The typical battle over real gun control over cosmetic gun control rages in Congress once again. Republicans are in control about the complete lack of gun control. Whatever they pass won't make a scintilla of difference.
Mass shootings will continue. They are likely to get worse. Our sense of helplessness will grow. Count on it.
That's because the Republicans continue to be right about one thing: Mental health must become a priority. But they put it on their agenda to speak of it as a convenient bromide, not do anything about it. That's because that problem is far deeper instilled than just about any of us want to understand. Because nobody really wants to face what's wrong--and that's because of the role Republicans have had in establishing it. And if they did, nobody would know what to do about it. Nobody would know where to start.
Nobody's saying guns aren't the issue. Of course they are. But they are the vehicle. Mental illness starts the engine.
Why are young people picking up weapons of mass destruction and using them on the helpless? Because they have lost hope. Notice that most of them take their own lives after wreaking their carnage. That was the plan all along--go out blazing away so that someone notices you.
But how do they get to that thinking so early in their lives? Those lives should be filled with promise, with striving, with hope that tomorrow will be better. They have obviously concluded that that's nonsense. Genuflection to the altar of nihilism is what prompts the only thing left--total destruction of anything, but especially of something they can control for whatever few minutes they can control it.
That's what their lives are left being, a salute to the destruction of life. Easily, too, with a weapon that tears human flesh apart. Remember Pat Tillman, the pro football player who went to Afghanistan and got killed in that conflict? He was shot by his own people, with the same kind of gun that massacred little kids in Uvalde. His head was blown off. That's why the devastated parents of some of those kids had to submit to DNA swabbing to aid identification--because the children suffered the same fate. (Jake Tapper of CNN was on Stephen Colbert's late night show recently, wondering if we weren't being too antiseptic in our hiding the actual results of such weapons from the public. Though he himself doesn't know where the line should be drawn, he has a point.)
What causes such disasters? What drives this?
Neoliberalism, that's what. The idea that, fundamentally, you're on your own: Not just that you shouldn't count on anyone to help you, that's bad enough--it's the idea that it's practically guaranteed that no one will. So success, far from being guaranteed, becomes a desperation, because beneath it is a trap door to oblivion. You're a failure. No one cares, either. You're worthless. The strength it took to make the effort is irrelevant. You failed. You're weak. You turn around, and there's no one there. See? We told you.
That worthlessness is evident in the things other people have--nice homes, great cars, people waiting on them hand and foot, the life of luxury. You, you poor slob, are forced to work for them so they can have what you'll never be closer than a hundred miles to achieving. The world, the real world, doesn't enforce self-esteem. It's all measured.
But success isn't defined by you. It's defined by someone else you've never met. The goalposts are constantly being shifted. There's no relief. You're in a rabbit hole, deeper and deeper.
Nobody shows you that the world is, in fact, an interdependent place, that nobody, nobody at all, can rely on gaining anything sufficiently valuable by themselves. In short, we need each other. There are no "self-made" independent people, and there never have been. Barack Obama missed a chance to try to explain this the day he told corporate executives, at least in theory: "You didn't do this."
By "this," he meant making their massive wealth all by themselves. He just left it there. He didn't explain that they, too, needed to remember that they relied on many seen and unseen people to establish their wealth and the prestige that came with it. That wouldn't have changed a lot of mindsets, to be sure, but someone needs to keep harping at that point: We need each other.
Because that's the basis for this unrest: That everyone is in a cutthroat world where winners are celebrated and losers are discarded--and there are infinitesimally far more of the latter than the former. Radical reactionaries who are convinced of this are first of all, those who have won; and secondly, want this thought process to be enforced on the rest of us. They're the ones who think Social Security and Medicare are the salutes to socialism that are ruining America--that, instead, all of us should work ourselves to the bone until we die useless deaths. Aw, shucks, you didn't quite make it. Farewell.
The young assassins are merely cutting off all the suffering that they can foresee, intercepting years of pain and pointless effort. A mere career isn't enough. Self-regard has already been extinguished. It's all way too much.
It engenders a deep-set desperation. If what I do doesn't matter, do I? If my life doesn't matter, neither does anyone else's. I'll join and cling to some radical nonsense group that at least gives me value, however negative, and adapt a belief that I'm better than someone just because of something no one else can change or help--skin color, or race. Since I don't feel good about myself, I'll join others who think the same.
But in the end, it's the loneliness, the sense of utter isolation, that gives one the impetus to slaughter out of that desperation. Without a recognition of common humanity, that pleasure and pain can and should be shared, life loses its meaning rather quickly. You can be in that rabbit hole only so long. You become dangerously afflicted. You have to shoot your way out.
Frankly, I'm surprised there haven't been more mass shootings. There are certainly enough guns. There are certainly enough targets. And there is certainly enough desperation out there.
Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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