So now it’s about mental illness.
We know where that mental illness grows. Not the medical one, the societal one. It grows in people in an unstable society. A society that makes no sense in so many ways and fuck us up. When I read Gawker’s unemployment stories I see what can fuel the explosion of an individual. 2010 has seen the highest suicide rate in the US in 15 years.
What most boomers driving our Western society don’t get is that things really changed, that today you can make the best choices and it just doesn’t matter, you’re still going to possibly end up in shitty places through the weight of things you cannot control at all. The sense that as an individual things are more random than ever before, is terrible.
That’s like, the strongest despair you can get.
You don’t even need to be so mentally ill to snap out of control. It just happens. The Colorado shooter was an apparently brilliant dude, studying neuroscience. How could we see what was about to happen? We could not and no one could. On the other hand the Virginia Tech killer was receiving treatment, therapy and special education for years and that didn’t stop him. He wanted to replicate Columbine and did.
Look at the Empire State Building shooting, the 58 year old perpetrator went there to kill his boss after he had been laid off. No psychiatric problems ever, he just had enough after being evicted from his apartment. Hitting the streets at almost 60 is probably crazy hard to swallow.
We shouldn’t dismiss people’s pain and call for the convenient “he was just a crazy and sick person”, especially in a psychotic society teaching us to be good AND merciless. Which of course doesn’t yield good results especially with white guys because when shit hits their fans, they are the ones falling from the highest point. Everybody else is used to not have all the rights and therefore are more capable to deal with the shittiest shit. This guy went nuts because of the IRS and the government, crashing his plane in a building. Meanwhile, black people deal with the worst statistics possible -employment, incarceration, children death rate- and don’t try that much to make everyone pay for it. Black people even have the lowest suicide rate. Like Paul Mooney says, “white folks, thanks for making us tough.”
Anyway if it’s about mental illness, it’s about society’s not individuals’. This is the one we need to fix.