Looking At Ourselves

THE MASS MURDERER was mentally ill. A freak. An outlier. A lone wolf, angry and alienated. Nobody is his right mind would do such a thing.....We utter such nonsense repeatedly until we begin to believe it. And the truth is, we are never deceived, we only deceive ourselves. It comforts us, makes us feel superior, provides us a neatly packaged explanation, easy to understand, easier to assimilate into whatever our personal agenda, and then dismiss, until the same nightmarish scenario happens again, as it will, and always does. Kill the killer, and forget he ever lived. Grieve, utter hollow platitudes about the beautiful lives lost, then move on, having learned nothing. Learn nothing, remember less. It will never happen again, we say, knowing it will. My dead son was covered with tattoos, with a full beard, strong arms, and a penchant for cocktails and an occasional game of blackjack. In a city which, according to nature, should not exist for lack of water, souls and wallets are sucked dry, as we seek to escape our hollow lives of quiet desperation in our lonely angry culture. When all hell breaks loose, we compare ourselves to the killer, and celebrate our moral superiority, and what we vainly call "normal". Steven Paddock was sixty four years old, and perfectly normal. A retired accountant, nondescript well to do real estate investor, and high stakes gambler, without strong religious or political convictions, narcissistic; what could be more normal in America? He slipped on a casino floor, sued, and lost. Again, perfectly normal. He had a veritable arsenal of weapons. Normal. We are not prepared to accept his complete normalcy, to accept how similar to the rest of us he was. We resist the truth only because we fear we might perish if we accepted it, and indeed we might. If thou gaze long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into thee. When we gaze into the mirror, we see only our beautiful selves, and we snap a picture, for all the world to see. Self absorbed, we see little, and invent the rest. In the twentieth century one hundred million people were shot and killed in military combat, which we refuse to call murder, instead ascribing it to love of God and country, and turning the killers, and ourselves, the murderers, into heroes. It requires denial, and effort. We are all angry, we are all normal, and we are all killers. There is more, much more in the mirror than a beautiful face. In his famous novel, "In Cold blood", Truman Capote tells the true story of two transient, shiftless men who murder the Clutter family in Kansas, looking for money, and come away with only a few dollars. they are caught, tried, and hanged. Capote's point in the story is that blame for the tragedy belongs to society in general, as well as the two murderers. Capote, using subtle literary skills, shows how the two men were shaped by their environment. He often said that he die not believe in individual guilt, for anything, but only societal guilt, and that society, acting as a single, complicated, many faceted organism, produces all human behavior collectively. Whether we agree with this, we must admit that although individual responsibility for all our actions is fundamental to an understanding, of human actions and moral consequences, all of us, in concert, do indeed create a set of conditions in this world, and that these conditions are very much with us, and they impact us. guns don't kill people, people kill people. but like my grandfather said, put a gun in a man's hand, and the first thing he wants to do is fire it; we would not drive fast cars were we not behind the steering wheel of a Corvette. Individuals act individually, but only because they are able to do so within the framework of the rest of us, whoever and whatever we are as a whole.