There are times when you have the feeling that the world is going stark mad.
An American-born, 29-year-old man raised in New York City, of Afghanistan parentage, walks into a gay club in Orlando, Florida, and shoots 50 people to death because he’s angry at gays. Then it turns out he’s been to the club several times before, was known to some as a friendly guy and, in fact, was even communicating on some gay websites.
Immediately, everyone tries to jump into it; a Baptist preacher in Sacramento posts a sermon on YouTube telling how happy he is that they were all killed, Trump sends out a tweet congratulating himself for being so right about Muslims and blaming it all on Obama, the NRA says it’s not them, since everyone should be constitutionally permitted to have an AR-15 with a 50 shot clip and the Congress doesn’t appear ready to do anything. I don’t think we’re ever going to do anything much about guns in America, but we certainly can do something about assault weapons and large clips of ammunition. The death toll keeps rising because the weapons keep getting more efficient and more deadly and there are answers — we can limit assault weapons and certain kinds of clips of ammo. It’s not perfect but it’s better than what we have.
Then locally they caught a young guy in Santa Monica, who drove all the way from Indiana with a vehicle full of weapons, who was headed for the LA Gay Pride Parade, with intentions unknown.
Our changing sexual mores, our growing questioning of gender and gender roles, the clash of religious strictures and personal sexual drives are frightening to lots of people, and I suspect we are in for a rough ride for a while, with some very nasty outcomes.
What’s equally frightening is that the FBI previously had the killer on their watch list and had investigated him not once, but twice, and cleared him of any terrorist involvement. Apparently he was not involved with any foreign terrorism, but he had said some very strange, angry, racist things to co-workers and it’s not yet clear if the FBI picked up any of that or, if they did, whether they reported it to local police. Trying to distinguish between someone who is just a big bag of wind and someone who is really dangerous is a very tough call to make, particularly if there is real mental illness under it all.
You search around trying to find some reasons why this is all happening. There seems to be some growing detachment from reality and I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. This week, Karen and I were downtown and we passed a hotel that had a game show convention of sorts, so we flashed our press passes and went in to take a look. There were a bunch of nerdy-looking 20-somethings trying out all sorts of games, almost all some variations on war or deadly combat. Now none of these guys — and it was primarily guys — looked like potential mass murderers, but then, who knows? And how do you tell? I suspect most have been playing these games since they were kids.
Lest you think this is not reality and just fantasy games, there is an Air Force base outside of Las Vegas where Air Force officers go to work, strap themselves into a pilot’s chair and operate a real drone, often carrying real weapons, in a country half way around the globe, and they do this all watching a TV screen with information provided simultaneously from the drones and other sources. After their shift, perhaps after blowing someone up, they unstrap themselves, get out of their pilot’s chairs, go to their cars, maybe stop at the market for something the wife wanted and then drive their kids to Little League practice. It’s got to be very difficult for some to tell what’s real and what’s fantasy in the world we live in today and that can make a lot of people very dangerous.