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Saturday, July 21, 2012

Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before...

Something happened at a theater in Colorado. This wasn't the first time...Repeat atrocity in a new venue. At first glance, the suspect seemed too calm and intelligent to have committed such a heinous crime as this; it was hard to place him as "just another" cold-blooded killer or deranged lunatic,  but on the other hand, he fit the profile, that dreaded profile, of a quiet, subdued, loner that no one really knew, a guy whose life was coming unglued in his early 20s, a ticking time-bomb waiting to explode.  Yet still one has to wonder: how does a guy who graduates from college with highest honors in neuro-science come to this? How does a person endowed with superior intellectual gifts, who at one time was in possession of a conscience and a high degree of self-restraint, even a reputation for wit - an actual sense of humor - which would suggest some semblance of joie de vivre, get lost in a fantasy world to such a degree that he ends up identifying with an arch villain, and then enters a theater to mow down other young people who would most likely tend to be on his wavelength, who would be most sympathetic to his plight? And so it remains a mystery why and how so many young caucasian males seem to fall into this trap - assuming as I do that they don't begin life this way - only to end up ruining their own lives, while trashing the lives of others at random for no discernible reason. He apparently had lost the capacity to see outside himself....And the victims? We have their faces, their stories to remind us that something is deeply amiss in Gotham, in the heartland, in the rest of America...

1 comment:

spastic_dowager said...

I think the deeper question lies in the paradigm shift, and what I mean by this can be exemplified by my executive director asking his boss about schizophrenia in the time of Christ: When people went delusional then, who did they think they were? In the contemporary era of weapon commodity and mass media, this is a potent cocktail, and I am thinking about it on my account too, in a more striven context, perhaps.