In the triumphant return of news you don't need me to tell you, tragedy struck the California beachside community of Isla Vista this week when Elliot Rodger, 22, killed six of his fellow UCSB students on Friday night. Rodger had apparently written a lengthy manifesto which voiced his contempt for nearly everybody, but particularly high-lighted his hatred of women and his desire to see them suffer.
It says a lot of the post-9/11, post-Columbine world that I grew up in that when I heard this my sadness was not coupled with surprise at all. Shootings like this have become such common-place during my lifetime that once the smoke cleared and our national grieving had begun to subside it wasn't hard for me to predict the flow of events to follow.
Predictably, we all start to ask ourselves, "How could this happen? What could we have done to prevent this? What makes these things keep happening?" They're questions we've asked ourselves many times before now, and the search for answers always turns into a shit-show. One person proposes a thought, another person sees that thought as an affront to their lifestyle, shots are fired one way or another, and we collectively find ourselves off-topic. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
Exhausting, isn't it?
Before I go on, I want to say that I have no answers. I am no psychologist or sociologist or statistician and I don't know where these things keep coming from, what can or should be done to prevent them, and what it might mean for the rest of us. I do, however, know when a conversation isn't happening. I know that nobody, or at least most people, don't want to use the suffering of other people as an excuse to intrude unnecessarily on the lives of others. I know that we need to stop this self obsessed "the thing I enjoy or agree with is very definitely not to blame" bullshit and listen.
The obvious instance of this intellectual dead end is the gun control argument. In the interest of full disclosure, I suppose I should say that I'm not a gun person myself, but also that I'm not taking a stance on the argument here. Let me say that again I AM NOT HERE TO SAY THAT WE NEED TO START TAKING GUNS AWAY FROM EVERYBODY, but the fact that I need to make that disclaimer so big is indicative of the problem.
Inevitably in these things, one of the early questions asked is "Where did the weapon come from?" This question is usually met with a huge collective outcry of "They're trying to take our guns! Don't take our guns!" or, indeed as we heard today from former McCain campaign mascot Samuel Wurzelbacher (aka Joe the Plumber) "Your dead kids don't trump my constitutional rights." This kind of automatic defensiveness is damaging to the conversation. The gun control argument is a complicated and nuanced one, with plenty of twists and turns and the second amendment smack dab in the middle. But, in situations like this, where every attempt at dialogue has been shut down, no progress can be made on either side. No conversation is had in a public forum about the every potential implication and angle here. We have hit an intellectual dead-end.
Here's another example, more pertinent to this particular set of killings.
Because the killer expressed such profound hatred of women, it has been proposed that his actions are the extreme but inevitable result of the rampant misogyny that permeates our cultural landscape.
This idea too, has been met with a great deal of fearful hostility. Instead of talking like adults about even the possibility that there might be harmful things innate in our culture that are worth phasing out, many have responded that this theory is some part of a sweeping feminist agenda to phase out "traditional masculinity" or something like that. Instead of talking about where this killer might have picked up his brutal misogyny, we instead find ourselves in a different argument all together, wherein people afraid of even the possibility of slight cultural change sling childish insults, which get slung back, and, look, we're collectively off topic again.
Here's one that hits close for me.
We probably all remember the 2012 Aurora shooting, wherein James Eagan Holmes killed 12 people in an Aurora, Colorado theater at a midnight showing the Dark Knight Rises, which I myself attended a midnight showing of in Vermillion on the same night. The kicker? Holmes was dressed as The Joker.
I've been a life-long fan of comic books, action movies, and nerd ephemera of all sorts, and I've spent my whole life dealing with allegations that these things I love breed violence in impressionable minds. I've always dismissed these allegations as the ignorant venom spitting of people too far separated by generation or interest to understand what that stuff means to me.
But, when a mad man clearly inspired by something I love shoots and kills real people in the real world? That's called a connection. One that I still have a hard time dealing with, in spite of my enduring love of all things Batman.
Now, I trust that held up under the scrutiny of public conversation, by beloved funny-books would be found basically innocent of wrong-doing, but we never got to have that conversation. That conversation was blocked by people like me. People afraid that talking about the potential implications of the things we loved might result in them changing, or going away all together. I think now that that was the wrong way to handle it.
It is time for us, as adults in the first world, to not be babies about people questioning the things we're used to. When peoples' lives are on the line, no stone should be un-turnable. We need to be able to listen, and respond back calmly to cultural critiques and criticism, and when it comes time for our half of the argument, we need to believe that things we're defending can hold up on their own merits.
And if they can't? Maybe it is time for a change.
It is time for us to stop being a culture of defensive yelling and posturing and start being one of listening and considering. That's how progress is made.
-Jimmy
Well said, Jimmy. Keep up the posts!
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