Self-diagnosis of Shock

I got home from a late rehearsal and hoped to be able to sit down and write about politics. I'd already halfway composed a light-hearted exploration of potential fallout from Candidate Romney's withdrawal... sorry, "suspension" of his campaign.

But the only place to escape news is to be asleep, in this day and age. The top headline on Yahoo was about a shooting at a council meeting in Missouri. Really? I think.

It turns out that it was a horrific shooting in the suburb next to the one where I grew up. A shooting at a building I've driven by hundreds of times in my life. It was at a city council meeting; one of those boring meetings where people talk about dog poop ordinances, and whether or not someone can put a giant naked statue of Elanor Roosevelt on their lawn. By the way, they can't.

Some guy shot a killed a policeman outside, then shot and killed another policeman inside. Then, shouting "shoot the mayor", he proceeded to kill at least three more people. The Public Works director died instantly, shot in the head. The City Attorney tried to attack the gunman by throwing chairs.

The Public Works Director? What the hell! The gunman had been forcibly removed from a meeting two weeks ago, and had a long history of disrupting the council meetings. But why this violence? What made it a "good" idea to kill policemen and small-time bureaucrats?

Honestly, what the fuck?

Is this the new way our society works? As the population increases, do the number of violent and mentally unstable people increase? Do they have access to more destructive means of killing people?

I know it's the accepted thing to say how unstable the gunman was. How messed up his life. How he just snapped. Is that enough? Is that all the answer we'll ever have?

I suppose this is why society invents superheroes and gods. We yearn to have someone who's able to stop the unstoppable. Who can explain the unexplainable. Who can prevent the innocent from dying pointlessly.

I heard this news, and I didn't think it effected me. At first, it was just another senseless tragedy. But the immediacy of the location brings me in. The fact that I've seen the mayor's name a hundred times in the local newspaper brings me in. The fact that someone thought the town council in a little suburb of St. Louis deserved to die; that brought me in.

And I basically started going into shock. Tingling at the extremities. Cold fingers and toes. Short breaths. A strange inverted feeling in my eyes. An inability to concentrate on anything.

Luckily, I was chatting with a friend who dropped whatever concerns she'd been talking about and told an impromptu story about a singing lobster, after I had told her it was nice to be chatting with someone as long as I didn't have to think about anything. By the end of the story, I had made myself hot tea and seized control of my rebellious body. I'm still a little short of breath and cold, but that's nothing that bundling up under the covers won't fix.

In the weeks following the 9/11 attacks, I had a similar reaction. One day I was just sitting in my apartment watching the TV, and I started crying. Sobbing. Moaning. I just couldn't stop. I remember trying to explain to my girlfriend about how awful it was that people would kill each other so senselessly. In retrospect, it seems a rather silly thing to cry over; there are bad men in the world. But, bless her, my girlfriend just sat there with me while I cried into her lap. She said soothing things over and over and kissed my forehead. And it was better.

I'm sure many people react that way. The clawing insanity of actions like this shooting can temporarily drive anybody just a little bit crazy.