This week in the future (5/29/22)

callin' out to all area crew

I’m not a big fan of personalizing responses to current events. I remember 9/11. This was an attack on us all. People who wouldn’t go to New York on an all-expenses-paid junket wearing FDNY hats. Sikhs getting attacked because racists don’t even know who they’re supposed to be racist at. Two forever wars.

So, not exactly a good idea.

That said, this was a bad week for someone with a six-year-old daughter.

Hello darkness my old friend (“friend”?)

Another school shooting, another angry young man who hates his life and tries to make women miserable online:

He could be cryptic, demeaning and scary, sending angry messages and photos of guns. If they didn’t respond how he wanted, he sometimes threatened to rape or kidnap them — then laughed it off as some big joke.

But, you know, that’s just the way of the world these days:

Some also suspected this was just how teen boys talked on the Internet these days — a blend of rage and misogyny so predictable they could barely tell each one apart. One girl, discussing moments when he had been creepy and threatening, said that was just “how online is.”

That girl, of course, is absolutely correct. I’m guessing every woman online has experienced similar, almost all of it from men who haven’t, as yet, shot up a school. I certainly have heard stories worse than this.

And all this on some app, Yubo, I have to confess (not good since I write this thing) I’d never even heard of before this.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what, if anything, I could add to this conversation. I’m not sure there’s much.

I was once an angry boy. Not angry like this one, or so I think, so I have to think to keep going, to not hate myself. I remember what it felt like to want attention from girls, not get it, and feel angry about that. But I was lucky. I had good friends. And I didn’t have the Internet, or at least anything like this version of it.

It’s always easy to say what you would or wouldn’t do, from the remove of middle age, affluence, comfort. But lots of boys are awful online and nobody can know which ones will go to these lengths. We’re not talking about a needle in haystack. We’re talking about a single stalk of hay.

Later on, trying (failing) to become a professional, someone I was close to committed an act of violence no less heinous than this one. A guy who knew us both, responding to my horror, to my belief I could never do something like that, gave me one of the most important pieces of wisdom I’ll ever receive: you don’t know what you’d do. If you were in that position, you just don’t.

We are not going to identify these killers beforehand. There are millions of angry young men, and nobody can tell which .000001% of them are going to do anything like what this one did.

But we can look around. We can ask whether we think the world we’re creating is humane, is kind, is likely to exacerbate or curb our worst tendencies. This doesn’t happen everywhere. There are plenty of societies that don’t generate this level of random violence. In fact, most don’t, many of them poorer than ours.

So, when I look at something like this, I refuse to see something I couldn’t have done. Why? Because that mystifies it. If it’s just beyond the pale, if it’s just some demonic act of incomprehensible evil, then there’s nothing to be done. But there’s plenty we could do. Hopefully, I’ll find more to say on that in the coming weeks.

But for right now: if you’re reading this, you’re probably someone I know and love. (If you’ve read this far, I love you even if I don’t know you.) I hope you and yours are well. I hope you’re cup runneth over with the milk of human kindness. If it doesn’t, I hope you’ll let me know; maybe there’s something I can do. We have to start somewhere. Might as well start here.