Things People Don't See Coming, or as I like to call it, Bullshit

Clearing Some Shit Off The Table:

There has been a lot of talk about this shooting. This is OK. In fact, this is a good thing. For anyone hiding under a rock the last little while, here is a quick overview of what happened: Shooting.

I take issue with a few things. I know, I know, I always take issue and I always have issues. But this is important to me. So I'm going to pour it all over my blog.

Guns. Not the problem. I'm sorry. I do not know of any other way to put that. And I'm not going to give some neutral philosophic blather on this situation and humanity and expect people to listen. I'm going to tell you how I feel.

This is solid commentary on the gun debate:

 

 

It is hard for me not to say this to the gun control argument: Come the fuck on, will you? I'm not arguing that we should not have gun control. I'm simply arguing that this is not the be-all-end-all solution to our problem. Let us spend some time on it but not all of our time.

Humanity seems to be really good at being confused over simple things. Shootings, serial killers, suicides, you name the bad situation and humanity will typically reply with some variation of "I didn't see that coming."

OK, to clarify, I'm not arguing that we should have known this guy was going to shoot these children at this school on this day at this time...I'm arguing that this guy was not alright. And something could have been done to prevent this. The exact details I'm not going to get into and I certainly do not know everything there is to know about the situation.

What I do know is that some situations can be understood when viewed honestly. Some situations are just recipes for disaster. Where is the debate on Mental Health Services? Where is the debate on understanding human beings in their environments? Oh, let us talk of guns instead...

Life is at once simple and complex. That is just how it is.

We need to change the way we look at situations, the way we look at instances of human interaction. I'm not saying let us be robots and be cold and removed and reason-only creatures. I'm saying let us use what we have come to refer to as Reason and Passion to try to understand. To understand this shooting, to understand religious fanaticism, to understand depression, to understand suicide, to understand the human condition. Our condition is not one of sunshine, lollipops and rainbows. Nor is it a condition of doom and gloom. Our condition is not some unsolvable mystery either. Our condition allows us the possibility, and importantly, the means to understand ourselves.

So why all this nonsense? Why not just look at a situation and try to understand it?

There is talk of learning of history so as not to repeat it. This is half bullshit, depending on how you interpret the word 'learning'. We can learn about and even memorize important historical facts. But what good does this do us if we do not understand it?

Take Hitler, everyone loves to hate this topic so it is an easy one. We can learn all about WW2 and say Hitler was evil, the end. Or, we could look at history, a more rounded view, and see economy, national identity, a recently lost war, a scattered collection of cities calling itself Germany finally uniting, etc., etc., etc...this does not even include the role of other countries.

Not so simple as Bad Guy acts Badly, The End, is it? With this shooting, do we look at gun control or do we look at the entire situation? I'm going to err on the side of caution and take a step back to see the complexity of the situation. And I'm certain I'll find what I always find when I take a step back: it is easy to understand, and it could have prevented at many steps along the way, and, saddest of all, it should not have happened.

In a perfect world this would not have happened. We do not live in that perfect world. But this does not give us permission to not figure shit out. Our imperfect world does not always follow perfectly crafted logic but there is some sense to it. There is a way to look at the world that would allow us to make sense of it. We have to accept that it does not always logically make sense. But in some broken-logical sense we can have understanding. This shooting has left a lot of damage and hurt behind in our imperfect world.

We have enough victims. We have too many in fact. But if we go in bull-headed and don't see the problem for what it really is, we are creating more victims. It really is that simple. But let us continue pretending it is complex and that we cannot understand how something like this happened...that approach has been working wonders up until now, right?