Brain Candy and Killers
Well sir, I guess there's just a meanness in this world.
-- Bruce Springsteen, Nebraska
Another senseless mass murder in this country, and it has me pissed and sickened down to my core. I don't know a soul who has ever set foot on the Virginia Tech campus, but I've been robbed. We all have. What if one of those students or teachers would have gone on to cure cancer or AIDS one day, or figured out a way to eradicate global hunger, or negotiated peace in the Middle East? At the very minimum, we have 30-something dead people who wanted to be productive citizens, enrich their lives and our society through education, and raise happy productive families. Chances are, among the dead are those who volunteered for charities, cared for stray dogs and cats, mentored youth, or was the person friends went to when they needed to unburden their souls. Such potential, reduced to blood and brains splattered on a classroom floor. Dammit - I'M SO PISSED!
Then I start wondering why I'm surprised. A few years ago, it was John Mohammed and Lee Boyd Malvo shooting people from the trunk of a car customized for random murder. Before that, Columbine, Oklahoma City. And before those, and between them, other school shootings and mall shootings and office shootings -- random recreational killings that grow fuzzy in my mind due to the fleetingness of their horror and their growing everydayness.
I'm not talking about the mass murders of 911 or Rwanda or Nazism that grow out of some demented ideology or unrestrained greed. I'm talking about the mass murders that somehow have become the perverted products of our own middle-class citizens pushed over some incomprehensible brink. How does this happen in the most prosperous, richest, opportunity-filled, freedom-loving society on Earth?
How do I deal with this? I don't. I block it by watching Dancing With The Stars and reading People Magazine and OD'ing on brain candy, because intellectual nutrition becomes so overwhelming that it borders on toxic. Mental cotton candy becomes an escape, a drug like liquor or pills, by convincing you that it's actually satisfying. Virginia Tech isn't like a train wreck that you have to gawk at as you drive by, because it's impossible to move on and go about your business. You have to stand there and stare and feel overwhelmed by your own helplessness while your feet are cemented to whatever ground they happen to be planted in.
It may be politically incorrect or controversial to say so, but after this, I'm over the existence of an unrestrained Second Amendment. How can we continue to insist that anybody who hasn't committed a violent crime yet has the right to go out and buy a gun with no qualifications other than an ID, the right amount of cash, and a few days' wait? As long as we make it easier to buy a gun than to buy a house, we're going to reap what we sow, and we'll gather our harvest in body bags.
I don't need guns for protection. I need protection from guns and the crazy-ass people who are allowed to have them.
-- Bruce Springsteen, Nebraska
Another senseless mass murder in this country, and it has me pissed and sickened down to my core. I don't know a soul who has ever set foot on the Virginia Tech campus, but I've been robbed. We all have. What if one of those students or teachers would have gone on to cure cancer or AIDS one day, or figured out a way to eradicate global hunger, or negotiated peace in the Middle East? At the very minimum, we have 30-something dead people who wanted to be productive citizens, enrich their lives and our society through education, and raise happy productive families. Chances are, among the dead are those who volunteered for charities, cared for stray dogs and cats, mentored youth, or was the person friends went to when they needed to unburden their souls. Such potential, reduced to blood and brains splattered on a classroom floor. Dammit - I'M SO PISSED!
Then I start wondering why I'm surprised. A few years ago, it was John Mohammed and Lee Boyd Malvo shooting people from the trunk of a car customized for random murder. Before that, Columbine, Oklahoma City. And before those, and between them, other school shootings and mall shootings and office shootings -- random recreational killings that grow fuzzy in my mind due to the fleetingness of their horror and their growing everydayness.
I'm not talking about the mass murders of 911 or Rwanda or Nazism that grow out of some demented ideology or unrestrained greed. I'm talking about the mass murders that somehow have become the perverted products of our own middle-class citizens pushed over some incomprehensible brink. How does this happen in the most prosperous, richest, opportunity-filled, freedom-loving society on Earth?
How do I deal with this? I don't. I block it by watching Dancing With The Stars and reading People Magazine and OD'ing on brain candy, because intellectual nutrition becomes so overwhelming that it borders on toxic. Mental cotton candy becomes an escape, a drug like liquor or pills, by convincing you that it's actually satisfying. Virginia Tech isn't like a train wreck that you have to gawk at as you drive by, because it's impossible to move on and go about your business. You have to stand there and stare and feel overwhelmed by your own helplessness while your feet are cemented to whatever ground they happen to be planted in.
It may be politically incorrect or controversial to say so, but after this, I'm over the existence of an unrestrained Second Amendment. How can we continue to insist that anybody who hasn't committed a violent crime yet has the right to go out and buy a gun with no qualifications other than an ID, the right amount of cash, and a few days' wait? As long as we make it easier to buy a gun than to buy a house, we're going to reap what we sow, and we'll gather our harvest in body bags.
I don't need guns for protection. I need protection from guns and the crazy-ass people who are allowed to have them.