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Pardon Me While I Kill Myself. (Please get a room of your own.)

So here’s why you and I should get stuff done.

Stories change.

The Germanwings plane disaster hit me hard because of one fact: 18 of the dead were from one high school, sixteen kids and two chaperones. I still don’t know for sure what they were doing in Spain, but it didn’t make the slightest difference to me: they were kids, teachers were with them, and that interaction has meant the world to me for much of my life, and life to me in most of my world. I’m an education guy. I’m a school freak. So I got writing. The emotional vein was rich, and I had it going. 613 words in, I knew where the piece was headed and how it would end. Powerful comparisons had been summoned, and hearty stories from my direct and tangential experience just needed a little more flesh. I was tired. Maybe a bit distracted. Probably could’ve finished, but close enough. The writing beast had been slain for another day. Well, badly wounded, anyway, so I knew it couldn’t run much farther.

Life intervened, though, and I couldn’t get back to the piece the next day, and didn’t the day after that. Not only was nobody waiting for the piece to be done – standardly lame working conditions for an aimless blogger – but my take, full of emotion though it was/is, wasn’t exactly a hot one. It was elegiac and backward-looking and somber. No rush, right?

And then the air disaster story changed for me, dramatically, with the reports of the co-pilot having done the deed purposely, by and for himself.

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Men and Guns and Murdered Sleep

UPDATE: A shorter version of this piece, with a somewhat different focus and some extra authority, also appears at the Baha’i Teachings website.

I can’t help myself. I have to say something about Santa Barbara, but what to say that others haven’t about a young “man” – oh, how that word is mutating like attention-deficit cancer cells – who so pathetically, so enragingly, so outrageously, so pitiably, so hatefully, so sadly and so narcissistically wore all his grievances on his electronic sleeve. Then he found, what – not courage, for God’s sake – enough petulance-gone-mad, enough entitlement-gone-toxic, enough Internet-chutzpah-gone-fatally-virulent, to spew the tantrums of a deeply spoiled child with the sick can-do of an adult, and with the cold metal of “equalizers” that would never require him to face his victims as an equal. God help the innocent. God help us all to sleep, and to keep finding hope and goodness.

The numbers are hard to gather, let alone fathom. Just in the USA, some dedicated carnage-counters in the gun-addled States (the on-line magazine Slate, for one) throw out statistics that mainly seem to numb us. “35,000 gun deaths since Sandy Hook”. “A mass shooting every five days.” “90 American gun deaths per day.” And so on. More than half of these are suicides without the murder, it appears, since guns are the American way to take arms against a sea of troubles / And by opposing end them… So yes, Hamlet, there’s that, but at a certain level of super-hero self-hatred, offing yourself just isn’t cinematic enough anymore.

But there’s more.

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Why Did We Need to Know? TMI After Blacksburg

3:53 a.m.

Thank God for exhaustion, or I wouldn’t have gotten the hours of sleep that I did. A long hot bath helped, though there isn’t enough soap and water to clean out my head. A heavy dose of bed-time narrative – imagine Kurt Vonnegut as escape fiction! – and I was finally able to knock myself out. And then my little boy called in the night: I’m thirsty, it’s too dark, something. And now I can’t get that other voice out of my head, that fully grown, lip-quivering boy at the perfect storm of petulance, his self-loathing narcissism gone murderous.

If you haven’t seen the Virginia Tech murderer’s rant, my counsel is to avoid it. It is toxic. And no, I did not take my own advice. I couldn’t not watch. Get right inside the mind of a mass killer! Step right up, folks, and see the Wounded Boy! Hurry, hurry, hurry! It’s Actual Footage! Live! Inside the heart of darkness! Tell your friends, invite your enemies, forward this everywhere! And please, don’t forget to patronize our sponsors… When I wrote about Dawson College and the shooting there on that bitter day last fall, I refused to name the shooter, just as I do when I reflect on the earlier Montreal Massacre. How quaint, how fussy that now seems when NBC News has decided to air the ravings of the Blacksburg killer. NBC itself is BIG NEWS today! So, by extension, is the Globe and Mail and all the other TV, print and online media that have dutifully obeyed the pre-death wishes of that catastrophically maladjusted man-child in Virginia. (No, I won’t name him, either. I crave the conquest of barren hillsides. I fight battles out of time. I’m an idiot, but I do what I can.)

I am stunned by what I saw. I am bewildered that I could click on a bit of text and bring the sickness, the disgusting narcissism of raging injury right into my house, right into my heart. (“Create in me a pure heart, O my God, and renew a tranquil conscience within me, O my hope…” Pray and pray.) I wonder at the decision-making process of the major media. WAS there any? Well, DUH, of course we run it!! We’ll never have a scoop this loaded again! The number of jolts this provides to the planet is beyond counting. We will watch and watch again, a lurid and haunted fascination. We don’t know what’s good for us.

So while the commentators (like me) prattle about “copy-cat killings”, now the Manual for Impotent Men is available free, in deathly colour. It’s the school for scandalous action. And now YOU can get the revenge you deserve! It WORKS, kids! When the revenge fantasies don’t work anymore, try reality! The guy’s a hero now. He has a constituency. He’s the patron saint of Glock masturbation. He has been given exactly the public exaltation that he lusted for in his pornographically petulant dreams. We nourish this madness. We feed upon it. It is unbelievable. It is this week’s sign of apocalypse, if we needed one.

No doubt there will be pious invocations of the public’s right to know, the sober responsibility of the broadcaster and the journalist. But this is the ultimate sell-out. NBC has hit a jackpot, and they’ll keep pulling that slot machine’s crank. Vonnegut couldn’t have invented a humour so bitterly black, where mass murder and mass media join hands and celebrate the power of rage and heartbreak. In Canada, the families of slain and dishonoured girls fought long and achingly, at an emotional cost we can’t imagine, to restrain access to the ugly evidence in the Bernardo trial. Can you imagine now how the families of the Virginia Tech innocents are feeling, knowing that this filth is number one with an on-line bullet? Can you imagine their decision, to watch or not? I pray that they don’t, but what if they do?

I will try not to watch again. My eyes are raw and my gut hurts, but I’m like a billion others. I want to understand. (Ah, noble intentions. Or maybe I just want to say, Didja see? Didja see? Maybe I just want to peek into that corner we all know is off limits. It’s psychological pornography, and we get to justify it with all kinds of righteous reasons. Didn’t NBC?) But I do want to be able to sleep. Macbeth comes to mind. (I’ll name the Scottish play, but I won’t name the Blacksburg bastard. And yet I hear he had hardworking parents. Dry cleaners. Out, out damned spot!) Do you remember the aftermath of murder in the play?

Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more!
Macbeth doth murder sleep,’ – the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds…

It’s 5:03 a.m. I’ll try sleep again, but even writing doesn’t seem too cathartic right now. We will all sleep again. (Pray for the sleep of the bereaved families. And I hope, too vengefully, that somewhere news executives are losing a few nights of their own.)

And We Mourn for the Americans…

“We are all Hokies today,” said one email to an American sports radio show today, as the chatter about bad calls and draft prospects was cut off at the knees by the word out of Blacksburg, Virginia. Yes, Virginia Tech’s athletic teams are the Hokies, but nobody’s thinking much about spring football or the basketball season just past. “There’s somethin’ ’bout Mondays always makes me blue,” Steve Earle was just singing out of my stereo. The grim curtain of violence has just fallen again in the United States. Somehow, thirty-three dead in Virginia hits harder than another Baghdad bombing statistic, but we’re all human. The hurting is everywhere, but it’s hitting the Americans especially hard today.

This particular bit of grimness is farther away for us in Canada, but only good luck and good policing prevented a similar death toll in our own college shooting last fall. (I wrote about Dawson College here. The feeling is the same today.) Education and gunshots make a horrifying juxtaposition. I grieve for those students hurt in body and soul. I try not to imagine the parents of VaTech students, waiting and wondering, and especially for those who don’t wonder anymore.

The words of Bahá’u’lláh, 19th-century Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, come to mind as we all ask, like sports-talk jock Jim Rome did today, “What the hell is going on?” Just before the dawn of the 20th century, with all its apocalyptic confusion, Bahá’u’lláh — a Persian nobleman tortured, jailed and exiled for teaching the oneness of humanity and the renewal of civilization — wrote this:

The world is in travail, and its agitation waxeth day by day….How long will humanity persist in its waywardness? How long will injustice continue? How long is chaos and confusion to reign amongst men? How long will discord agitate the face of society? The winds of despair are, alas, blowing from every direction, and the strife that divides and afflicts the human race is daily increasing. The signs of impending convulsions and chaos can now be discerned, inasmuch as the prevailing order appears to be lamentably defective…”

We will know more, and it will likely make us sick. May it also make us work for the betterment of the world and the well-being of our communities.