There are 8,000 Stories in the Naked City – This is One of Them
I drove through the pre-dawn streets. The traffic lights cycled through their silent and regular routine, directing dozens of ghost cars to dozens of ghost locations. The street glared with rain and my windshield turned runny from the fat drops. It was weather best described as cheap film noir.
No, really…true story…
My father died about a year and a half ago. He’d been in reasonably good health for an 86-year-old, but by his last year started to decline like, well, an 86-year old. Still, he had a reasonably good run and didn’t have any pain at the end. You can’t ask much more from life than that.
Now that Jared Lee Loughner’s bullets have stopped flying, the air is thick with new bullets in the form of accusations and denials, proposed legislative actions, and the pros and cons of the Second Amendment. But most of these rhetorical bullets are far off the mark.
There are many reasons to suspect that Loughner is severely mentally ill. And I should know, I’ve spent most of my life in close proximity to the severely mentally ill. Both my mother and grandmother were schizophrenic and my sister is severely bipolar. I suffer from bouts of clinical depression myself.
One of the things I’ve learned is that the mentally ill, particularly likely schizophrenics like Loughner, don’t live in the same dimension as you and I. They live in a dark mash-up of reality and hallucination that the initiated often have trouble grasping.
They can seem normal and rational one minute and the next arguing with a disembodied voice. They can lapse in an out of psychotic episodes separated by months or years or they can stay psychotic, as my grandmother did, nearly all their lives.
There are as many different presentations of mental illness as there are people who suffer from it. But, there’s one constant – trying to deal with the irrational through rational means is a long shot at best, and more often than not, doomed to failure.
Triggers Without Guns
The air’s already heavy with accusations that right-wing politicos fanned the flames of insanity. The Palinator says, ‘Gosh oh golly gee, I had no idea people would see that as a gun target. And, how did people jump to the conclusion that my statement about not retreating, but reloading is in any way violent?’
Well Sarah, they said so at the time – loudly – and you didn’t “explain” yourself until people died. Ditto Sharron Angle’s entreaty to take “Second Amendment” solutions if not getting her way. Both of these “explanations” are toilet paper-thin and should be used for exactly the same purpose.
However, claiming violent suggestions trigger violence is as specious as claiming that being gay makes you a pedophile. It’s almost impossible to tell if there is a trigger and what effect it has at all. It’s equally true it might have. In the end, it doesn’t matter. When the evil voices tell you to kill, you do and there is no rational explanation why.
That’s not to say the Palinistas were guiltless to throw “misunderstood” gun sights out there. The First Amendment guarantees that right, but the First Amendment doesn’t say word one about free speech being intelligent speech. At the very least, their actions lowered the national discourse by several notches.
As is often the case, the knee-jerk response to tragedies like this is to become a dynamo cranking out proposed laws guaranteed to stop the violence.
Legislation: Responding Rationally to the Irrational
Increase gun control to keep loony fingers off the trigger? Well, if a person hasn’t been diagnosed there is no way to tell if their finger is competent to grasp the trigger. And if they have, there’s no way to tell if the person’s demons are under control, especially when they can seem completely normal even while in a deep psychotic episode.
Besides, there are many more ways, other than guns, to kill. Some of them are even more efficient. You can bomb, stab, set on fire, or bludgeon your victims with exceptionally large heads of cabbage. If the voices say kill, the mentally ill kill – by any means necessary. Besides, you can’t control the sale of cabbages.
And for the drive all decisions to the state level crowd, no control works if all states have different rules. Otherwise, a gun bought on one side of a lenient state boundary will kill the same on the other.
It’s a uniquely American trait to pay scant attention to violence until the right someone gets killed. If this hadn’t involved a sitting member of Congress, the national anguish wouldn’t be so deep nor last so long.
There are gang shootings that rival this one’s brutality and death toll, yet we don’t get in such a tizzy over them. How is this instance any different from a dangerously disgruntled right-to-lifer picking up a gun or bomb to carry out an assassination? What about Timothy McVey or a Kabul suicide bomber or the Va. Tech shooter? What about someone who carries a gun to a political event to “exercise their Second amendment rights” only to get into a one-sided duel with and overly agitated opponent in the crowd?
If the NRA is right about anything it really is that guns don’t kill people, people kill people…and there are a lot stupid, clumsy, and insane people out there. People I’d prefer not lug their guns everywhere for when they decide to “protect” themselves from an overly righteous Obama socialist.
There are dozens of rational responses we could take to keep this from happening again because most of us are sane and rational – if not a little overheated. Unfortunately, most would have about as much effect as prostate and colorectal exams for airplane passengers or tapping every phone on the planet to chase down a nut who lives in a cave and makes bad videos. It behooves us to choose wisely because the cure may be worse than the disease.
You can only control those things that are within your control. A person who literally hears the voice of the devil isn’t going to bend to your control. That’s not because they are unwilling or inherently bad people. It’s because they can’t.
And there lies the problem.
GIVE NOW - Support Scarleteen's import work in sex education. Click the image to learn more >>
At the risk if dating myself – at least not in the eHarmony sense – I am from the sex education dark ages.
In my day, Just Say No was Just Don’t Say Anything. Moms and Dads, more often than not, didn’t have “the talk” because of their own shocking lack of knowledge or because they were too embarrassed. Teen pregnancy and sexual diseases were relatively rare. And gay kids? Well, they simply didn’t exist.
Sex ed was limited to the 6th or 7th grade when all the girls were herded out of gym class to see a film about “that time of the month” while the boys played baseball…in the winter. Many of the girls emerged from the film visibly shaken and, so far as I know, none ever revealed the true nature of the film to the boys.
Of course, that left teens to their own sexual education. And teens, as they frequently do, thought they knew more about things than any adult could possibly know. In those days, they unfortunately may have been right.
In an era before the Internet – and personal computers for that matter – there were few ways for kids to learn about sex or become more comfortable with their own sexuality except by repeating the same misinformation amongst themselves. As a result, many a young girl disappeared with an “advanced case of mono” before coming back noticeably thinner and much less fun-loving than before and sometimes boys dropped out of school because “the family needed the money.”
Because my wife and I came from that era, we pledged we’d treat our own daughter differently, even at a young age.
At four, she already had a concept – appropriate for a four-year old – of how pregnancy worked. The were no cabbage leaves or storks, only a frank discussion when she asked questions. That policy sometimes created some odd conversations with our first grader.
Daughter: Dad, do you and Mom have sex?
Dad: You know how sex works, right?
Daughter: Yes.
Dad: And you know you are our child, right?
Daughter: Yes.
Dad: Then what does that tell you?
Daughter: I guess you guys have sex.
When she became a teen and asked more adult questions, we continued our policy. We encouraged her to use sites like Scarleteen to learn more. We explained the pleasures and pitfalls of her nascent sexuality and told her it was okay to go to Planned Parenthood for birth and sexual disease control and we’d not question her about it. And, she did.
Today she’s equipped to venture into a sexual world with the knowledge she needs and Mom and I are both pleased and relieved.
From the mouths of Scarleteen and children comes modern wisdom.
I urge you to speak out about your own sexual education, see what others are saying, and support Scarleteen’s important work.
OF DOGS AND PISS - Fiona, the family Sharbrador after leaving a personal message for Gadget, the family rat.
Note: This post is excerpted from a letter, entitled One Saturday Morning, I wrote to friends on February 22, 1999. It was originally posted several years ago, but vanished from the Poobah archives because of the incompetence of my former web host. Welcome back.
Dear Correspondents,
My luck this week has not been good. Thursday morning I began the day by being pissed upon – twice. I don’t mean pissed upon in the metaphoric sense, but in the quite real wet and messy sense.
Let me explain.
The littlest Poobah called me to her room to reattach her pet rat’s water bottle to the side of his tank. Since he kept trying to escape while I was doing this I transferred him to his temporary holding cage. During the transfer he whizzed on my hands. As I went to wash them, our Sharbrador dog, Fiona, went into a terrific territory marking induced squat. When I grabbed her by the neck scruff to stop her, she managed to sprinkle me with Eau de Urine No. 2.
Not an auspicious way to start the day, but still better than a chap I heard about on the radio the other day. A Nigerian economist walking to work in Lagos, fell into an open and unmarked hole at a construction site. He was immediately sucked into an open sewer line and was swept to a smelly death somewhere downstream.
The BBC reporter, in a pique of British understatement, described his eventual fate as, “a fate worse than death”.
He has now become something of a cause celebre. Thousands marched on city hall to protest the absence or red caution tape around the hole to protect economists from drowning in excrement. The mayor replied that he had done all he could – the project’s budget just could not accommodate the purchase of 27 feet of red plastic tape. I think this probably speaks volumes about the Nigerian economy in general and about Nigerian construction projects in particular. It seems exactly the sort of thing that an economist might study. Ironic, eh?
Enough of food and body fluids for this morning. Time to return to my Saturday morning. I hope this finds all of you well.
Your Omnipotence,
Poobah
