How Fragile We Are…
Nothing Is Guaranteed, Lest We Forget
by Randall Amster
Once again, events conspire to remind us how fragile is our existence and how vulnerable we really are. A young man whose goal in life might have been “helping others†winds up hunting them instead, ruthlessly mowing them down 
in a bizarre public spectacle in which it is not life but rather death that mirrors art. Chillingly, a neighbor describes the gunman as a “typical American kid†who “kept to himself [and] didn’t seem to have many friends.†In the postmortem analysis, fingers will be pointed and political positions staked, but the essential issues will again likely go unaddressed as we forge ahead to the next reel in the film, without noticing that the entire narrative itself is deadening by its very nature.
There are no “good guys†or “bad guys†in this veritable societal shooting gallery that places all of us in the crosshairs. Some people simply break, while some seek to break others, but both are responses to a society that places alienation, dependency, and casual brutality at its cultural core. We might blame a specific organ when it contracts cancer or treat the disease like an individual pathology, all the while neglecting to address the obvious socio-environmental roots of the condition. To do the latter would require us to ask hard questions about the society we have created, the one we participate in and benefit from — yet if we do not, the issue will likely soon become moot as the patient expires. (more…)
