Crazies

Today, a man shot at least 32 people to death on a college campus in America. He wounded many others; then took his own life. The names of the victims and the perpetrator have not yet been released. Many anxious families and friends are enduring an unbearable silence tonight -- the silence of not being able to reach their loved ones they believe were on campus when the chaotic tragedy occurred this morning.

The President of the United States issued a statement that began by emphasizing his support for the "right to bear arms."

Strict constructionists of the U.S. Constitution have long puzzled me. Men, and only men, of a landed gentry who considered women, the poor, and minorities less than whole citizens, so they denied them the vote, framed the document that anchors our peculiar form of democracy.

This "sacred" document was crafted in an era that a tiny group of white men controlled the resources of what was then only a partially explored and settled continent. Virtually all of them were farmers or merchants, and they all had guns. They'd just expelled the British overlords from America. They still hunted game -- for food. They feared uprisings by the indigenous people whose world they had appropriated.

Two hundred and thirty-some years later, our mentally-challenged President still defends the "right" for pretty much anybody to carry a lethal weapon. Problem is the world has changed, big-time. These days, if you are packing a piece, you are a danger to society.

People kill each other here at a rate that if it were a poor, underdeveloped country, would probably be labeled as a society in a state of "civil war." Luckily, we Americans have fabricated the idea of the crazy loner, the person so alienated that he starts taking potshots at anyone within shooting distance, laughing crazily as he snuffs out their precious lives.

Then, he kills himself.

Sort of like a "suicide bomber," eh? Incomprehensible, unimaginable, barely human, really.

There's just one problem. These alienated loners are not much different from you or from me. Have you looked in the mirror lately? More American adults live alone than live in couples, or in family groups.

We are the nation of the rugged individual, supermen and superwomen, who don't need anybody, who deny in fact that lonely feelings even exist. Meanwhile, in our isolation from each other, anger and frustration grow within all too many souls.

Finally, the weakest links in our social chain break, and cause their brief moment of havoc. The rest of us react with numbness -- this is just another incomprehensible event to a people inured to such random horrors.

That is the real tragedy.

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