the response to mass shootings long ago became routinized, mechanical; with apparently renewed passion, the nytimes calls for sensible gun laws, if you can imagine that. you feed it from whatever angle into your political machine. this is one of many ways to try to grapple with the apparent incomprehensibility, the excess, the extremity, the inhuman howling from within the human.
i do think the 'incomprehensibility' is important; it's scary not to understand it, but it's even scarier to understand it. to say it's incomprehensible is to say, among other things, 'i would never do that.' and yet i too feel the incomprehensibility; i don't usually write about mass shootings anymore because i don't know what to say.
nevertheless, an observation: we suck. i really do believe that in many dimensions human beings - and by this i mean myself as well as you - are irremediably flawed. i feel the power in the doctrine of original sin, and the mystery of why a good god would create fundamentally depraved creatures or suffer them to exist is another way of saying that our hearts are incomprehensible to ourselves. we don't even know what we ourselves might do.
you know, i'd owe a naturalistic exploration, though it'd be half-assed. but evolution produced, for examples, creatures with allergies or like without eyes in the back of our heads. it's compatible with a lot of what might be thought of as mistakes. anyway, the historical form of demented or wholly counter-productive or gratuitous violence and rage varies in its objects, its forms. it might be a giant bureaucracy organized for genocide or a cult of human sacrifice or take-a-ride-in-the-suv-and-shoot-up-the-holiday-party. we ain't gettin no better, putting it mildly.
anyway, that's no explanation. more of a feeling. but what i do want to say is: this is us.
