffeinated
suave
happy
celebratory
amorous
