Beware the Unseen

Bear with me, but I am going to assume you are not completely insane— Could you walk into a dance class or your place of employment and shoot people? I think most of us get pissed off at annoying people in our yoga class or angry at our boss or stupid co-workers—

But could you take an gun and go shoot the people in your yoga class or your co-workers?

Neither could I.

This is because we do not have serious mental health issues.

I’ve been angry at people in my life, real angry, but the idea of shooting anyone—even those people—makes me sick.

Maybe it’s the same with you.

I would imagine you would have to be afflicted with pretty serious “head stuff” to be able to shoot other people just because they made you feel angry or isolated, deceived or ignored.

We have had three mass shootings here in California recently. With each one, people are blaming it on guns. Even the President is calling for banning assault rifles. You know, I agree on banning assault rifles, my thought is those weapons do not belong in the hands of civilians….

But to make this a “gun issue” is to engage in dangerous simplification.

Yes, guns were used and no I do not think you or I should be able to own an assault rifle—

But there is something much larger going on.

The gunman in the Monterey Park shooting is from Hemet, a town roughly twenty miles from where I work and live. After the shooting people in his life described him as paranoid, solitary; visiting the local police to report thefts of money. He liked to dance, he would go to the ballroom he would later shoot up and dance on a regular basis. Maybe he had a crush on another person who frequented the ballroom, maybe that person was dating someone and the shooter was jealous—

Been there, as I’m sure you have; who hasn’t crushed on someone and when you find out they have a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a spouse…ouch!

But could you shoot them? For that matter, could you bar the doors and set the building alight? Could you park a moving truck full of liquid fertilizer outside and blow them to bits?

Neither could I.

This is because neither you—(possibly I’m being kind)—nor I suffer from dangerous mental illness; you would have to be mentally ill to do any of those things to other human beings.

We look at these situations like Monterey Park or Half Moon Bay or the six year who shot his teacher and we’re jump on a single track: GUNS! GUNS! GUNS!

This is not a gun issue, it really isn’t. This is a mental health issue. This modern world chews people up and spits them out and please allow me some hyperbole because—

Don’t you feel it? I know I do. So many times in my life I’ve felt rushed, felt forced into stressful situations, I’ve felt unseen and disregarded, I’ve been ground down by week after month after year in rush hour traffic, in a job doing the work of three people, I’ve had unreciprocated crushes and on and on and on as I’m sure you have—

But you and I are okay, maybe we’re stressed out, feeling isolated, but we get on, we don’t just go to the Planet Fitness or where we work and purposefully kill people.

You’ve got to be—please allow this—fucking nuts to do that.

How do these shooters fall through the cracks? Does it start young like the six year old who shot his teacher? Does it develop in adulthood? We’re all marketing, packaging, and selling the “best us” to the world, we’re sweeping our hurts and fears under the rug for the people in our lives—

When you are that sick, there is not a rug big enough; the rug is a collection of large, obvious lumps:

Hey…uh, you got something under your rug.

Why weren’t people pointing out the rugs of these people? Is part of the problem the expectation that we always have to be “on brand”? Hey, smile! When someone asks how we’re doing they don’t want the truth, they want you to smile and say that you’re doing great. And you and I conform to these social expectations, as do these shooters. The difference is, you and I are mostly sane, we do not suffer from paranoid delusions or whatever these people are afflicted by.

This is not a gun issue. We want to make it a gun issue because that offers a simple solution: Take the guns away, cue happy ending. Send those bulldozers to the homeless camp and raze it. Just sweep your troubles away, don’t worry that the rug is excessively lumpy or you’ve simply swept your problems to another part of town. We need simple solutions because we don’t have the energy or the strength for more shit. Are you kidding? You’ve got two kids, one who is autustic, you’ve got this job where you get calls at night and on your “days off,” you’ve got to deal with your marriage and all the other crap those of us attempting to survive in this volitile, uncertain modern world are dealing with—

Keep it simple, okay? Just…make it about guns, alright? I’ve got too much shit to deal with as it is.

This modern world does this to us, the pace and the expectations and everything else where even something small like being spurned by someone we’re crushing on at a dance studio makes us want to…

You or me? Just be kinda sad, maybe drink too much.

But this modern world breaks some people and we don’t see it. No…we ignore it. It’s not okay to not be okay and that is fucking toxic, this smiley face “blowing sunshine up each other’s asses” bullshit. I’m not saying we should always be negative, always moaning about the things that make us unhappy, but when we are not coping, seriously not coping, we should be allowed to ask for help. Do you? I know I don’t. There have been loads of times in the past three years I’ve needed to talk to someone, to tell someone I am not doing okay, but we are socially conditioned to just deal with things. Maybe it’s the same with you. The thing is, when you or I are not okay, we’re still okay. Shit hurts for awhile but we can carry on.

It’s not the same for the shooters. It’s not the same for those people living under tarps in the industrial park.

So, no, it is not simply a fucking gun issue.

This is where I sum everything up neatly with a solution to the problem. The thing is, there are no neat solutions when it comes to us complex creatures. What is it they tell us to do when faced with a monumental, complex task? Break it down into small, manageable pieces? The first piece is understanding. The first piece is seeing these people standing there with a broom next to a ridiculously lumpy rug. The first piece is hearing a six year old muttering about setting a teacher alight and not just brushing it aside but understanding, “Hey, that’s not right.” It’s looking at this frentic, modern world where we are made to feel like numbers, like everytime we need help we’re forced to climb phone trees. It’s the capricious way our society eyes with disdain the weak, the broken. That is the first step, the first of many steps, in truly solving this issue.