“Don’t take your guns to school…”

The new craze: mad at your girlfriend, shoot everybody in sight. Today’s headlines positively oozed lurid thrills, a slow news period broken by Real! Exciting! News! The masses sharing a vicarious simultaneous orgasm.

“Ooh! How dreadful! Do tell! How, when, who, why?”

Why this urge to delve into behind-the-scenes dirt? Everybody wants to know what made the guy so angry. I won’t be surprised to find the girlfriend blamed for it.

Real reality TV, the ultimate get-off. Interview the survivors, roll the cameras, have the victims cry on cue.

Next: hire shooters, raise ratings…

Cynicism aside, these events catch me deep in the quease pit of my gut. Empathy grips me, imagining what it must have been like for them. The clip-vested killer cruising from class to class, opening fire systematically, panicked people leaping from second-floor windows to escape the deadly hail…

He, though, escapes my empathy radar. I can’t imagine him. I view him only through the lens of ‘monster’. Yet my heart knows that can’t be right. What forces made him? What drove him to do it? The urge to know is driven by pity for the child in the killer.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 3:54 pm and is filed under truth and strangeness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.