Sunday Ramble: Just Another Weekend of Mass Shootings and Online Trolls...

"Oh my God! Did you hear the news about the mass shooting?"

I look at that statement and...

(pauses to think)

... realize that it's a sign of "our times" that the first thought that goes through my mind isn't just horror at the fact that there has been a mass shooting, but the inclination to ask the question "WHICH mass shooting?"

Grasses in the evening sun

Something horrific and (at one time) unthinkable has happened and now I suddenly have the realization that the "unthinkable" has become commonplace enough that I actually need to ask for clarification...

WHICH Mass Shooting?

In case you've been living under a rock, on Saturday, August 3rd, a 21-year old male walked into a crowded WalMart in El Paso, Texas and opened fire, killing 20 and injuring another 27.

I'm not going to spend time on the "how/when" because it's all over the news and you can just Google it, if you want to know more.

What alarms me is that I live in a world where it's necessary for me to actually ASK which shooting an acquaintance I am talking to is referring to. Because there was more than one! More about that, later...

What alarms me is that a "mass shooting" seems to have moved from the realm of unthinkable horror to just a somewhat-normalized very sad news story.

I am struggling a bit with what to do with that, from an emotional and psychological perspective.

Crow, the eternal trickster... what is the lesson, here?

Sanctity of Life and the "Who Cares?" Culture

My mind is doing double duty as I contemplate the dilemma at hand.

I'm trying to rationalize to myself that we have always been violent and prone to killing each other, and we are simply more aware of these tragedies because we now live in the age of instant information where every person with a smartphone is a newscaster. When I was a kid (in the 1960's) we had to wait till the evening TV news or tomorrow's paper before we heard about events like these.

A quick search of a number of online databases will reveal that as little as 30-40 years ago, "mass shootings" were something that happened every few years or maybe once a year.

I think back to my college days at The University of Texas in Austin during the early 1980's, and how it was a *'distant legend" that in 1966 Charles Whitman had ensconced himself in the UT Tower and shot and killed 16 people and injured another 31.

Apple Blossoms

At the time, such a thing was still "unthinkable," and more or less the stuff of history, not reality. And we were suitably horrified when six people were shot and killed at a Dallas nightclub in 1984.

Meanwhile... we have had the Gilroy Garlic Festival shootings on July 28th, the El Paso WalMart shootings yesterday (August 3rd) and even while that's still active news there has been another mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio today (August 4th), killing 9 and injuring 27.

And so, we find ourselves asking "WHICH Mass Shooting?"

Trolling, Rage and Lack of Restraint

Meanwhile, here in our own microcosm of online social media, we contemplate things like online bullying, trolling, vengeful behaviors and other toxic acts.

Some write these off as people being "snowflakes" and "too sensitive."

I don't care to get into whether or not that's an accurate characterization; I'm more interested in the fact that we are needing to have such a discussion; that antisocial and sociopathic behaviors are increasingly being passed off as some form of "normal."

So I sit with that for a while...

Ducks on the bay...

I think back to a conversation I had with a colleague (who worked in the mental health field) maybe a decade ago, in which we explored the possibility that we — as a culture; as the human species — aren't actually becoming any more violent or unstable... what has actually changed is our expectations of how much we "should" experience life turning out THE WAY WE WANT IT TO.

In other words, we haven't really changed much, we just feel far more entitled to have things OUR WAY and have far more severe and immediate reactions to things NOT being "our way."

Of course, that's just a working hypothesis, with very little to back it up but gut feeling...

When I Was a Kid...

... I was pretty much brought up to believe that "getting things my way" was not only not something to expect, but it was a bonus and a privilege when it actually happened.

So being "told off" or "getting passed over for promotion" or "having your girlfriend dump you" was pretty much incorporated into the fabric of my reality as "part of normal life," rather than reasons to have a total emotional meltdown; and the thought of resorting to (fatal) violence was not even on the table.

Of course, waxing philosophical about a distant past that will never return doesn't help the dozens of people who lost their lives in the course of the past eight days.

A rose for those who are gone...

But I keep thinking about what feels like a "Who Cares Culture," and I have a hard time shaking the possibility that we have actually managed to create a world in which we HAVE SO MUCH TO TRACK that we simply don't have much bandwidth left over to "care."

I say that against a backdrop in which I personally found my breaking point recently... and much of that was related to simply feeling overwhelmed by the constant demands of a world that seems to have ever more "content" for me to deal with. And then I think about that childhood of "lower expectations," and how we DID have "more time" to pause and "lick our wounds" when bad things happened... rather than being immersed in a world that constantly demanded that we MOVE ON without ever pausing to process those things that hurt us...

Meanwhile, my thoughts and prayers go out to all those who lost loved ones recently, and who are trying to make sense of it all.

Thanks for reading!

(Another "Creative Non-Fiction" post for the #creativecoin tribe)

What do YOU think? How has the world changed in the past 40+ years? Have we lost touch with the sanctity of life? Have we grown too entitled to things turning out our way? Or have we just run out of time to care about others? Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment-- share your experiences-- be part of the conversation!

(As usual, all text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly for this platform.)
Created at 190804 21:10 PST
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