A very dumb society: The latest shooter

One of the blindest and most contemptible features of present culture is our gaze at the adult lives and motivations of mass murdering shooters. Twelve hours ago, a twenty-six-year-old killed twenty-six people at a Texas church. Reports give us the news about his black outfit, his rifle, whether he got it legally, what he posted on Facebook and LinkedIn, how he walked through his spree, his dishonorable discharge from the Air Force, his domestic violence against wife and child. We may soon learn what jobs he had, a quick sketch of his personality at work, maybe the “human interest angle”: what some classmate or friend thought about him in high school.

Useless, stupid, useless.

What matters is who his parents are, how he was raised and treated during his elementary school years, if there are siblings and if they, too, have had problems. Was he a head-banging infant? Were there two parents in the home, were they immature, emotionally selfish, loveless, “working all the time,” jerks? Did they hit him? Was he bullied and did his parents have cruel or indifferent or weak ways to deal with it? Was he so cut off from them that it would never have occurred to him to tell them his troubles? Did an uncle sexually abuse him? It would be good to know what made him a misérable who dealt with pain by causing it in others. Do we want to know how these things happen? The parents would be interviewed, put through individual therapy. We’d know their incompetencies, because there is no doubt in the world that they dropped most of the balls they were thrown. Was the killer ever in therapy, and did it fail as it so often does? Therapists do have to be gullible for a few minutes, taking in information openly. But if they see a dysphoric young man who speaks anger, they have to work damned hard to find a buried scrap of heart and reach it. If the child is “callous and unemotional” or the teen is a pre-mature psychopath – these facts are observable and alarms need to be sounded. Of course, not everything can be done to prevent the youth from further corrupting. I’ve confronted the deeply injured, joined them in their misery. I’ve confronted young psychopaths. Sometimes maybe all we can do is call their bluff: “I see your game,” hoping to disenchant the defense of this personality.

Because of this Olympian-sized missing the boat, society often looks to me like a joke or bad theater: playing adult-land. We could see the child in us. Think of how strange that world would be! We’d be looking at parents and families and children’s lives, not “chemical imbalances.” We’d all know basic depth psychology and see people with standard x-ray vision. We’d see children as influenced – good or bad – every minute of their day. We’d morph schools into education and therapy. We’d absolutely kill the “stigma” of mental illness, which is emotional pain and what happens with it. I don’t know a single solidly sound person without this pain. Do you?