This week has been filled with talking of how violent our company has become. The shot in Arizona has created a lot of discussion on the topic. Fingers have been pointed; blame laid. People on both sides of the political organization are stressful to distance themselves from their own use of violent language in their rhetoric, afraid of the backlash. Several movies have been blessed as well.
Taxi Driver apparently is the point-to film for any random shooting, because the opponent in the film was so insanely violent. I wouldn`t be surprised if soon books and music become the target of blame too.
Humans want to realize the man in which they live.Random, senseless violence is really hard to understand. It`s such a cushion to the practice of our day to day that any time something like this happens, we stay in our tracks and looking around dumbfounded for a few minutes, stunned as sure as if we`d been bitch slapped by life. And maybe that`s exactly what it is. In the face of disarray and uncertainty, we feel for causation. We wish to compartmentalise the pain we`re experiencing, to get support to the comparative ease of normal.
Normal people don`t kill people. We want to think that. No matter how many times we see on tv that the man who slaughtered his entire family seemed so normal, that they were happy, that he was the best dad in the world, we can`t allow ourselves to believe there is a risk this sort of death could occur to only about anyone. We separate ourselves the masses who snap like that are unbalanced, sick. Of line they are, because nice, normal people like us would never intend to do something so heinous as to kill innocent people but because. This placates us, gives us back our sensation of protection, our little bubble.
As I was penning this, a commercial for a national intelligence program came on television. Stay tuned. At 6:30, they were passing to learn a see at the gunman, what could have set him off. Listed in the possibilities was quite clear - "What movies was he obsessed with?"It could well have been what music did he listen to or what genre of reading material did he choose.As if somehow, the answer to the tragedy lies in figuring out what external stimulus pushed this new man over the edge.
We are a violent society. Before we start longing for the "dear old days", it bears saying that man have ever been violent. People appear to wish to create a differentiation between sanctioned violence and "senseless" violence, but in my opinion, public hangings with gawkers who came (come?) simply to love the spectacle are no less violent or heinous than a movement by shooting. The reasons are different, but violence is violence, death is death, and from the multiplication of gladiators and arenas where they fought to the end in presence of shouting crowds, humans have enjoyed violence as a spectator sport.
The books I read tend to be violent. They constantly have been. Very scary and very violent, I`ve always enjoyed the form of books that make people nightmares. It`s been the like with movies I choose to watch. Give me a good zombie movie over a romantic comedy any day. The music I hear to is likewise very violent. Sublimation is a near thing, and when I mind to very loud, really hard hitting music with savage lyrics, it makes me feel less angry, not more so, and I`ve been a fan of this form of medicine since I was a kid, when my mom would call at me that I was passing to go deaf and wondered how could I bear that noise.
The media chosen doesn`t have a person violent. I think the person chooses the subject matter of media based on things that are within them already. The personality chooses the content. The content doesn`t make the personality. No one hears a politician use violent row in their rhetoric and says "Hey, that gives me an estimate_" As well, just because someone listens to Shootin` Spree, reads Doom and plays Medal of Honor doesn`t think they leave some day go on to kill people.
So how then can we possibly ever get to call who the next shooter might be? We can`t. There is simply no way. Censoring violence in media will not end these random acts. All the finger pointing in the public won`t prove that a horror story made a grouping of kids decide to become Satanists and get to plan human sacrifice. All the craze that surrounds these events worries me because each time we lay blame outside of the individual who attached the crime, we run the danger of allowing ourselves to be tricked into that blissful belief that if we simply didn`t have this stuff around, all this awful violence wouldn`t happen. You know, some of the almost violent countries in our existence have none of this media to pander in and want of exposure didn`t keep them from their human nature.
In hindsight, there are always easily read signs that individual had the tendency toward this case of violent act. The trouble lies in foresight, though. How do we promise and prevent? Short of taking every soul and separating them from all early people, there is dead no way to break these things. Put humans together and violence will occur. It`s the way it is, the way it`s always been.
This offense was horrific. I find so seriously for the victims and their families. I find for the category of the man who pulled the trigger. I likewise look for the man who did this, in the sensation that he is mentally ill and yet though it doesn`t exonerate him or delete his culpability, certain mental illnesses can be like a pit inside your head and the earth outside holds no horrors that could match. It really doesn`t stop me from being angry or from believing this person needs to be segregated from fellowship and punished for the nightmares he`s caused, but as a person, my heart holds compassion for what I suppose must be passing on in his mad brain.
There is no way to have sense of what this person did, no way to ride out the things that might have made him finally break. There is no way to see when this might happen again and to whom. We can`t protect ourselves from it by censoring all the things we might not approve of or understand. Do I wish that we have national leaders saying things like we want to get a second amendment solution to this problem? No. I don`t, and I wish that we are looking now realizing that maybe it`s best for us if our role models aren`t speaking so flippantly about taking out those they differ with. But don`t charge them for what happened.
What we can do, and what we must do, is look for the multitude who lost loved ones and mourn just a little, or a lot, the release to humanity. Then we get the operation of making our very unsafe world safe again, at least in our minds. We operate our doors tighter, keep our children close to us. We convince ourselves that this is an anomaly and that if anyone we knew was subject of this, we would know it before it came to this end and we go on with our lives. We`re humans. Self delusion is what we`re better at.
I know, this tower has aught to do really with vampires and reading, but sometimes things occur in our reality that are so completely in the head of my head that I can`t remember or write about anything else until I`ve processed the case completely. This is one of those things.
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