This isn't the post I had planned for today. I had written some nonsense vaguely related to the Don Imus story, but suddenly nobody is talking about that any more. Funny how quickly our idea of what's truly offensive can change so quickly.
There aren't many things more offensive than a red-hot chunk of metal the size of your smallest knuckle traveling 800 feet per second. I was thinking about this a few days ago as I was firing a 9mm Glock semi-automatic pistol into a target. Well,
near a target. If you're a bad guy, you don't have much to fear from me. But if you're the bad guy's dwarf henchman standing to the left of the bad guy's leg, watch out. Apparently my "grouping" is excellent, which is a nice way of saying that I miss the target in an extremely precise way.
It had been a while since I fired a gun, and I was struck by how incredibly powerful those things are. First of all, guns are LOUD. My neighbor came over after firing a few rounds to ask if I minded the noise. His house is about 200 yards away, but even inside my house I could have easily heard the sound over the TV. "Not if you let me shoot," I told him in all seriousness. Which is how I got invited to this little target practice outing. He handed me the gun and gave me some basic instructions. There's no safety on a gun like that, which means that it's about 16 times easier to release a barrage of bullets than to open a bottle of children's vitamins. Point and shoot. BANG! It was loud even with a headset on. Without it my ears would have been ringing after three shots.
After every shot the gun recoils. I couldn't hit the target even on the first shot, and without taking five seconds to re-level after every round my aim would have gotten wilder and wilder. After emptying two clips my index finger felt raw. Imagine holding a heavy metal rod in your hand. Then imagine someone whacking at the rod with a hammer. Over and over and over. That's what it feels like to fire a gun. BANG! BANG! BANG!
My point is this: When you fire a gun, you
feel it. It's not like the movies, where the hero sails through the air, gun in each hand, firing round after round as the bad guys fall. I can hardly imagine directing that power at another human being. Even a human being that I really,
really didn't like. Even a human being who was stealing my TV. I'd rather let him have my car and my wallet and whatever else he wanted rather than feel that explosion in my hand and know that I had directed that force at another person.
Now imagine directing that kind of force at a person, taking a moment to level the gun -- calmly, deliberately -- and taking aim again. And again. And again. Over and over, until the gun is empty and your ears ring and your hand starts to hurt. Then reloading, and doing it all over again. Not at bad people, not at people who are taking your stuff or hurting your children. Just people. Young, intelligent people with loving parents and their whole lives ahead of them. This is not a tragedy. A tragedy is a plane crash or an earthquake. This is something far worse. The only word that comes to mind is
atrocity, and even that word has been cheapened by atrocious overuse.
"It was like something out of a movie," the witness says. Survivors said the same thing after 9/11. And so we come full circle, the reality of the horror overwhelming our ability to take it in. To those in the middle of it, trying to make sense of what is going on, the only point of reference is something completely unreal: the movies.
Ironically, it does not seem at all like a movie to those of us on the outside. I was in the waiting room at the doctor's office with my 7 year old son shortly after it happened. He was supposed to be getting a cast put on to replace the temporary splint they had given him after his treehouse fall, but the doctor was apparently a little backed up. Funny how scheduling appointments every seven minutes has that effect.
CNN was playing on the TV. We sat there for two hours -- the length of a movie -- listening to the same repeated sketchy accounts. I bet I heard the phrase "at least 22 dead" fifty times. And we were trapped there, listening to this soundtrack over and over. Sartre's
No Exit came to mind.
Hell is CNN Headline News, I thought.
This is an admittedly self-centered way of looking at these events. My suffering was hardly on the same level as that of the students and professors in the middle of it. And yet, as anyone who has lived through a tragedy knows, the worst part is what happens afterward, when you try to go on with life. Everything is the same, yet completely different. You feel like you're living a pantomime, a kind of cheap mockery of your previous life. All the little details are the same, but you've somehow lost the thread of the story. Life has become a tiresome sequence of events without meaning.
The question facing all of us, whether we are on the inside or the outside, is this: Is life a movie, complete with a central theme, problems that must be overcome, and a satisfying resolution? Or is it simply CNN Headline News, endlessly repeating the same horrific and meaningless events, without context or explanation? Or is it somehow both? Is the horror and meaninglessness the very thing that we are here to overcome?
Kurt Vonnegut, one of my literary heroes, just died. I'm glad he didn't live to see this, because it would have been more evidence for his theory that mankind is "evolution's greatest mistake." Vonnegut saw life as a pointless succession of events. His characters were forever being yanked around by forces so far beyond their understanding and control that even their most valiant attempts to determine their own destiny were rendered absurdly comical. Vonnegut insisted that his writing was not motivated by any great artistic yearning, but simply by his need to make a living. And in case you are thinking, "Aha! So at least he valued living. He must not have thought life was completely pointless!" -- remember that he once tried to kill himself with booze and alcohol and continued to smoke unfiltered cigarettes right up to the end, not caring -- and probably hoping -- that they would hasten his demise.
And yet... I don't think that Vonnegut really believed to his core that life was hopeless. Implicit in the word "mistake" is the idea that things should be different than they are, and perhaps
could be different than they are. Vonnegut obviously believed in the value of humor, which is the sentient being's way of simultaneously acknowledging one's powerlessness in the face of circumstances beyond one's control and of claiming mastery over them. It's like Vonnegut was saying, "Look, I know the universe is beyond my control, but the universe can't stop me from being pissed off about that fact."
When something like this happens, it's an unmistakable reminder of just how much is beyond our control. But that doesn't mean we have to simply sit back and let the death toll wash over us. Life isn't a movie, with a tidy resolution, but it doesn't have to be CNN Headline News either. If I believed that life was a meaningless sequence of events, I'd be no different from that gun-toting loser (I refuse to use the word "gun
man"), trying to at least make it into the news before my time is up. There is meaning in life, and it can't be eradicated by one sociopath with a handgun.
I believe that, and the universe can't stop me.
Labels: Current Events, Serious Stuff