Constant and Sharp

After the page break, find my thoughts on the Colorado shooting, family and karma, and the need to understand violence.

It's a long post.

The first thing I woke up to on Sunday morning was the news about the Orlando shooting.

When I saw the number of victims (then counted as 50, now 49 as people realized they were including the shooter among the innocent dead) I felt a numbness. A wall went up.

“Oh. Another shooting. Of course. I suppose we were due for another.”

When San Bernardino happened just a few hours from my home, there was a lot of chatter about how tragically routine these ‘active shooter’ situations have become. About the only question that comes up is whether the massacres committed are acts of global terror or domestic terror. We sit and wait to hear what name the news outlets will cough up for the shooter. Muhammad is such a common name. It’s one of the most given names in our world. I wish, with black irony, that for once an ‘Islamic’ named shooter was just being crazy, and not some self-proclaimed “Caliphate soldier” for the so-called Islamic State.

I feel a cold rage that I’ve been staving off since Sunday morning. I’m openly bisexual. This attack on this LGBT club was an attack not just on those poor souls, but everyone like them. If given the chance, ISIS would force me into marriage or kill me. This is a tragedy on a global scale. On a national scale. But also on a personal scale. It is a painful mark in history for LGBT people much the same way the Charleston church shooting was for the African American community. Somehow these two movements, of LGBT rights and the violent ideals of ISIS, which had been largely separate save for shouting insults across a vast canyon, collided cataclysmically. We’re standing in the smoldering crater, and I think people are struggling for how to process this. I think those responsible in the LGBT want to avoid being divisive by exacerbating the “us vs. them” thinking, but others who are hurt and angry and feeling a ghostly fear rise up from their own experiences of persecution are lashing out.

“The worst mass shooting in America, and of course the victims are LGBT!”

But I want to find a way to think of this in a broader way. Our world is a community. I know some people roll their eyes at the concept of globalism, but it’s fucking happening, so you can pooh-pooh it all you want. The reality is that our cultures are slowly fusing together, influencing each other, and it’s all because of the interconnectivity and speed of our technology… which only promises to grow MORE interconnected and speedy as time goes on. This is one of things that terrifies ISIS. That had terrified the Taliban. They could see the world at large changing, encroaching on their ways of life, and they decided it was their heavenly mission to stop this. They see modern living as a corruption of everything that is right. These disenfranchised young men are lost and frustrated. They honestly believe that rejecting the only world they’ve known and claiming some twisted code makes them better. The truth is, the call of the times still beckons them back-- back to the flashy clothes, the catchy music, and the evolving views on love.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Patrick Bateman, you are the perfect embodiment for this entire Islamic “movement”.

These men (and some young ladies)... they are outcasts looking for recognition and purpose. Some are just fucking crazy and like to have the justification for their craziness.

I have a morbid fascination with death. It is something that persisted since childhood-- perhaps a result of my PTSD upbringing? Some other influence that I cannot readily recall? Maybe just a karmic inheritance that steers me that way? Whatever the case, I can’t help but stop and stare when hearing about these things. I immediately try to parse out the reasons. Understanding is important to me.

I’ve read all about the Columbine High School Massacre, for instance. The days leading up to that eventful day in 1999, when I was just a child. The journal entries, the tapes, the witness accounts. I read about it till I felt like I understood. Eric Harris was a sociopathic narcissist. Dylan Klebold was his depressed follower. They were both retaliating in response to an arrest for breaking into a van and stealing some items from inside of it. People blame the parents. I don’t. People blamed the police. I don’t. The tactics unit wasn’t equipped to handle this kind of situation. This was new back then. A shooting of this scale was still rare before the new millennium kicked off. The police officers simply had the misfortune of having come in at the wrong side of the school. They had to check every classroom to look for the shooters. Meanwhile, Eric and Dylan were racking up most of their kills on the other end of the campus, murdering students in the library with leisure.

When I heard about Orlando, my first thoughts was the numb horror, of course. Then the disgusted resignation. Then… the analysis turned on. White rabbit took off.

“Night club? A soft target. The shooter could have slipped in through a side entrance, or maybe even went in with a disguise. Oh. He was a security officer. Did he go in uniform? That could explain how he got an assault rifle inside. Fuck, the music. It was so loud and so dark, no one realized what the shots were. Big difference from Aurora. It was dark in the Colorado theater too when James Holmes opened fire. People thought it was a stunt for the new Batman film. But that confusion quickly dissipated, and people started to flee. The fact that they were sitting in theater seats saved lives. If they had been on a level plane like the people in that Orlando night club, then they would have been mowed down. That’s how Omar Mateen managed to be so lethal. The environment was perfect for him to capitalize on. A perfect storm. Makes me wonder why no other shooter has tried this before? Unpin a few grenades… roll them across the dance floor… then open fire… Fuck, what’s wrong with me?”

Murder mystery fans like to think up ‘what if’ scenarios about how they would ‘conduct the perfect murder’. I felt sick as I realized I was trying to do the mass shooting version of that.

How much of that is just sick entertainment, and applicable analysis? I can’t say. I hate that I can’t say. One thing I do know? I hate how news outlets cover tragedies. Deaths and wounded victims should not be turned into gifs. Anchors asking questions like, “Was it terrifying?” is the insensitive, predatory, ignorant crap that turns the media coverage into a circus.

I remember where I was when the Aurora shooting first hit the news. I was working at the Augusta Country Club in Georgia, temporarily working as a server in their downstairs restaurant. Ordinarily I only worked special banquet events upstairs. That night was slow. Me and the other servers were watching the TV screens as the news reports rolled in. The customers were quiet. People were murmuring and reacting in various ways. Some tutted, shaking their heads. Others whined and fussed, almost like the reports were just saying a heavy rain was coming, or their favorite sports team lost.

I cried.

There, right in front of my fellow servers and the very rich white customers we were serving, I cried.

I was a few months pregnant already. Maybe it was the hormones? I felt embarassed. Tried to stop the tears, but they kept coming. Then I stopped fighting it and just let them come, because this was sad news, and why should I feel ashamed for being sad about sad fucking news? When one of my co-workers asked me what’s wrong, I could only say, “There were kids in that theater!”

One female server put an arm over my shoulders and led me to the employee room to calm down. As the others saw me weeping, they kept asking her, “What’s wrong? What happened?”

“She’s crying about that new shooting in Colorado,” the female server said with a shrug.

“Oh,” they said, bemused looks on their faces.

I calmed down a few minutes later and returned to work. When I went back out, my fellow workers had gotten over their initial surprise and kept asking if I was okay. I responded that I was fine and explained that it must’ve been my pregnancy. As if I needed to. As if I had to apologize for being sad about dead children.

Separation. We are expected to be emotionally separated.

There is good reason for this, of course. With all the horrible news in today’s world, we can’t stop and weep for it all. The world still has to keep going. We still have our own lives to tend to.

I just wish I could strike a balance between compassion and passive reception? I don’t want to hear this kind of news and think, “Oh, how sad!” I want to feel something. I need to feel something, even if I do something. Good acts without proper motivation is emptiness. Clockwork Orange, anyone?

So difficult to do when your immediate life is roaring about you.

I mentioned my relatives were coming to stay with us. Well, they’re here. They’re going to be here for the next 2 months. Unless hubby’s work sorts out where it’s going to move to, we can’t hope to make any serious moves to find a new home. So… 2 months of relatives! Six people all crammed into one house! With lots of weird issues to sort out!

Yay?

As we sat and listened to the news reports about Orlando trickle in bit by bit, I sat with my mother and sister-in-law in the living room and listened to the latest of the shit show in Guantanamo Bay. More family drama. Ridiculously timed problems. It sounded so karmic that my eldest brother and his family would suffer so much in just a single year. In some cases, in just a single week. Family deaths (on in-law’s side), physical fights, surgeries… It’s stranger than fiction. I know life can be up and down sometimes, but it feels so cosmic.

Eventually it got to the point that listening to both the news reports AND the drama faced by family overseas just… got to be too much. I started to tune some of it out. Troublesome Beast was an excellent person to chat with, and he provided some much needed relief (See? You weren’t a bother at all! Quite the opposite!) but I couldn’t disconnect entirely as much as I wished to. I wondered if I was just failing to assert my boundaries, or something? Was I being codependent? I actively resisted feeling too badly for my brother and his family. Some of their problems they didn’t directly ask for, but they were the results of many past choices. It’s not my fault. Can you believe it? I had to tell myself that everything happening in Guantanamo Bay was not my fault. Not my responsibility. I tried to stay sympathetic but distant.

Sympathetic but distant.

Sympathetically distant.

Like about the Orlando shooting.

Sunday went by all right. One awkward conversation with my sister-in-law when I was driving her into town regarding my father’s absence and the overall state of our family. Bought a ton of DVDs from Best Buy, including Zootopia. One less awkward grocery store run with my second eldest brother. Then I made corn tortillas and debated on drinking rum or vodka. (I didn’t drink at all. Hoo-ray.) The evening was spent locked away in the bedroom, thoroughly done with family and anything resembling socializing as I played Overwatch. After a few hours, I worked on Her Collar, Her Love. Wrapped the day up by watching The Revenant with husbando till 1AM. Good movie. Though I found myself irritatingly reminded of current events.

Yes. Revenge is bad. Sweeping statements like “we should bomb the hell out of them!” and “ban all Muslims!” is the kind of ignorant shit that just keeps leading to more and more violence.

It’s human to want to understand things. It’s human to be morbidly curious. It’s not human to turn tragedies into games.

Media coverage, while necessary, has become a frenzy of bottom feeders looking for ratings.

Emotional distance may be practical, but compassion shouldn’t be neglected.

I believe in karma. I see it happening in my everyday life. I truly feel in my heart that such terrorists and mass murderers and other wrongdoers will get what’s coming to them… If not in this life, then the next.

My pain is constant and sharp...but I hope for a better world for everyone. I want my love to be spread to others. I want no one to be forgotten.

Comments

[Troublesome Beast]

I'm glad that I was a valid distraction.

I think that one of the things we forget, speaking of the analytics, is that humans are the yautja of our world. We used to run our prey to death. The thumbs I hamfistedly add double spaces after paragraphs you crazy people put only singles with are crushing levers. Our arms are hooked to throw, our bodies twist for owl plus levels of visual arrangement. We can balance to move forward, crouch defensively without giving up much of our reach... and that's the body.

We see the invisible. Tigers and zebras are pretty well camo'd in their environments; humans are very good at seeing them. We consume poison. I'm not just talking about alcohol; capsaicin and cacao fuck other species the hell up. We go "Mm, tasty!" We can feast on vermin and trash, on a huge variety of plants, and then there's what we do to our fellow animals. Like most superpredators, we're scavengers as much as hunters, but like bears (thank you Stephen) we can supply ourselves with the calories to recover afterwards. We survive injuries that would leave other animals unable to still get food. Then there's our technology, and the fact that our philosophies and ability to contemplate ethical vs. moral vs. survival allow us to create efficient ways to work together.

What's my point, here, with the reminder that humans are nightmarish horror movie monsters? Well, there's a caveat: we're also damn good at helping other species. Even those that don't benefit us immediately. We've done well by most of our symbiotes like dogs and cats, even if we also get to the tragic... which brings us to tragedy and the ability to plot a massacre while being horrified by it.

You are heir to that nightmare. Whether you believe like I do, that the universe was set in motion with a plan for souls to inhabit bodies that suited the randomness of free will-- theistic evolution with the caveat that anything done by an omniscient, omnipotent creator will resemble pure chance unless the creator is childishly spraypainting their Names on our ass-DNA-- or that it's pure forces of efficient adaptation acting like the mindless, hungry clockwork leviathan that bows before and yet flees from entropy, you are heir to what we had to do to not merely survive, but to thrive.

Of course you can plan that. You know how it's done; your memories of games and basic logic fill in some blanks. Your body remembers what it's like to remember how to do it. But ah, your foremind, your soul. That's the distinction. You have the intellect to know it's wrong, to know that it just creates an endless cycle. The last time we retaliated to something like this with naked violence, we created ISIS. Every time some asshole does something like this, it pulls back the veil and shows us that someone who might love a different way is no less a fragile, vulnerable, wonderful nightmare than the rest of us. Pain begets pain; paradise-- that takes planning.

Then there's the soul. I'm not as clear on maya/buddhism/the release from suffering and attachment, so I can only give you my universal dispensationalist Christian heresy. Your soul knows what's right. Your soul remembers love eternal. Listen to that, at the core, and the hatred can't win. To quote the dearly departed Sir Pterry, we are where the falling angel meets the rising ape.

Also, I am in fuuuulll on rant mode and I apologize for italics spam.

Someone keeps insisting that our preciiouuuusssss Rarity is just a simple seamstress and an example of standard unicorn levels of strength and skill.

imgs.xkcd.com/comics/duty_calls.png

[Nines]

4020037

Very well said overall! I do have to try to make myself remember sometimes that for all the bad that people do, there are also those that are doing an incredible good.

To quote the dearly departed Sir Pterry, we are where the falling angel meets the rising ape.

Ooh, I like that quote!

Oh and this:

Someone keeps insisting that our preciiouuuusssss Rarity is just a simple seamstress and an example of standard unicorn levels of strength and skill.

Read pretty much like this to me:

lovelace-media.imgix.net/uploads/489/c22ab410-6f9b-0133-0c51-0e34a4cc753d.gif?

To which my reaction was...

media.giphy.com/media/3o85xERD1TT5JKCIXS/giphy.gif