Reacting, and preventing.

I had an idea for this week's post, a good one about a necessary quality of horror. I was going to make a few points, then complain about how hard I've been working on Roja.

But on Friday, a twenty year old boy in Connecticut killed twenty-seven people, including his own mother and twenty children. The police are working on trying to understand why he did it, but I'm not holding out hope for a reason that makes sense. Despite my odd interests, I think I can grasp the concepts of 'sane' and 'normal' that most people use when they get up out of bed in the morning and go through their day. I may not live there, but I can see it from my window.

The problem, as I posted not too long ago, is that people's hand-made realities don't include everything that everyone else's has. They can't. Your world may not contain a reason to go do what that boy did, and mine doesn't either. But I guarantee you, his did.

People are naturally wanting to do something to prevent this from ever happening again, and already some are calling for more gun control. After all, if the boy hadn't had guns, he couldn't have done it, right? Look up the news from China, about how they've started posting guards at schools because of recent attacks on kids over there. The same damn day of the attack in Connecticut, a man went after kids in a school in Henan province with a knife. Not too long ago, another man did the same thing with a machete. 'Doing something' about guns is an easy answer, and I'm sure the people of China have their easy answers, too.

How can we keep this craziness from ever happening again? We can't. Take away guns, cars, planes, and baseball bats, and the people who think they have a reason to hurt children will use sticks and stones. People have their own reasons to do everything, and we're pretty clever at finding ways around obstacles. We wouldn't have survived as a species if we weren't.

How can we decrease the chances of it, then? Well, I thought of a couple of ways, but you tell me how likely they are.

First, we mind each other's business. I pay attention to you, you pay attention to me. Instead of just waving to the old man across the street, you walk over and say hello some Saturday afternoon, and ask to meet all the people who live under his roof.

Quick note: You show up at my door and try that, and you'll be soaked with the garden hose before I throw a plugged in, frayed, extension cord at you.

The other option? Well, we listen. All of us, to all of us. We also sincerely, completely accept one another. You take the guy next to you at the bus stop, who likes to have sex with women's purses, as he is, and I listen to the woman in front of me in line at the DMV as she tells me what really bothers her, so that then she won't go home and cut herself under her clothes where it won't show. Would the boy in Connecticut have told his reasons to someone, if he knew in advance that they might listen? I don't know, because I don't even know his reasons. But the next one might.

Tonight, during a break from writing, I made my regular call to my daughter. I told her I loved her, and that she means the world to me. Please go do something similar.