Connecticut school shootings: the moral void

 

Christie Blatchford, a tough and venerable print reporter who exposes truth far more powerfully than I ever could, had some choice things to say about the horrors that happened this morning in Newtown. Some of it touched on social media and the bizarre, faceless way we communicate in this stranger-than-strange time:

The wisest story I’ve ever read about a mass school shooting is a work of fiction – no accident, I suspect, for it takes distance to see past the horror of such things, not to mention get around the makeshift shrines and the spoken and printed equivalents of the teddy bears which adorn them.

Social media and Twitter, it is certain, will make that latter task ever more difficult.

As mainstream newsrooms around the world geared up the sombre music and reporters lowered voices and dumbed down their language (yes, it is hard to imagine) in order to interview eight-year-olds, so did cyberspace fill up with omgs, fake sites, expressions of sorrow, rumours and ghastly bleatings.

To quote a young man named Ryan Lanza, who may be someone with the bad luck to have the same name as the Ryan Lanza who was first wrongly identified as the latest shooter or who may be the actual brother of gunman Adam Lanza, who complained on Facebook Friday, “So aperently I’m getting spammed bc someone with the same name as me killed some ppl..wtf?”

Either way, this is what passes for social commentary in 2012 — illiterate, petulant, self-referential sludge.

I think this is what I was trying to get at - not nearly as effectively - in my tirade against the cult of narcissism that drives texts, tweets and other bleeding chunks of damaged language. It astounds me that up until the past few months, this cacophany of chirping and blathering has been seen as nothing but positive: isn't it marvelous we can connect like this,  that everyone's the same, all of us equal in the great wide sea of cyberspace, so that we can freely propagate lies, scams, gooey badly-spelled sentiment (soon to become standardized, no doubt, in the form of "Twitter English") and other verbal effluvia, all in the name of instant communication!

A few years after the initial bird-brained euphoria, the rotten underside of this whole ill-planned enterprise is beginning to stink big-time. The fact that it has fewer rules governing it than the Wild West is only just now beginning to make itself felt in bullying and cyberscams and other forms of human hatefulness. Old people are being bled dry and have nothing left to live on, teenagers are killing themselves due to relentless organized persecution (after which we get all sentimental and fix things by designing a tshirt). Even the shocking suicide of that poor blameless nurse after the Duchess prank may have been driven by a barrage of cyberabuse.

Blatchford speaks of a novel called We Need to Talk About Kevin, in which a budding Adam Lanza-type begins to emit those eerie waves of incipient violence that everyone is so good at ignoring.  This bit of dialogue is both hair-raising and wrenchingly accurate:

The dad once asked Kevin, “Do any of the students at your school ever seem unstable? Does anyone ever talk about guns, or play violent games or like violent movies? Do you think something like this could happen at your school? Are there at least counselors there?”

“All the kids at my school are unstable, Dad,” the son replied. “They play nothing but violent computer games and watch nothing but violent movies. You only go to a counselor to get out of class, and everything you tell her is a crock."

Blatchford touches on the new industry of trauma therapy that always leaves me feeling as if something had been stuffed down my gullet:

I was in Littleton, Colo., 13 years ago. What was almost as horrifying as the carnage — 14 students and a teacher dead, the killers having shot themselves — was the theatre that followed. Students were able to grieve only in public, preferably for the cameras; professionals descended in swarms to help the town mourn; people urged each other to hug their children, as though without the reminder, no one would have thought of it.

Tonight I listened to countless reporters say things like "experts claim that -" and "let's talk to an expert on this subject", after which a psychologist would come on camera and spout truisms that any grandmother would know. Not one person had the guts to say, "My God, I don't know! I don't know what to do about  any of this. I feel like there's nowhere left on earth that's safe." Not one of them admitted that there is NO WAY to "safely" let your children know about all this hideous carnage in a way that will spare their feelings and leave them emotionally unscarred.

Don't lie to them, we were told, but don't say too much.  Don't disclose, but don't withhold either, and make sure you give them a big hug (because otherwise, we might forget).
 
But even that convoluted mobius of non-advice wan't the worst.  Every single "expert" I heard tonight told us that we should reassure our children that it "won't happen to them".  Oh? Do we know that for sure? Did Newtown know that for sure when it woke up this morning? If a place that looks like a Norman Rockwell painting could bury twenty small children just a few days before Christmas, we should not be so sure it "won't happen" in our town, that it won't start to happen in escalating waves as more and more people go crazy from alienation and meaninglessness and fall into the moral void that breeds pure evil.

Dark night: thoughts on the Colorado massacre

Like a lot of people, I find I can't live - can't go about my day-to-day activities and try to enjoy life - if I'm paralyzed with grief, horror and fear. At the same time, how can I NOT feel this, and feel deeply for the survivors who are reeling with shock and disbelief?

It COULD happen to me, or to you. We don't have special protection, even if we believe in "God" or "the angels".  It's NOT "a movie" or "part of the show". Those AREN'T "firecrackers", but gunshots! Gunshots that kill people.


Do you still think everything happens for a reason? Then tell me, explain to me: what was the reason for this?

I get sad and melancholy and I don’t know how else to feel when the news is so horrendous. In a sense, you have to just push it away. It’s not good mental health to practice so much denial, and it’s not honest either, but what else can you do, not go out because you’re afraid you’ll be gunned down? I don’t care about me, though I’d rather be cleanly killed than be like Gabby Gifford who is now reduced to a bewildered, childlike state.

It’s my loved ones I worry about. All the time, really. I worry about apocalypse of some sort. The weather, world climate, which is already deteriorating alarmingly, fire and flood, drought and snowstorm occurring where/when they shouldn't be, and I wonder what I am leaving for my grandchildren and their children, if they even have a chance to exist. And/or terrorism spreading like an evil ugly cancer, ultimate weapons, what they used to call “germ warfare” that would knock out so many people, there’d be no one left to try to cure it.

I know these are worst-case scenarios and the stuff of science fiction and  movies/books about the horror of dystopia, but still, did anyone anticipate 9-11? I don’t see how anyone could have, and that's what alarms the shit out of me. It was just a taste of what terrorists might do to us. If it happens again on a mass scale, of course it would be all-out nuclear war and the end of everything.

We can’t think about this, of course, but there is a cost to repressing it all the time. If you talk about it and openly express fear about it, you’re seen as a sort of party-pooper who doesn’t know how to have a good time (text-text-text, tweet-tweet-tweet!). I asked Bill once, “what’s IN all these texts? What are people texting about?” Bill said, “NOTHING.” And I think he’s right. They have no content, so all they are is a sort of mutual narcissism and a smokescreen insulating people from their feelings.  

Myself, I lasted about two seconds on Facebook because every time I tried to post anything serious, all I got was dead silence, or a nasty jibe meant to send up my comment or minimize it with a joke. I felt like I was eight years old and being ostracized on the playground once again.

I'm not in a personal crisis now, my life is stable if a little dull, and in many ways I am blessed beyond measure.  But that doesn’t mean I have no problems. Is it normal to have problems? People pretend they don’t. But all these sick evil people are emerging who think it’s OK to randomly murder strangers, even children. Meanwhile people say things like, “I thought it was part of the show.” During 9-11, people repeatedly said, “It looked like a movie.” Do we know the difference any more?

With all this emphasis on "social networking", we're increasingly wearing masks and becoming anyone we want to be. It's fun for a while, then an awful barrenness steals in and begins to eat away at the core, the very foundation of your soul. And for the most part, you're not even consciously aware of it. Everyone's doing it, after all, so it must be OK.

Constant shallow tweeting, texting and phoning about nothing drowns out the drone of horror in the background, the sound of those awful air-raid sirens I used to hear as a kid (supposedly, just being tested out, but tested out far more often during the Cuban Missile Crisis and at other points when the nuclear clock stood at a few seconds to midnight).

I never used to hear about random shooters when I was younger: did you? Did you hear about events like this, or Columbine, or people just randomly opening fire in mall food fairs?

Why is this happening now, when it never used to happen before? Though there is a tremendous amount of denial about this subject, in many ways our world teeters on the brink. Brink of what? Climate meltdown, terrorism on a scale so massive it's beyond our capacity to grasp - and, the thing no one talks about any more, vast, even grotesque overpopulation.

Being crowded together far beyond the carrying capacity of the planet, a planet we have poisoned grievously and choked with vast islands of dead computers and other forms of plastic that will never degrade, has done something to us. It's cooking up a huge vat of collective stress, the kind of stress that can explode alarmingly in a susceptible person. I have a theory about why so many people are becoming grossly obese: it goes beyond the ubiquity of junk food in seemingly every store. Cramming a chocolate bar in your mouth helps you push down that low-grade vibration of anxiety about our survival as a species.

Try to project all the problems we have in the world to fifty years from now. I am afraid to. I just don't see how we will be able to stop the juggernaut, the relentless progression of a destruction we set in motion ourselves, mostly through thoughtlessness and greed.

We treat these horrendous fires and floods as if they came out of nowhere, but I see it as the planet hitting back, finally unable to stand any more abuse. We HAVE changed the world climate, folks - irrevocably, and not for the better. I am afraid that these feeble attempts to reduce our "carbon footprint" is too little, too late.

But we are awfully good at numbing ourselves to the truth, whether with drugs, food, or an obsession with technology you can hold in one hand like an ice cream cone.

If a lonely, isolated, socially-deprived person with a fascination with weaponry begins to entertain an idea - an awful idea - what will stop him? He won't talk to a friend about it because he doesn't have any friends. ("He kept mostly to himself" has become almost a cliche in these situations.)  Friends aren't people any more - they're Facebook pages and "tweets". (And I think it's no accident that the inventor of this strange form of non-communication named it after the sound a silly, superficial, bird-brained creature.)

Every time something like this happens, authorities are quick to tell the public that it was an "isolated case", just one disturbed nut case whose mental illness had nothing to do with the rest of us or the alienated, anxiety-ridden, sick world we live in. That makes everyone feel better for a while. Doesn't it?

I don't know what to do about all this. It's as if I'm expected to care, but not care, or at least not care very much. I can't prevent another dark night, have no idea how to start. But the profound social isolation and alienation that gave rise to this horrific act affects all of us, without exception. 

So we don't know how to feel. We don't know how to go on. "We thought it was part of the show," the survivors said.

And in an awful kind of way, maybe it was.