One of the few perks of having no j-o-b is that you have no b-o-s-s, so I've fallen happily into the habit of lazy morning coffee, indulged while perusing email and connecting electronically with the world until I'm ready to be fully present, or "live," if you will. It's usually a pretty quiet time and this morning was no different in that respect.
But something else was different this morning. The scope of what had occurred in Colorado started to unfold before my still bleary eyes. I found myself struggling to take it in, momentarily even attempting to understand, to make sense of it. I wanted the why? right now, even as I understood that I was attempting to make "sense" of something that was never going to.
But I pored over the internet and poured more cups of coffee and went looking for information anyway. I visited news sites and I read comments to their stories posted on facebook. I read so called "liberal" media and The Blaze. I read that the shooter was a registered Democrat. And that he was part of the Tea Party cabal. I learned it was his parents' fault and he was, of course, a loner. It was also your story to exploit no matter how you interpret the 2nd Amendment.
Throughout the day I've been mindful of something else, and that's my own response to the horrific tragedy. Without intending "another" to be a diminishing of the shooting in any way other than to note it wasn't the only one we've had, it was "another shooting." But it's taken me most of the day to get in touch with what has felt so off for me. After hours of pondering, fueled by not much more than larger quantities of caffeine and tobacco than I'm willing to publicly cop to, I finally realized what was bothering me. The genesis of my niggling discomfort was that email I left unopened last night.
To be more clear, I had to acknowledged that I've become, for whatever reason(s), so calloused to violence that an email from a mainstream media outlet based in New York screaming about a shooting in Colorado didn't warrant enough attention from me to be opened when it was received. Nothing to see here. I promise you it didn't keep me awake. I slept like a baby.
I don't like knowing that. I've had conversations with a good friend recently about the cheapness of life in the context of violence in our culture, turning over and examining with each other our own ideas, our own attempts to understand. I hope I'm not just being melodramatic here, and I know (guaranteed) that I'm not beating myself up for it. But it occurs to me this is something important to acknowledge for myself, because if life is perceived as cheap or of no value (which, on some level of logic, it must be, in order to destroy it), am I not succumbing to the lure of blissful ignorance when I can just reduce news of this sort so easily?
I guess this blog entry came about because I wonder if maybe we couldn't all benefit from taking a moment to consider our individual responses to the horror in Colorado last night. Is it possible that at least part of the reason we spend so much time speculating about the why, and attempting to assign blame, that we think if we can understand it, we can prevent it? Or, more to the point, that we can keep it from happening, not to those we don't even know, but to us or those we do know and love? I'm not discounting the need to understand, but I am asserting that I think a lot of what passes for "trying to understand" is avoidance. It's really a really rather clever form of denial.
In the days to come, millions of words will be written about what happened in Colorado last night, many more of them about the shooter than about the victims. And every political agenda in the country will find a horse to ride in this race before it's over. There are already articles on the internet blaming it all on the movie that was running. For laughs, I expect to find comic relief as needed in the right wing media, probably on the aforementioned Blaze site, as Mr. Beck was on this bandwagon before it was one with his paranoia always available to incite the clueless and his hallucinations of a left wing conspiracy in the film. Somewhere along the way, however, I hope there's room for discussion about how we've responded to it. We'll have, no doubt, opportunity to do it better another time in the, probably, near future.