Angry, and In a Hurry

HAVE WE MADE ANY PROGRESS finding out what motivated our most recent school mass murders? Or have we already forgotten about them, preferring to direct our attention to the future, and whatever excitement it holds? For a few days following one of our gunfire spectacles, the media is frenzied with rumors and hints, then, just before discovery, all traces vanish, the new having worn off. Privacy laws take over, and what was really going on in the mind of the latest forteen year old mass murderer remains locked away, forever. Something is always going on. Teenagers do not spontaneously take up arms and randomly plug away. Usually, it involves bullying, but we prefer, for some strange reason, to conceal this in a murky cobweb of speculation about the trigger kid's mental state. Some people are just plain sick. Leave it at that, and move on. Are we really trying to understand our national epidemic of school violence, or are we merely engaged in a witch hunt for perverts, misfits, unnacptables? And by so doing, are we engaging in our own form of bullying, and obscuring the fact that our epidemic is deeply rooted to something inside us all? To accept bullying as the cause is to accept that there is a cause beyond the dysfunctional emotions of the trigger kid, with its horrible unacceptable implication that there might be something wrong with our society at large, something wrong with the rest of us "good people". Like, maybe we live in a culture of bullying? Not long ago some high school football team beat some other high school football team 91-0, and there were charges of bullying, "scoreboard bullying" or some such. Some women's right advocacy groups are now defining bullying as estranged husband using logic in an argument. So it isn't like we aren't trying. Its just that we do not yet know how to come to terms with what we really are. If we ever arrive at an understanding of what "bullying" really is, it is likely to include so many of our daily activities that we can no longer bear the sight of ourselves, or what we discover about ourselves. Don't lok now there is a forty thousand dollar SUV five feet from my rear bumper, doing fifty, and don't look now, but the driver appears to be a mainstream upper middle class all American lady, very good looking, but angry, and in a hurry.