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| Panel from Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns (1986) |
What do
I say?
Some
execrably pathetic excuse for a human being walked into a suburban movie
theater with a small arsenal and opened fire on a group of people whose only
crime was buying a Batman ticket. What do I say?
This
problem was supposed to be solved by now, you know that? It’s like those flying
cars we were all promised 50 years ago. In
the future, we’ll all have flying cars! There are even songs about how baby
boomers are still waiting for their flying cars. Well, for my generation, it
was mass shootings. We were supposed to be done with those by now.
I
still remember sitting on a bus on a middle-school trip and reading about a
now-forgotten rampage in Jonesboro, Arkansas. Someone had smuggled a
newspaper onto the bus, and all the girls were giggling over pictures of
Leonardo diCaprio in the Oscars section. The front page was abandoned on the
floor, and I picked it up and read about a couple of teenage boys pulling a
fire alarm and picking off their classmates as they ran for safety.
I was
a freshman in high school when the Columbine shootings went down. I remember
reading over a classmate’s shoulder as she wrote a letter to a friend, saying
she was “hearing all about the ‘tragedy’ in Colorado,” and I remember thinking,
no, that doesn’t need quotation marks.
It’s not a so-called tragedy. It’s a tragedy, full stop.
And
the grownups always told us, reassuringly, that in the future we wouldn’t have
these problems. All we had to do was put a stop to bullying (ha!), or get these
kids on medication (pfft!), or pass stricter gun laws (snrk!). In the future, there will be no mass
shootings.
Well,
it’s the future. I’m an adult now, more or less. And what is this I wake up to,
one fine Friday morning? What do I have to explain to a room full of
ten-year-olds when I go to work?
I can
tell you one thing I didn’t say. Not once on Friday did I utter the phrase “in
the future”. Because this will happen
again, and I know it. Congress isn’t passing any gun laws in an election year,
and probably not after that, either. More idiots will get their hands on more
guns and go to more public places and kill more people. Some of them will be
full-on deranged; some of them will just be depressed, or enraged, or sick of
the world. Some of them will be trying to get famous, because let’s face it,
that’s one way to do it.
I’ve
heard a few people say already that the solution is just to take the guns away.
Gun control? Don’t make me laugh. Even if we do manage to greatly restrict the
sale and ownership of guns, the most that will do is reduce the body count
slightly. Anybody remember the headlines from Europe and Asia about “stabbing
sprees” and a burgeoning “knife culture”? Unless the future is a place where
all of our food comes pre-cut, determined monsters will always have weapons, no
farther away than the kitchen drawer. And even if we ban knives, we’ll probably
hear about biting sprees. We’re just that kind of species.
No,
the more I hear about Aurora—no matter how much I don’t want to hear about yet
another public massacre—the more I think about something a very wise man once
wrote:
“… sin, young man, is when you treat
people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is.”
“It's a lot more complicated than that—”
“No. It ain't. When people say things are
a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they
won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts.”
“Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes—”
“But they starts
with thinking about people as things...”
That
exchange is from Terry Pratchett’s novel Carpe
Jugulem, a hilarious little book about vampires and witches and pictsies
and a truly ridiculous amount of alcohol. Pratchett’s grammatically challenged
speaker is a mountain witch named Granny Weatherwax. Seek out his books about
her if you can—I highly recommend them, like I recommend all his work—but watch
out for landmines like that one. Pratchett’s a satirist, and satirists wait
until you’re laughing and then stab you with a thought.
People
as things, that’s where it starts.
I
don’t know what motive, if any, the Aurora shooter might have had. It’s
possible that none of us will ever know. But I remember an interview with a military
sniper I saw once in a documentary, and I remember the man saying that the
first thing you notice about a living human target when you look at it through
a gunsight is that “the target has eyes, and the eyes move.” It’s a jarring
realization, I’m told—that the creature whose life you’re about to end has such
human features. And I think about a young man in a gas mask, in a dark theater.
You can’t see eyes very well that way. Not enough to see them move.
People
as things.
Kids
running from a distant school, onto a killing field. People as things. Students
huddled under tables in a library, their faces obscured. People as things.
Shadowy faces in a movie theater, their features blurred by flickering light
from the screen. People as things.
There
are so many causes, so many complex explanations, so many justifications and
ramifications and otherications that you quickly lose track of them all. But at
some point, I’m beginning to suspect, it always comes down to two people, one
of them holding a gun and seeing a thing through
the sights.
I hear
my students talk trash about people who are different from them—people of other
races, other creeds and countries, the opposite sex. They laugh about “blowing
away” the latest boogeyman on the news sites. And I know it’s just talk, just
kidding around. They’ll grow up and realize how problematic those solutions
are. They’ll realize that Dr. Seuss was right all along—a person’s a person, no matter
how small (or how strange). A person is not a thing.
In the future, we won’t have mass
shootings.
People
as things.
The
future is something we build. We make it ourselves. What kind of future would
we make, I wonder, if we taught our children never to think of people as
things? If we reminded one another that a person’s a person, no matter how
small? If we looked one another in the eye, and saw the eyes move?
The
deranged we will always have with us. We will always have weapons, even if
they’re only our teeth. This won’t stop the real psychopaths, or the tragic
accidents. But could we stop some of
the horror this way?
In the future, people will never be
things.
It’s a
start.
