What I hate..

... about the way the aftermath of these shootings plays out in our culture.

Amateur analysis. Idiots with no better understanding of why people do this and no more training than watching too much Law and Order (or reading too much true crime) offer up lack of god or mother issues or whatever cliche has been making the rounds for the past two or three shootings.

The instant replay of the whole gun debate. I'm not sure if any of this is actually new, or is everyone simply repeating what they say the last 20 times. I'm also not sure of the actual power of these debates ... discussions ... ritual calls and responses to change people's minds. Instead, we have a bunch of endlessly recycled "clever" remarks and photos with text that is supposed to be devastating to the other side, but is just the same ol' same ol', repackaged for the 21st century.

I suppose that in that first instance, any explanation is better than looking into that abyss. And for the second? Anger is better than pain, than grief--that other abyss, I suppose.

And I hate this, I hate this, I hate this. I'd like actual solutions to come about. I'd like for young white men to turn their backs on their inner monsters. (Maybe young, white men can't do that, because they aren't Klien bottles. Okay, I'm going for the familiar comfort of mixing metaphors.)
Or maybe it's because we have to do so much untwisting in order to make progress...
If we posit that we have tied ourselves into knots, culturally speaking, that we have made ourselves into (metaphoric--and not exactly a comfortable one for me to use) cripples who cannot walk straight, straighten our bodies, straighten our souls (boy the words I'm using)--then all of this Sturm und Drang is simply the mouse wheel that we run, and run, and run and never get anywhere on, because if we want to walk somewhere, directly, gayly forward, we have to do the work of untwisting the lies we tell ourselves and each other, rebalance our bodies, strengthen ourselves where we are weak, and hurt, hurt, hurt, bleed, bleed, bleed where we have tied ourselves off from the truth.
(And really and truly, I don't know what's what with the metaphors I chose. I suspect that it comes from, in part, a need for strong words to express the sort of "untwisting" I did in my head, as I tried to wrap it around the huge, tangled spaghettis of contradictions and horrors and snakes and shadows and chains and connections and sorrow that lives... somewhere... Isn't it annoying how the unexplained resists explanation?)