Apocalypse Now

Today marks the end of the Mayan calendar, which for the ancient Mayans simply meant it was time to find some fresh stone and chisel out a new calendar, but for the rest of us unsophisticated sots, it signifies how low we stoop to honor our own ignorance and the need to justify the end to the means of our existence. Apocalypse, old friend, you have always been with us; the night to our day, the end to our road, the very reason for putting one step before the other. Or not.

What do I have to write this morning? Just that I'm disappointed that for over two weeks I haven't been writing and I feel all cobby headed again. There have been at least two events lately that have been weighing heavily on my mind. One, a shooting at Clackamas Towne Center that left two people dead, and a shooting at an elementary school in New Town, Connecticut that left twenty-seven dead, including 20 children under the age of seven and seven staff. In both shootings the shooter took his own life. In both shootings the shooter was a male in his early twenties. In both shootings, each loss of life is an immeasurable los for the world.

The New Town shooting is more disturbing to me for the terror that these children had to undergo, and for the sheer insanity of the act of opening up on little kids with targeted intent. Juxtapose this to the mall shooter, who seemed solely intent on scaring people with his ridiculous hockey mask, shooting aimlessly into a crowd. In a larger sense, so inclined was Adam Lanza, the New Town shooter. His mother was trying to commit him to a psychiatric hospital, and this, combined with his perception that she cared more for the kids she helped at the school as a volunteer, likely brought him to the edge. In the end, however, I believe he was aiming at himself, the child within him, screaming for attention and love.

Was he the wild hare born to make this statement, this wretched, sadistic mark on our world? Or is Lanza one of us, the perpetual adolescent inside crying and lashing out to be heard, to be relevant? To say this person was "evil" is straying from the mark. The word "evil" is a blanket abstraction we like to use to characterize extreme deviations from our ethical standards or morality. Depending on who we are, the word is tossed about liberally to explain any devient behavior; a vestige of our Judaic-Christian construct. Adam Lanza was a deeply disturbed individual, perhaps fatally confused, perhaps mortally wounded in spirit.

But was Lanza, himself, evil? I would argue that the evil here is in the social soup in which he grew up. New Town, the quiet upper-middle class neighborhood like many others across the country, has proven to be just as vulnerable to inadequate mental health care as any other community. We are suffering an apocalypse, alright. Slow, unnerving, psychic devastation: clear symptoms of violence-laden society.

The world ends every day in utterly unpredictable ways for hundreds of thousands of people. It also begins, relentlessly and just as surprisingly. Terror or Joy? The choice, or rather the drama of it, is the great catastrophe of our lives.