The Murderous Rampage Next Door
Every tragedy births a supplication. Every assault, violent attack, assassination attempt and murderous spree begets the same series of questions, a palms-open appeal to the gods of law, society, humanity.
It goes like this: What will we learn? What will change? Will any solutions emerge? Who can fix this? Is it even possible? And finally, what the hell is wrong with us?
So it is that, in the wake of the Tucson rampage wrought by a deranged monster named Jared Loughner, a man with far too easy access to firearms and a brain far too full of tortured rhetoric, comes the collective wail from the right, the left, the president himself: Something must be done. We will get to the bottom of this. We will examine from every angle, figure this out, heal the wound.
Right. What wound would that be, exactly? The bottom of what? What, really, can or will be done? No one seems to know. Or rather, they sort of do, but no one has the nerve to do it. Ain't that America.
Regardless, some have already taken action. Already, two political creeps have decided to reduce themselves to, well, almost the same level as Loughner himself. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and Rep. Heath Shuler (D-N.C.) have declared that they will start packing heat, carrying their own handguns around D.C. like twitchy thugs, because gosh, it just makes sense. More guns will somehow equal less guns, and violence never begets more violence. Well done, boys. You're a couple of goddamn geniuses. Now shut up.
Cringingly childish, their response is nevertheless typical of the maleducated American ethos -- reactionary, fearful and seemingly unable to examine not only root causes, but a bogus value system that champions infantile cowboy machismo over, well, almost everything else.
But never mind them now. Let's dance backwards for a second. Do you recall if anything changed in America as a result of the Columbine massacre? Anything significant in terms of gun laws, the educational system, or our understanding of the troubled youth mind? Did we evolve a notch or two as a result of that profound and heartbreaking wound? What about after the '07 Virginia Tech massacre, in which Seung-Hui Cho's insane spree resulted in the deaths of 30 people?
Answer: Not so much. More school security, maybe. More cameras, sophisticated alarm systems, bars on the windows. A few schools hired more psychologists. Check that: We did learn something. We learned that if there's one thing we're good at, it's armoring up, locking down, imprisoning ourselves deeper into the cave of dread. Meanwhile, the kids are still not all right.
What about the granddaddy of them all, 9/11? No question: The nation changed violently, dramatically. But mostly toward the negative. Bush/Cheney's toxic response made sure of that: two wars, the Patriot Act, the TSA, wiretapping, Axis of Evil, terror alerts, Homeland Security, Islamophobia, the works. Not a single move toward self-examination, compassion, humanity or humility.
Only with Obama have we begun to carefully peel it back a little and re-examine our role in the world, open ourselves to international input and cooperation, realize we are not, and never really have been, the beatific Christian superman to the planet. Often just the opposite, in fact. But we've still a long way to go.
Another question swims like a piranha in the current headlines: Do the likes of Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Rush, Sarah Palin's "Take back the 20" list, Arizona's hate radio broadcasters, et al spur the mentally unstable to violent behavior?
More broadly: Does a blood-splattered, inflammatory media -- especially right-wing media, with its nonstop calls to attack the government, hate liberals, stockpile bullets before Obama comes for your guns -- help create a more explosive, Loughner-friendly environment, much like those fundamentalist mullahs who plant the seeds of hate in young Muslim minds?
You know the answer. It's a bit like asking if violent video games really do desensitize children's minds, or if smoking too much pot every day will eventually make you a useless, slow-blinking dolt. It might not be the sole cause, but it's certainly a factor. How big a factor depends, in part, on the level of one's instability to begin with.
Which leads us straight to Occam's Razor. The simplest answer is usually most accurate. Loughner was insane. No amount of hate radio, conspiracy websites or Palin ditzmongering could fully create the likes of him. He acted alone, he and his tiny, fetid brain. So is part of the answer simply improving the system that keeps the mentally unstable from having such easy access to 9mm semiautomatic Glocks?
Maybe. But the fact is, Loughner's festering insanity also found easy, fertile ground indeed to flourish into violence. Almost right up until the moment Loughner pulled the trigger, the ever-paranoid, Tea Party-enraged portions of this country essentially cheered him on, sent him a brochure, welcomed him as one of their own.
Look, this is America: While you are halfheartedly allowed to be as optimistic, spiritually awake, book-learned, calm and reasonable as you wish, you are aggressively encouraged to be as suspicious, xenophobic, poorly informed, well-armed, God-fearing and insular as you possibly can. Let's be absolutely clear: When it comes to toxic rhetoric and the general spew of hate and fear, the GOP and its frothing media army outgun liberals by a factor of, oh, about a thousand to one.
So here we are, another brutal tragedy, 20 people shot, six dead, a public servant in critical condition. What have we learned? What is our takeaway? Do you have a sense of it yet?
On one level, Loughner is but another fractured mirror, held up to reveal our darkest cultural themes, obsessions, illnesses. We ask, "How can we minimize those factors that allow monsters like him to exist in the first place?" Most answers fail spectacularly.
Will the hate radio provocateurs do any soul-searching? They will not. Will we get stricter gun laws? Barely. Will treatment programs for mental illness improve? Hardly. Will the media, pop culture, our politicians, our society ever get past the vile veneration of the firearm, which results in 30,000 gun-related deaths a year, by far the worst rate in the civilized world? What are you, a communist?
So maybe we do the only thing we have left to do. We turn inward. Each and every one of us, when slammed by these kinds of horrific stories, looks to the only thing we can ever really count on, the great human constant of life.
It goes like this: Deep in the heart of every human breast -- right, left, center -- beats the same desire. We all want peace. We all want more love, ease, a lessening of pain and suffering. How we get there depends on your daily choices, your angle and flavor of engagement with the world.
The final questions emerge. Are you an agent of the calm and the open-hearted, or a pseudo-victim of the fear and the reactionary? Have you already made your choice?
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