The shooter's mind roils. He acts as he has been conditioned to act. Now, he has achieved the power and control he has been denied. He is a military empire of one. His birthright as a U.S. American has been fulfilled. God bless the USA.
After mass shootings in the U.S., the sale of firearms rises. The phenomenon is very much like the reaction of alcoholics whose solution to the stress-inducing trouble, pain and chaos that their addiction inflicts upon their lives is to attempt to remedy the situation by careening into another drinking binge. U.S. Americans are attracted to guns in the same manner drunks are in love with their chosen killer.
They are seeking sanctuary from fear. All too many view the world as a hostile place, and the remedy, U.S. culture has instructed them, is to dispatch the threat by means of violence. These tormented souls believe they will be provided safety on a weapons-bristling citadel built on a mountain of corpses. (Floridians had to be advised that it would be a less than propitious act to fire weaponry into the fury of Hurricane Irma.)
Thus discussions of "gun control" will only exacerbate more fear, will cause gun sales to rise, and will increase the body count. The great unspoken is: U.S. Americans fear the wrong things. The culture roils in a miasma of confused apprehensions and displaced responses. The threat U.S. Americans are attempting to ward off is comprised by an occupation of ghosts, the ghost of history that stalks the precincts of their own minds.
If the habit of communal engagement is forsaken, the heart atrophies from a lack of practice. The presence of others, even the panoply of life itself, is misapprehended as menacing ... Others are perceived as malevolent, inhuman -- as phantoms, devoid of face, heart and blood.
Empathy is cultivated through participation mystique. Denied of the experience, the heart is at risk of being rendered a cold citadel of angst and paranoia. Without empathy's agency, passion cannot be transmuted into compassion. Sans the sublimation of the heart's hearth, psychical fires threaten to become a raging wildfire of collective madness:
"Putin's neo-Cossack hacker squads have invaded my hard drive; Iran craves nukes; North Korea is a coiled, nuclear viper of seething crazy. Or the madness is made manifest as shooting sprees whereby the mass murderer attempts to cut down with barrages of semiautomatic weapon fire internal phantoms that torment him from within ." -- Paranoid thoughts such as those can be read as, a confused soul's dark fantasies of release from ego-ossified bondage although by means of the agency of death.
Moreover, I have noticed that often the true state of mind crouched beneath paranoia is envy. Envy... unconsciously evinced as, others are taking up your space in the world and are plotting to maintain the arrangement by your undoing. There is a solution: Go take a survey of the world beyond your self- circumscribed range and insist on your portion of life -- your portion of fate. Yes, of course all too many situations in this life are rigged, e.g., the capitalist state. But life itself is too vast, too intricate to be fully controlled; the world is too big to rig.
First release yourself from the stultifying confinement attendant to self-
inflicted bondage. Then proceed into the midst of life and show your face to the world.
Storms will pass, the landscape glistens with renewing rain"
Set barriers and barricades aflame ... their flames caress the future.
(Article changed on October 11, 2017 at 22:58)
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