Blacksburg

My good friend Angela wrote this today. In it she articulates pretty much everything I could ever possibly want to say about what happened in Virginia this week so beautifully that I feel compelled to share it with you all.

You know, there's never any “excuse” for taking people's lives. And really, saying “there's no excuse” is just the tossing around of three words that don't amount to much, and I don't know why we all feel we have to make with the disclaiming all the time. It's the national-tragedy equivalent of “bless you” - just totally empty. We say it because that's what you say. When someone sneezes, you say “bless you,” and after you burp, you say “excuse me,” and before and after you talk in shades of gray about something bad that someone has done, you say, “It's not an excuse.” As if there are large numbers of people running around excusing it and we wouldn't know an actual excuse if we heard one and none of our friends know us well enough to know better.

It didn't surprise me at all to hear, this morning, that Cho Seung-Hui's video included rants about people who had rejected him. It never surprises me to hear, after something like this happens, that the person responsible felt alienated, or rejected, or lonely, or perpetually enraged. It also never surprises me that no one wants to talk about that, that we all want to stay out of the fuzzy areas, out of the deep end, that we're more comfortable with talk of bad vs. good and right vs. wrong and crime and punishment. But it does make me sad. Not just for specific people who've done awful things - not for Cho Seung-Hui or the Columbine shooters or Kip Kinkel - and not just for specific victims, either, although I think it's always sad when someone's life ends violently, whoever they are. It makes me sad for all of us, that we never seize an opportunity to extract something meaningful or useful from these tragedies, to try and really make it so they don't happen anymore. We never really talk about why, we never want to listen to the explanations of the people who would best know why, and we never, ever, ever talk about how individualism and capitalism and patriarchy and racism make it necessary for us to reject and alienate each other to survive, and how silence is what all of that shit lives on, and how fucking lonely that makes all of us, and how close so many of us are to breaking and hurting ourselves, and how we're hurting ourselves right now and hurting each other. It's easier and, in the very short term, less painful to treat each incident as an island, and each offender as “crazy,” without ever talking about how so very many people became this particular kind of “crazy.”

If you talk about this, and especially if you talk about it without wrapping it snugly in layers and layers of “no excuse” and “not that I condone” and “bad, bad, bad” and making sure everyone knows that you, too, think that justice is vengeance, then you're a bleeding heart, you're naive, you're crazy. Maybe. I'm probably all of those things. I'm also someone who doesn't want to live in a world where I have to worry that my kid won't make it home from school, or that I will go to work one day and never return. And I'm someone who knows that the conversations you think are going to be unbearably painful have nothing on the pain that comes from not having them.

Comments

[Kelly]

Angela is the shit. I love that woman.

[slouching mom]

so much to ponder here.

"we treat each incident as an island..."

that is so, so sadly true.

[BaltimoreGal]

Well done. Thank you.

[Matt]

Your friend has some tremendous insight. We must find the path toward a society which recognizes, confronts and DOES SOMETHING about and for any of its citizens who feel alienated and removed from the other members of the society.

Alice started a bit of discussion on her Wonderland site last week that drew another insightful response - mauigirl52 lamented "Too much emphasis on "I've got mine" and not enough on how to take care of those less fortunate. Too much emphasis on cutting taxes but not enough emphasis on putting the money the government does get into programs that increase quality of life. Too much emphasis on the old work ethic and not enough on how to live a real and balanced life."

It seems to me these are foundational concerns on the road to eliminating the silence your friend is talking about.

[Imperfect Mommy]

It's so systemic. It's the race to get more "stuff." It's lack of focus on mental health. It's schools that permit bullying to go on and on and on. It's our anxiety-inducing society. It's our violent society. It's access to weapons meant only to kill. It's schools and universities that don't want to close their "openness" and don't want to pay the money to put security measures in place. It's a focus on right to privacy and civil liberties that prevent us from disclosing truly troubled individuals (a place where I don't usually line up).

Our system is fwocked up. And everyone says "well, doing X or Y or Z wouldn't have prevented it." But maybe we have to start with x, then y, then z and start to chip away at this shit one little bit at a time.

Oh and BTW, starting to consider friends school for my daughter.

[joy]

Yes. Excellently put, and much-needed. Sadly, this perspective is not going to make it onto the headline news, but i am pleased you're posting this here, T. It's important.

[Thomas]

Is there an analogy to be made between "no excuse" and "no explanation?"

I'm not sure that there's either.