I am supposed to be playing tag today. I don't feel like it. I will get to that tomorrow. But today I am not feeling witty and lighthearted.
Yesterday in my adopted home, this lush and vibrant city that I love, six people were shot and killed. It started yesterday morning when a man walked into a cafe where he was a regular and started shooting people. Then he continued downtown where he shot and killed a woman and stole her car. Police caught up with him across town and then he knelt down and shot himself. It took all day, while the rest of us went about our business, checking occasionally for updates and wondering what all this was about.
This has already started the political shouting match about gun control. I don't want to enter that fray. I have my own opinions about it, but they don't matter that much. I don't want to talk about guns. I want to talk about the finger that pulled the trigger. The mind that told that finger that was its only choice.
The shooter was known to be unstable and very depressed. His own brother said "We should have seen this coming." The other patrons at the cafe where he was a regular feared of him and for him. He was, by all accounts, an unhappy man. Ostracized and out of sorts. He felt on the fringe of things and the killings were of his perceived enemies. I do not blame the victims. I do not blame the people close to him. Ultimately, we are all responsible for our own actions. He took his unhappiness, his mental illness, his feeling of otherness and made a series of very bad choices. He could have done otherwise. I will judge and say he should have done otherwise. There are plenty of profoundly depressed people who do not choose to kill others. No, I do not blame the victims.
What I do is wonder. I wonder if he could have been helped. I wonder if any of the people who knew him had tried, to no avail. I don't know. I wonder that we live in a society that drives some people so far out of it that they are driven out of their minds. I wonder if it's not the other way around. Perhaps they are already out of their minds and do the driving out themselves? I wonder if this is a trend that will continue.
It is no secret our country is collectively unhappy. Our economy is floundering. There are deepening divides along economic, ideological, racial, sexual, spiritual and just about every other kind of lines. We are a people afraid and nervous. We feel like we have been cheated out of something and that someone must be to blame. Some blame the rich, some the poor, some the military, some the corporations. We are tripping through these divided lines, weary from navigating what might or might not offend. It all becomes so much noise in the background and we are left with a collective migraine. A low, constant buzzing, inescapable pain and over-sensitivity. We want it to stop and nothing seems to help. Someone must be responsible. Someone must be to blame. Are we blaming ourselves? Should we?
Humans are pack animals. Like wolves. We are made to coexist, look after one another. When a weak or broken pack member suffers, the whole pack suffers. Wolves are sometimes perceived as dangerous animals, but there is no recorded case of a healthy wolf ever killing someone. It is the lone wolf, the wolf that is disconnected from its support system, detached through illness or injury or starvation who attacks. Sometimes it seems as if we are becoming a society of lone wolves. Our connections to other people are becoming more intangible. Our support systems disintegrating. We brave the elements, the maelstrom of images and messages that rain down on us relentlessly telling us we are not enough, that other people have it better, do it better, feel better. The brambles of want and need snag at our pelts as we hurtle through the forest. The small and the weak and the old are left untended, barked at for feeling entitled, disenfranchised, ignored.
Human suffering is ugly. Sometimes it smells bad. Sometimes it's frightening. Sometimes it sits next to us in human form in a cafe and we move away, uncomfortable and unable to enjoy our lattes. We bottle our own suffering up and hide it away or we splash it about, obnoxious and off-putting while well-meaning people nod and smile, pat-pat, there-there, and go on about their business. We are so caught up in our rapids of busy-ness that to slow down and listen is to risk being swept away, drowning. So we holler a brief hello from our life boats and continue on. I am a socialist. I am a grass roots socialist. I believe that by helping the lowest rungs of our society - children, the homeless, the mentally ill, the elderly - we elevate the whole society. I know not everyone feels this way. I know what it is to be focused elsewhere, to be frightened, to be exhausted, to be discouraged. I know how it feels to get out of the life boat and wade upstream to reach out a hand and have it slapped away or have it accepted only to be left standing soaking wet while someone makes off with my raft without so much as a "how do you do." I don't know how it feels to go out for a cup of coffee and get shot. I don't know how it feels to want to rob another person of life.
When things like this happen, the instinct is to hide. To lock the doors and keep our loved ones close. To shut out the rest of the world and its ugliness and suffering. But sometimes I wonder how that is any different from what we do on any other day. I am a realist, too. I know there will always be people who become unhinged, make unconscionable choices, hurt and destroy. But I wonder. I wonder if we need more locks, more controls, more fear. Or if, perhaps, we would have fewer feel the need to vent and rage if we threw our doors open and listened. If we watched and we helped and we got involved. If we realized that regardless of the packaging, we are all just humans who suffer basically the same emotions, share basically the same needs, the same fears, the same desires. Would it hurt your feelings if someone crossed the street to avoid you? Would it wound you just a little bit if someone wrinkled their nose and walked away when you tried to strike up a conversation? What if you asked for help and people just flowed past, consciously avoiding eye contact? What if you were sick and your society determined that you did not deserve to be well?
None of this excuses the actions a desperate, sick man decided to take yesterday. None of this will bring back the lives of the people who were just out for a cup of coffee, getting into their cars, driving down the street. These innocent people who had unwittingly become enemies in one man's mind and suddenly lost their lives for it. None of this makes any of that all right. None of this will make a difference to any of those people now.
But that was yesterday. What about tomorrow?
What if we paid attention to the desperation of another human before he felt the need to pull out a gun. Would that make a difference?
Yesterday in my adopted home, this lush and vibrant city that I love, six people were shot and killed. It started yesterday morning when a man walked into a cafe where he was a regular and started shooting people. Then he continued downtown where he shot and killed a woman and stole her car. Police caught up with him across town and then he knelt down and shot himself. It took all day, while the rest of us went about our business, checking occasionally for updates and wondering what all this was about.
This has already started the political shouting match about gun control. I don't want to enter that fray. I have my own opinions about it, but they don't matter that much. I don't want to talk about guns. I want to talk about the finger that pulled the trigger. The mind that told that finger that was its only choice.
The shooter was known to be unstable and very depressed. His own brother said "We should have seen this coming." The other patrons at the cafe where he was a regular feared of him and for him. He was, by all accounts, an unhappy man. Ostracized and out of sorts. He felt on the fringe of things and the killings were of his perceived enemies. I do not blame the victims. I do not blame the people close to him. Ultimately, we are all responsible for our own actions. He took his unhappiness, his mental illness, his feeling of otherness and made a series of very bad choices. He could have done otherwise. I will judge and say he should have done otherwise. There are plenty of profoundly depressed people who do not choose to kill others. No, I do not blame the victims.
What I do is wonder. I wonder if he could have been helped. I wonder if any of the people who knew him had tried, to no avail. I don't know. I wonder that we live in a society that drives some people so far out of it that they are driven out of their minds. I wonder if it's not the other way around. Perhaps they are already out of their minds and do the driving out themselves? I wonder if this is a trend that will continue.
It is no secret our country is collectively unhappy. Our economy is floundering. There are deepening divides along economic, ideological, racial, sexual, spiritual and just about every other kind of lines. We are a people afraid and nervous. We feel like we have been cheated out of something and that someone must be to blame. Some blame the rich, some the poor, some the military, some the corporations. We are tripping through these divided lines, weary from navigating what might or might not offend. It all becomes so much noise in the background and we are left with a collective migraine. A low, constant buzzing, inescapable pain and over-sensitivity. We want it to stop and nothing seems to help. Someone must be responsible. Someone must be to blame. Are we blaming ourselves? Should we?
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| Photo courtesy of Morgue File |
Human suffering is ugly. Sometimes it smells bad. Sometimes it's frightening. Sometimes it sits next to us in human form in a cafe and we move away, uncomfortable and unable to enjoy our lattes. We bottle our own suffering up and hide it away or we splash it about, obnoxious and off-putting while well-meaning people nod and smile, pat-pat, there-there, and go on about their business. We are so caught up in our rapids of busy-ness that to slow down and listen is to risk being swept away, drowning. So we holler a brief hello from our life boats and continue on. I am a socialist. I am a grass roots socialist. I believe that by helping the lowest rungs of our society - children, the homeless, the mentally ill, the elderly - we elevate the whole society. I know not everyone feels this way. I know what it is to be focused elsewhere, to be frightened, to be exhausted, to be discouraged. I know how it feels to get out of the life boat and wade upstream to reach out a hand and have it slapped away or have it accepted only to be left standing soaking wet while someone makes off with my raft without so much as a "how do you do." I don't know how it feels to go out for a cup of coffee and get shot. I don't know how it feels to want to rob another person of life.
When things like this happen, the instinct is to hide. To lock the doors and keep our loved ones close. To shut out the rest of the world and its ugliness and suffering. But sometimes I wonder how that is any different from what we do on any other day. I am a realist, too. I know there will always be people who become unhinged, make unconscionable choices, hurt and destroy. But I wonder. I wonder if we need more locks, more controls, more fear. Or if, perhaps, we would have fewer feel the need to vent and rage if we threw our doors open and listened. If we watched and we helped and we got involved. If we realized that regardless of the packaging, we are all just humans who suffer basically the same emotions, share basically the same needs, the same fears, the same desires. Would it hurt your feelings if someone crossed the street to avoid you? Would it wound you just a little bit if someone wrinkled their nose and walked away when you tried to strike up a conversation? What if you asked for help and people just flowed past, consciously avoiding eye contact? What if you were sick and your society determined that you did not deserve to be well?
None of this excuses the actions a desperate, sick man decided to take yesterday. None of this will bring back the lives of the people who were just out for a cup of coffee, getting into their cars, driving down the street. These innocent people who had unwittingly become enemies in one man's mind and suddenly lost their lives for it. None of this makes any of that all right. None of this will make a difference to any of those people now.
But that was yesterday. What about tomorrow?
What if we paid attention to the desperation of another human before he felt the need to pull out a gun. Would that make a difference?
That was a sad story. For everyone.
ReplyDeleteI am a grass roots socialist, too. Every soul matters. Every single one. We are that man and he is us. We owed it to him to tend to him. We failed. When something like that happens, the failure spans far further than the person with the finger on the trigger. It's a symptom of a horrible disease that plagues us as a people, and it requires action. Caring. Commitment to the notion that we are all valuable--no exceptions.
ReplyDeleteYes, what he did was hideous. Absolutely not okay, no excuses. What is was not is unspeakable. We need more speaking about the lost and the invisible. We need to stop ignoring them or hiding them and begin reaching out.
A couple of my socialist type posts:
http://www.word-nerd-speaks.com/2011/04/old-mother-hubbard-economic-reality.html
http://www.word-nerd-speaks.com/2011/07/americas-invisible-children.html
Love this line, and believe it wholly: "We are that man and he is us."
DeleteBless you, Word Nerd. Thank you for such powerful and beautifully said thoughts. I agree with you so much.
DeleteWe definitely need more speaking of these things - speaking and not shouting. I don't know why we hide mental illness or ignore it. We do a whole month for breast cancer, fundraisers, walks, 5K runs, etc. It confounds me that some illnesses are "worthy" or acceptable while others are not.
So sad. And yes unsettling and brings about a lot of questions. A lot of thoughts. Why does it take an event like this for society to realize that we are not taking care of the mentally ill. His family might have tried to get help, he himself might have tried. Budget cuts have taken away a lot from a lot of people. Is this the price we have to pay?
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure even now we will realize that we are not taking care of the mentally ill as well as we could. I don't know why there is such a persistent stigma, why there has to be a fight to receive care.
DeleteIt seems a pretty steep price to pay.
Thank you for saying all this. At my church, we "covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of all people." A creed we don't have, but that promise, we do. It is so large a promise that it can never be kept, which is the only kind worth making.
ReplyDeleteA few summers ago, a man entered one of our sister churches in Knoxville during a children's performance rehearsal and killed some people. He was after "the liberals" he believed gathered within that church. Afterward, our faith had to struggle out loud with how to reconcile our values with what this man had done. Some people seemed most comfortable perceiving him to be the witless victim of a system that they could call evil, some others felt profound anger for his choice. I don't know why he was broken–why he felt compelled to open fire in a church filled with children and take the life of adults who protected them. I just know that he was. Like the Seattle shooter. Predictably, visibly broken, like a kettle just about to boil.
Like you, I get so tired of us doing nothing and then reflecting, "Why, oh why, did this happen?" Each time a bullet enters the body of an innocent, it is a choice someone made and it is also a failure of society in general to care for her children–to see that every one of us are at one time or other greatly in need, perhaps of love and care, perhaps of a long time-out. I always hope that next time we will learn.
I remember when that happened.
DeleteI have the same hope, that next time we will learn. I just don't know that we will. Or can?
Beautiful post. Part me understands sympathy fatigue. You hear so many stories of those in need or requiring aid, that you start chalking it up things beyond your control.
ReplyDeleteInstead,I look to the people who are in my life. I can touch that. I can help them. I can make a difference there.
Perhaps it's less grand than wanting to save the world, but being a good friend and neighbor is within my realm of ability. Beyond that, I fear I'm too selfish/tired/lazy/removed.
Still working on becoming a better person. Takes time, I guess.
I fully understand the sympathy fatigue. It is a very real thing. There are so many important causes that warrant attention. I think all anyone can do in the end is what they can, where they are.
Deletewe are on the road this week, lou, and so i have not been following the news. this post was the first coverage i've read of this episode and there's a particularly resonant quality to this story as i hear it through your experience of it, you know?
ReplyDeletesometimes human suffering does sit next to us, making us uncomfortable and rendering our lattes less satisfying than we had hoped. but sometimes we get called out on that behavior and are reminded of our irreducible obligations to one another. so we rouse ourselves at the sound and try a little harder to be kind or, at the very least, aware in the days following.
thanks for calling us out, my friend. we could always stand to do better.
Thanks for reading, Wendy.
DeleteI call myself out more than anyone else. It's so easy to slip into complacency, a narrow focus. It's sad that it takes gunshots sometimes to rouse us out of it.
We are very weird this human race <- now there's a clue.
ReplyDeleteWe could make this world anything we want it to be, Eden if we wanted. But we persist in making it the opposite.
That man, well maybe he knew this too and found it such an entirely horrific realization.
I think you've hit on something, here, Julie. It feels like the tip of something huge and immovable.
DeleteI lived just a few minutes away from Columbine, and our community and the nation went through all these same questions. All I know is God is love and this is a world where bad things happen. I think sometimes maybe someone could have helped. I think other times, nobody could. But I just don't know. Sending lots of prayers and love toward your beautiful city.
ReplyDeleteThis made me think of Columbine, too. And Chuck E Cheese a few years before.
DeleteThank you for the love and prayers. I thought of Columbine, too. I don't know if anyone could have helped, ever. I think sometimes it's a thought I use to comfort myself that perhaps, there will be no future incidents like this.
DeleteThis is a compassionate and ultimately brilliant response to a horrific event. I definitely feel you're on to something. Living where I do, in my tiny little town, in my tiny little county (the entire population of which is but a fraction of the population of your city), I have been fairly sheltered. We have a few individuals in town who suffer serious mental illnesses and out-of-control addictions, but most people know them by name. Many of us go out of our way to greet them, to check on them, etc. When one of these individuals was recently hit by a truck (while in his usual highly inebriated state) on Main St. and helicoptered to the hospital in Rochester (about an hour and a half away), the newspaper ran a front page story and its website was flooded with supportive and concerned comments. The two or three people who dared make judgments were "shouted" down by the compassionate ones. So, yes, in my little isolated, insulated world, it has been fairly easy to forget that in the rest of the world, something else altogether is going on.
ReplyDeleteAt the halfway house where I've worked for three years, I see glimpses of that other world. We take in clients from anywhere in the state of New York--though the vast majority come from this western portion of the state. I have seen numerous men with dual diagnosis (mental health/addiction) and that number continues to grow. These are the most difficult cases and, often, the people with the least options. Many of them clearly need intensive inpatient mental health treatment and instead are in the semi-structured environment of our halfway house with outpatient mental health counseling at the agency in town--an agency with counselors whose competence and compassion I have many reasons to doubt. In any case, our program is generally a six-month program so by the time the intake appointment at mental health is made, groups set up, and the prescribing psychiatrist finally seen weeks or even a month or more have gone by--bringing a client's affiliation with this particular mental health organization down to three or four months at best before they are shipped back to whatever county they came from. Of course, when they leave, referrals are made in the home county, etc, but I doubt how often they are followed-up on.
I guess my rather long-winded point is that the systems are inadequate and really need to be looked at. I think one of the keys to making changes in the system is more grass roots socialism. ;)
In the meantime, more one-on-one compassion toward others can make an enormous difference on a case-by-case basis. That is something else I see on a daily basis in my job as well. One of the most heartstring tugging moments I've had on the job came when one of our dual-diagnosis residents said to me, with what can only be called wonderment in his voice, "You treat us like we're human beings." I was proud and grateful to know that my actions so clearly matched my feelings, but I was also deeply depressed and disturbed by the fact that clearly, clearly, clearly compassion, treating "them" like they are human beings, is so rare, even in my own facility, that it was worth commenting upon.
My heart goes out to the friends and family of the victims of Wednesday's shootings. My heart goes out to all of us as we struggle to make this world we're living in a safer and better place.
That is one of the blessings of a small town. It's almost impossible not to see every resident as a person. As much as I love this city, it is all to easy for our "fringe" folks to become a part of the scenery.
DeleteThis makes my heart sad, and reminds me of "all the other shootings" close to me. Lindhurst High School in CA my sophomore year in HS, Chuck E Cheese in Aurora my senior year in high school, Columbine High School, Gabi Giffords in Tucson ... I have no answers.
ReplyDeleteI struggle with how to point the finger. The finger that pulled the trigger is physically to blame, clearly. In many of these cases, that finger then turns on the person attached to it, which leads to the discussions of mental illness and the "fringes" of society. I too know plenty of mentally ill people who are not violent. In my life, I have known (of) people prone to violence who did not appear to be mentally ill.
It takes a whole village, but each member of the village has to buy into that for it to work. Each member of the pack has to give a hoot.
I have no answers, and perhaps no intelligent comments to add. Except this member of the Periphery's virtual pack gives a hoot. I appreciate you putting this out there, being honest and thoughtful about it. This is a conversation that needs to be had in communities and villages around the country (around the world really, but let's start "small"). I'm not convinced it can be a "national" conversation. I think it has to be community conversations all over the nation.
My heart goes out to everyone affected, physically and emotionally, in Seattle Wednesday. If only that could actually help heal their wounds.
I agree that it's a conversation that needs to be had. It needs to be had among friends in soft voices, not shouted in rhetoric and promises. It's not a simple problem, and it's not the only problem our society faces.
DeleteI think it can actually help for people's hearts to open and go out to those who need it. It's really the only way that things start to get done.
Wow, thank you TL! What a beautiful post! Very thoughtful and compassionate.
ReplyDeleteIt made me of a post that Tara forwarded tome a while back:
http://deeperstory.com/jesus-had-blue-eyes-or-plus-one/
I'm not Christian, but this post was beautiful and completely in line with my spiritual path. It is the Christianity that I love and admire!
Thanks for sharing that article with me. It's beautiful and so important. It has given me lots to think about.
DeleteAbsolutely! I posted a link to this post in the comments on that article too. I hope you get some hits out of it. I really love what you've written here! Curious if you would email me mla_ca520 at hotmail dot com? I'll respond from a different email address, that is my "spam" account, but it's the only one I'll post on the web!
DeleteI have a question that I'd like to pose offline I would very much value your input.