I really wish I had an answer. I don't, and I'm not sure anyone does.
I'm writing this blog late in the evening. Something happened today, something of such heart stopping evil that I'm sure most of us will have nightmares about it. I'm not going to explain what it was. If you live in the U.S. you already know. every media outlet, and two-bit pundit has already screamed the gory details in your ear. I don't want to do that. I don't want to glorify this heinous act any further. Everyone else has already done that, and I think that may be part of the problem.
There is an old curse attributed to the people of China, which translates roughly as; "May you live in interesting times." As a young child I couldn't understand why adults thought this was a curse. It seemed like a blessing to me. After all interesting was the opposite of boring and had to be better, right? What the adults around me knew, and what took me years to realize. Was while interesting could be the opposite of boring, it was also the opposite of peaceful.
Ask anyone who makes their living keeping others safe, ( Fire Fighters, Law Enforcement, Security Professionals, etc.) how their shift was and the words "quiet" or "dull" will bring a smile to the faces of their coworkers. However the words "busy" or "interesting" will cause those deep creases right between the eyebrows. Interesting is dangerous.
Instant communication brings the world to our fingertips. It also isolates us in a disturbing way. We don't interact on personal, face to face, intimate levels anymore. Our friends are "on line".even our celebrities are different than they were twenty years ago. There are people who are famous for being famous! The public can follow their every move on twitter or face book. We've gone from a culture where every child could grow up to be president, to one where every child wants to be Paris Hilton. This is insane!
Everyone wants to stop the tragedies. We want to get out from under this curse. Well we should. But we can't do it with a quick fix. We can't do it with gun control. We can't do it with mandatory mental health evaluations. We can't do it by locking away "those people", because we are those people! The internet has made the entire world one village. We gossip over the back fence with millions of people every night. Maybe we need to stop that.
Before the internet, before cable news , cell phones, and instant messaging. We lived in small towns, villages, and neighborhoods. Our celebrities were the local DJ, the basket ball center, and the grocer who could do magic tricks. And any one of us could be a celebrity in our neighbor hood, just by being us. But now we are ghosts. faceless fingers tapping out words in a big chunk of ....nothing. we aren't real to each other any more, we aren't even real to ourselves. I wonder if that's not what is happening to us. If in our desperate attempts to get noticed, we're turning to acts of outrageous horror.
Being a decent person doesn't get us noticed. And that, may indeed, be part of the reason behind these tragedies. Perhaps in the minds of these deluded individuals, it doesn't matter that they won't be remembered with love. Just that they will be remembered. Perhaps if we didn't feel the need to know everything about everyone everywhere these .....creatures, would realize that they are doomed to obscurity like most of us, they would find a different path to fame. A less "interesting" path.
Larry
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