With only a matter of days separating shootings here in Portland and now in Conneticut, and a scant few months from the Denver attack, I am beginning to lose my faith in coincidence. Whats the saying? Once is an accident, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action?
I'm beginning to believe this is enemy action. The hard part is, I cant identify an enemy at this point. As a nation, and a culture, we have plenty of enemies- some, even, with the wherewithal to exert covert pressure on us. I am not willing to lay these actions at the feet of political opponents- even at their most misguided, this is beyond the pale. At the same time, I KNOW that there are groups more than willing to lay these deaths at OUR feet.
Occam's Razor be damned, there has got to be some common tie here. There is too much coincidence- assaults carried out by seemingly innocuous young men, all using similar methods and weapons, in such a short period of time. I fear we have found the domestic equivalent of suicide bombers in the middle east.
This is all too disturbing for words. Somewhere, there is a hand at work, and we are being played.
Stay cautious, people. We need to get to the root of this, or it WILL break us as a nation.
Well, to play Devil's Advocate for a moment, this is a country where there are an awful lot of bent arrows wandering around on the streets. This is a country where it is very nearly impossible to commit anyone involuntarily to the nuthouse until after they've already killed someone. There are plenty of crazies out there.
ReplyDeleteOnce upon a time we identified them, locked them up, lobotomized and sterilized them, and kept them locked away where they couldn't harm anyone. There were Supreme Court cases like "Buck vs. Bell" that confirmed the legality and constitutionality of the practice, all overturned by liberal judges legislating from the bench after the Second World War. Now no one is crazy, no one is deviant, the only one who's sick in the head is the one who sees how many people are walking around loose who are sick in the head--we mustn't be "mean spirited" or "judgmental" or "stigmatize" the "mentally challenged," blah blah blah.
Once upon a time--say, 1925--anyone who wanted a Thompson submachinegun could buy one via mail-order, and there were no metal detectors in the schools, no BATF, no TSA, no Homeland Security. And there were no school shootings, no workplace massacres, no airliners being hijacked and rammed into buildings--and no steamboats either.
What were we doing right then, that we're doing wrong now?
Its the eternal conundrum, isnt it? Its easy to say that we were doing things right, way back when- except when we werent. There are lots of things that are vast improved now, very important things in civil rights and treatment of prisoners. We USED to lock people up for crimes like being a single mother, or being homosexual. I CERTAINLY dont support returning to that. Other things, such as personal responsibilty for our actions, were well understood, to the point that I dont think people would have understood the concept of collective responsibility. So, yes, its certainly possible that we are experiencing a collision between the loss of social mores, our inability to identify true instability, and the egregious idea that killing a lot of people will make you famous or notorious in death.
ReplyDeleteThe flip side is- what if that ISNT whats going on? If an outside force was trying to destabilize our culture, don't you agree that attacking shopping malls, schools, and mocie theatres is a likely way to do it? Especially if they could simultaneously cause us to disarm ourselves with plausible separation- they would need no links to disarmament groups, no trace to be found. They would just feed them anonymously. It even makes sense to use our newfoumd compassion for the mentally ill against us.
In short, we know the impetus exists- we have plenty of enemies willing. We also know the methods exist, methods of planting thoughts or ideas coercively, especially in people with a fragile psyche. Is it too much of a stretch to connect them?