Flowers For Socrates

“Non-violence” by Swedish sculptor Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd
U.N. Visitor’s Plaza, New York, New York
A gift from Luxembourg.

By GENE HOWINGTON

There are patterns in the world and this is illustrative of one of them. There is a tragedy, some horrid even where a lot of people have died senseless deaths and often for doing nothing more egregious than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The media grabs the story. There is sensation reporting. There are third-parties who use the coverage to promote their own pet causes. In the end, when the coverage fades and the cameras turn to the next “big thing”, you are left with the essence you started with: tragedy. Somewhere, somebody is missing someone taken from their lives by violence or accident. The public memory fades, but the private pain lingers on longer.

Take for example the coverage concerning the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado. If you possess even a minimal level of empathy for your fellow human beings, twelve dead and fifty-eight wounded when their only crime was wanting to see a movie can only be properly described as tragic. Among the dead are a man who had been celebrating his twenty-seventh birthday (Alex Sullivan), a member of our Navy (Petty Officer Third Class John Larimer), a twenty-four year old aspiring sports journalist (Jessica Ghawi), and a six year-old girl (Veronica Moser Sullivan).

As the aftermath unfolded, people with various political agendas trying to monopolize on this shooting to promote their pet causes came forward, some in a most heinous manner. During a radio interview on The Heritage Foundation’s “Istook Live!” show, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said that the shootings were a result of “ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs” . . . and questioned why nobody else in the theater had a gun to take down the shooter. Gohmert in one fell swoop illustrated that not only is he a base political opportunist, but that he apparently doesn’t understand the 1st or 2nd Amendments very well – a common affliction among Texas pols. Others pols used this tragedy as a way to promote their anti-gun agendas, their pro-gun agendas and the Twitter-verse filled with statements from “our leaders” about this tragic event and all of them in some way self-serving. And what are we left with now that the media has moved on to fresher “product”? Somewhere, somebody is still missing someone taken from their lives. The private pain lingers. After the media heat, the cost is still the same for those touched personally. The facts are important. The human cost is important. The memory is important. The media and political spectacle? Not really. Putting aside the hangers on and the sensationalism, what underlies these kind of senseless acts of violence? Madness, certainly. Even madness has root causations even if it doesn’t always posses logic.

The accused gunman at Aurora had dyed his hair red and told the police he “was the Joker”. The gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary had a fixation with violent video games. A young Missouri teen who killed one of her young friends did so because she “wanted to see what it felt like”. A detachment from reality is often present in dealing with violent psychopaths and sociopaths. However, violence is a part of our entertainment culture and it has been since the first stories were made up and retold around a fire on the African veldt. There is the fantasy of violence. There is the reality of violence. They could not be more different in outcome. This kinds of episodes this where the line between fantasy and reality have clearly been crossed in some meaningful manner causes one to question how does the fictional impact the real. Does this problem distinguishing between fantasy and reality exist in the individual or in society itself? The answer might be “a little of both”.

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