Fort Hood, Orlando . . . That's just today's roll call of places now streaked with blood because someone lost it, pulled a gun and just started shooting. Has anyone else noticed that these mass deaths are increasing in number? Has anyone else noticed that the less-than-mass deaths -- like the Portland man who lured his ex and her 4-year-old son back to the place they once shared then plugged them and himself -- are occurring more often? What is going on?
Blaming our gun laws is, frankly, the easy way out. The real problem, the far more significant problem is, in my view, that everyone is slowly going crazy. And, sadly, going crazy is a perfectly normal response to the stresses of our environment.
We've got two wars going. When a country goes to war, it brings the war back home -- with the damaged men and women who we dump out of the military and leave them to fend for themselves. When a nation gives itself permission to inflict massive, mind-bending damage on another country, well, then, it's perfectly reasonable for human beings to give themselves that same permission. So using violence in reaction to events becomes normal, even in some cases preferable. It's in our DNA, people.
Then you layer on this brutal economy with even fewer jobs now than since 1983, and you have a fine, old-fashioned recipe for chaos on the hand-to-hand level.
Is there a solution? Sure. But it's the most difficult solution of all: treat everybody's mental illness, instead of pretending it exists only in "the other." People can withstand immense stress -- homo sapiens wouldn't have survived otherwise -- but it's clear that a lot of us need a lot of help. The dithering over this earthquake makes me unutterably sad.
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