We Are Better Than This

I generally reserve this space for fun and games. The games that we play, and the way that we approach them, generally speak to the sort of society in which we live. We treat games as pastimes, diversions from our day-to-day existences, yet we allow ourselves to get wholly absorbed by them from time to time. And that’s actually a good thing, I think. Right now, I’m far more interested in focusing on the Seahawks being in the upcoming Super Bowl and far less interested in dealing with an assortment of personal life issues and quandaries and challenges. Those problems will still be there on the 3rd of February. They can wait.

But sometimes real life intrudes. Real life can be really ugly. And sometimes it gets personal:

COLUMBIA, Md. (AP) — Someone armed with a gun opened fire at a busy shopping mall in suburban Baltimore on Saturday. Three people died, including the person believed to be the shooter, police said.
The shooting took place at the Mall in Columbia, a suburb of both Baltimore and Washington, according to Howard County police.
Someone called 911 at around 11:15 a.m. to report a shooting at the mall. Police responded to the scene and found three people dead, including one person who was found near a gun and ammunition. No details were released about their identities.
Police said they believed that one of the people found dead was the shooter. Two people with minor injuries were transported to a hospital for treatment.
The mall is at the center of the town and typically opens at 10 a.m. on Saturdays. It was busy with shoppers and employees when shots rang out before noon.
Joan Harding of Elkridge, Md., was shopping with her husband, David, for a tiara for their granddaughter's 18th birthday. She said she heard something heavy falling, followed by gunshots and people running.
"My husband said, 'Get down!' and the girl that worked in the store said, 'Get in the back,' " Harding said. That is where they hid until police gave the all-clear.
At a news conference, Howard County Police Chief William J. McMahon said police are relatively confident that there was only one shooter.
"We don't know a motive yet," McMahon said. "We are very confident that it was a single shooter, and there was not another shooter in the mall."
The mall was closed to the public as police went store to store looking for people who might still hiding, McMahon said. He said the shooting occurred at a store on the upper floor.
He said it wasn't clear whether the shooting was random or whether the shooter and victims knew each other.
Witnesses described moments of panic as they heard a succession of gunshots and screaming as people ran for cover into nearby stores and hid behind locked doors.
Tonya Broughton of Silver Spring, Md., was with a friend getting facials for a 'girls morning out,' she said. "The only thing I heard was all the people running and screaming and saying 'There's a shooter! There's a shooter!' " she said.
Wearing a gel face mask, she and her friend hunkered down in a Victoria Secret store.
People were directed out of the mall and into a parking lot, where some boarded a bus and others walked toward their cars. Some people were seen crying. McMahon said detectives were interviewing witnesses as they emerged from the mall to try to get a better picture of the events that had unfolded.
Laura McKinzles of Columbia works at a kiosk in the mall. She said she heard between eight and 10 gunshots, followed by people running and screaming. She ran into the backroom of a perfume store and locked the door.
Allison Cohen, who works at the apparel store "Lucky Brand Jeans," said she always felt safe at the mall.
"I truly never thought something like this would ever happen here," Cohen said. "It's really, really shocking."

My future in-laws live in Ellicott City, Md., which is near to Columbia. They were shopping in this mall at the time. They were apparently at the opposite end of the mall when the shooting began, near an exit. They were able to run from the mall to safety. But 15 minutes earlier, they were in the area of the building where this occurred. 15 minutes. That small sliver of time being difference between safety and potentially being in harm’s way. They are OK, which is a great relief. I am thankful for that. I am very, very thankful.

But I am also livid that I live in a nation where something like this happens at all. That several people have suffered the ultimate loss in this incident – the loss of one’s life – makes me extraordinarily sad. It also makes me angry. Really angry.

This sort of violence is senseless and needless. This is not how a supposedly civil society conducts its affairs. It’s unacceptable. If we cannot ensure the basic safety of our citizens, then we, as a society, have failed. And this sort of thing happens FAR TOO OFTEN. It seems to happen almost every day in one area or another of this country. That we, as a supposedly civil society, have not taken more steps to prevent these sorts of incidents from happening should be infuriating to every person who lives here.

My outrage is genuine. This isn’t me speaking in the abstract. People who are very dear to me were very nearly in harm’s way today. And in recent times, there have been two instances where people that I know have been killed in acts of gun violence. That’s two times too often. Any number larger than zero is too often. It’s not acceptable. In one case, it was a murder-suicide. In the other, it was someone I know who is an attorney and was attempting to mediate a dispute who was in the line of the fire when one of the parties pulled a gun. I mention the situations because violence takes many forms. The end result was the same in both cases, however – a senseless loss of life. Two incidents which have forever altered the ways that I see this life of mine.

The thing is, it should not take personal connections, a personal feelings of loss, to make us care. This shooting today in Columbid, Maryland, should outrage you even if you know not a single person in the greater Baltimore-Washington area. We, as human beings, should not be doing this sort of thing to each other.

And I have ZERO interest in debating the politics of gun control right now. Whether I do or do not favour gun control isn’t really the point. What is the point is that there are an awful lot of gun control apologists out there who will quickly respond to an incident by using an excuse other than the prevalence and easy accessibility to firearms. “People are crazy,” they will say. “Crime is everywhere,” they will say. To which I say this: OK, well if the problem is crime or people being crazy, then what are you doing to solve that problem? Don’t pay lip service to ‘bigger’ life issues. If those are the real problems, then try to solve them. Go on, do it. Make your community and your society a better place. I urge you to do it.

Same for gun control advocates: don’t just bitch about guns. Strive to make change. But what if you cannot make grand societal changes, at least in the short term? Then make small change. The solution is larger societal issues is found in often found in small ideas. Find commonality with people, find common purpose. Surely, we can all agree that a gunman shooting innocents in a mall is unacceptable.

It would be easy for me to be hardened and inflexible, to be cynical, having not only seen three people I know killed by gun violence in recent years, but also having been a victim of a violent crime in the past in which my life was threatened. Yes, it happened to good old, whitebread, milquetoast, middle class me. I was fine, in the end, the victim of an act perpetrated by a couple of junkies who likely didn’t remember they had even done it. It would be easy to call this a random act, but it was nothing of the sort. Two guys who wanted the means with which to get high chose to commit a crime so as to make it easier for them to do so. We should be careful using the word random to describe incidences of violence. It is not random. It is a choice, though not necessarily a conscious one.

And imagine how I felt when, a couple of months after that, I came across one of the perpetrators while walking along Mission St. And I did know it was him. I could never forget that face. I will remember those two faces forever. And there he was – strung out, yellow-eyed and trembling, leaning up against a lamppost near a bus stop. And I stopped in my tracks, I just froze there in place and glared at him, glared right through him, wondering if he remembered me.

But no, he did not remember me. He had no idea who I was. No idea at all.

And in that moment, of course, I was outraged that this scum junky was out on the streets, having evaded capture by the S.F.P.D. All sorts of cynical ideas go through your head in a moment such as that – what a joke, the criminal justice system is in this country. What a laughingstock. Guys like this motherfucking sleazebag are free to just roam about, pickpocketing and thieving and doing whatever the fuck they want. The cops don’t care. No one cares.

It’s when you give in to cynicism that vigilantism suddenly seems like a good idea. In that moment, I could’ve killed him. And I really do mean I could’ve killed him, as in physically, as he was so meek and pathetic and I was so angry that I could’ve beaten the living shit out of him right there on the street, leaving him begging for mercy, but also leaving him wondering why it was that this seemingly random dude was using his face as a punching bag.

But I did nothing of the sort. Instead I just moved on. I pitied him. I felt sorry for him, because I was certain that this guy – who was willing, with an accomplice, to pull a gun and a knife on a guy for $7 and an iPod – had completely lost who he was. He wasn’t a human being anymore. He was a zombi, as good as dead. Me using violence as a response to violence, and doing so at a time of my choosing when I had the upper hand, would have been the easy way out.

What is far more difficult, however, and also far more important, is committing to finding solutions to problems which lead to people behaving in the way this person had behaved towards me. This shouldn’t happen to others. It shouldn’t happen at all. If I can do something to prevent that from happening to one other person, I have made this society better.

I regularly donate not so insignificant sums to institutions devoted to the study of mental illness, something which I care deeply about. I have done so now for quite some time, believing that knowledge is power. We humans are a dangerously flawed species, but we are also gifted with the ability to learn and understand ourselves, to learn why it is that we do the way we do things, and to ultimately change both individuals and the individuals who come after them. While I do not believe that mental illness is the reason that all crimes of the nature of this shooting in Columbia occur, I believe there is often a strong correlation. It seems inherently irrational to me that we, the human race, so easily hurt one-another. I believe that the seemingly soulless shells of individuals who sought to hold me up could have been prevented from reaching that point somewhere in their lives. That behaviour seems preventable to me. There are reasons why this happens. Lots of reasons, some of which make no sense. Me personally, I am not smart enough not well-learned enough to explain this, but that doesn’t mean I should do nothing. If by contributing financially, I am able to enable those who are smart enough to find some answers, then I have made a difference.

And that is what you should do. Make a difference. Care about your community, your society. There are many angles to a story such as what happened in Columbia. There is some aspect the act of a gunman going on a spree in public space which should make you uneasy, which you should want to change so that it happens less often, if at all. So pick one and go about solving it, whatever that might entail. Do not be cynical. Do not just sit there and do nothing. Even small things are enough – acts as small as standing on my soapbox here in this small corner of the internet and imploring others to be involved. It should not require an enormous act of violence to compel us to action, but sometimes we need to be shaken to get off our duffs and act. (And I admit that I am just as guilty as succumbing to inertia as everyone else.)

The cynic would say that another violent act such as this will inevitably occur. I do not share that view. This sort of loss is not inevitable. Losing is only the default in sports and in games.

We are better than this.