March Madness

I don't have any particular plans, so don't get the wrong idea. I'm just compiling a list of when it's OK or not OK to murder children.

So far, the reasons proffered just this month are:

1) Concussion. And stress.
2) Something something Palestine.
3) When they are alone and black.

Again, not really looking for a plan of action of any kind, this is purely an academic exercise.

It's already hard enough to be a kid. You don't know how to find or prepare food for yourself, you live in somebody else's house, you can't set your own bedtime and everybody is just so fucking tall. You have to live in a world where no one says Thing 1 about the blatant adultism in countertop architecture and doorknob placement. Beyond that, you spend your whole life navigating through a series of life-threatening obstacles like stairs, food which must be chewed, the existential curiosity of elder siblings and the unfortunate serendipity of butter knife and electrical outlet design complementarity.

And now every couple of weeks it seems, well-armed nutters are out there targeting you, seemingly at random, for extirpation. You try to ask them why and all you really get are... well, see the above numbered list.

But I think I've reached the conclusion of: fuck them. How important is the "why" really? What light does it really shed on the slaughter of the innocents to know that the guy in Afghanistan had a head knock and was kind of a dick to people? Let's say we take all that information and feed it into the Crimestoppers Algorithmic Atom-smashing Differential Engine of Doom. What would be the primary insight? That all the traits exhibited by the guy who turned out to be a mass murderer are shared by 98% of the U.S. military population, active, reserve and veteran? And maybe 60% of the non-military?

I hear and agree in principle with the points that the Army should have known better and could have done more and that the issues with brain injury and post-traumatic stress are both real and serious. Maybe that just means we should be giving more credit to the rest of the Soldiers who have been injured in such a way and have as of press time managed not to go on a murder spree amongst those least able to protect themselves.

It's hard enough to be a kid. It's infinitely more difficult to be one in Afghanistan. The unexploded ordnance alone makes simple games like hopscotch far more life-affirming than they should ever come close to being. If the point of the game is to come out with all your limbs, maybe it's time to consider coming inside.

But alas, even inside is no longer safe. The scary stuff you should never have to consider follows you in, or worse, waits until everyone's asleep first. The news agencies are trying, but there's just no explanation to satisfactorily illuminate all the black-dark corners of these personalities. Let's find out, let's know everything. Why? So we can stop it happening again, I guess. But that's not really an option, is it? That's not how we work. Our only knowable response is to throw every ounce of energy and cash at putting processes in place to... stop the last thing from happening that already happened. No box cutters on planes was after 9/11. Take your shoes off in the security line was after that fucked-up looking British guy tried the shoe bomb trick. It's silly and flailing and likely pointless, but there's really no other option. Chronological retroactivity is not on the table so long as we're bound to the linear trajectory of spacetime as physics currently understands it.

The only other option is to do nothing, which is no option at all. The noble semiautobiographical fiction of human agency demands something resembling action.

Although in the case of the murdered teenager here in America, we could just evacuate Florida entirely. Hand it back to the cottonmouths and the caimans. Let the storm surges and wildfires fight over what's left. It would be violence and conflict on an unprecedented, Biblical scale we could all watch on CNN. But if we just left the same laws on the books, the hurricane would go unprosecuted and we'd have to hear all about the signs we missed from its youth as a tropical depression.