Gerrie van der Walt, @gitfo on Unsplash.
Insanity holds a web of connotations. Psychologically, insanity involves mental disorder of some sort, perhaps delusions or impaired connections to reality. Very real issues that riddle thousands, even millions of people to varying degrees.
Legally, insanity can be invoked as a defense. An argument that certain behaviors were the result of a lacking of capacity, an instability of the mind. Genuine accidents, or at least instances for which responsibility is difficult to ascribe. Evocative of how our legal system is not fit to wholly commit to such compassion beyond maybe sometimes acknowledging these plausible instabilities—if it moved beyond to the realm of structural change, the makeup and volume of cases it would need to address at all would likely lessen.
Colloquially, insanity is foolishness. It is for one to appear almost unbelievable in their steadfast commitment towards actions that seem inadvisable, if not wholly reckless. Not far from the maxim that insanity is simply doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results.
One might also think of “going insane” in the idiomatic sense, of feeling an extreme disbelief at the existence of an impossibly possible feature of life.
The murder of 19 children and two adults at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas is yet another page in an inexhaustible scrapbook of mass shootings in this country. And though we may not have pulled the trigger, our fingerprints are all over this hell-shaped book. Tendencies we’ve allowed to inhabit our shared consciousness bleed into these pages of blood. We’re deluded in still viewing the painfully possible as impossible. We yield to our society’s instabilities and weaknesses that leave people violent and victim to violence; we shirk responsibility by failing to actually address the sources of those flaws. While being both authors and background subjects—survivors, for now—of this scrapbook, we allow it to become snapshots and preludes of reality, living and ongoing history. We’re petrified by our action, or rather inaction, while tragedy repeats, over and over again. Such a society is indeed an insane one.
If a tragedy at hand does not impact us directly, we instead may come to try knowing its pain through a now all-too-familiar sequence, repeating each day, each week. Logging on to the internet grants us the ability to walk through scenes we were not present to witness in real-time, our scroll serving as our simulated gait, promenading us through ongoing tragedy like a living museum. Our scroll proceeds, so too does the ritual. Where it all happened. Which corrupt politicians took thousands of dollars, from what lobbyists blocking us from doing anything about any of it. Just for it all to happen again and again and again. Where we have gone wrong is where we are going wrong is where we will go wrong.
And the same predictable, unsatisfactory responses. No wonder that, while millions believe America ought to have stricter gun regulation, many just feel resigned—not to the violence itself, but to the idea that the government would ever do anything about it all. It’s a justifiable lack of faith in the basic practice of politics in this country.
The tendency to view politicization as bad, specifically in the realm of gun violence, saturates much of society. That, instead of casting blame, or making “partisan” claims about what the problem is, we ought to be “reasonable” and seek out the “root problems” of gun violence. Mental illness, social alienation, medical over-prescription—the “root” can gesture towards anything other than ideas like America being the only place in the world with more guns than people. (Let alone the idea that many of these guns are military-grade weapons capable of such disfigurement to the point of necessitating the collection of DNA samples from family members in order to identify the Uvalde shooting victims’ bodies).
Of course, regulation like background checks, assault weapon and bump stock bans, and gun buyback programs, and so on would dampen the carnage brought by guns in this country.
And sure, there is an interweaving of “non-gun” issues that play some role in our rampant gun violence too. Healthcare, culture, the basic relations and connections undergirding our society—all these and more are patches comprising this broader tapestry. The tragedy of Uvalde, where masses of police stood by for an unbelievably long span of time while kids begged for help, especially represents our fundamentally senseless priority structure regarding this tapestry. There’s inordinate and never-ending funding for police; pennies for the whole gamut of every other vestige and vision of how the government can support, protect, and serve its people (no less does this tragedy exhibit the absurdity of this imbalance than because of each time the police have lied or changed their story surrounding how their actions directly led to more kids dying). So then, concluding that the answers to all these issues (and thus to gun violence) somehow lie outside of politics is just a basic misunderstanding of what politics really is.
Politics is the envisioning and undertaking of how a society constructs life for the people within that society. Providing genuine mental healthcare to people; ensuring people have actual time and resources and services to support one another; building a society characterized by care and compassion rather than pain and struggle—these are all explicitly political activities.
Accordingly, among the most damaging impulses pervading our society is viewing politics as a bad exercise, rather than what it plainly can and should be: a collectively-pursued means to achieve collectively-serving ends. Gun violence prevention is and always will be political. Believing otherwise is to fall prey to the delusions of the irresponsible and ineffectual governance that has led to these recurring tragedies and ensuing perfunctory rituals at all. It’s to allow our self-imposed delusions to keep occupying our shared consciousness; it’s to allow the scrapbook of shootings to stay boundless.
Genuinely recognizing our society’s insanities and instabilities, and meaningfully supporting each other in overcoming them, would allow delusion to break and responsibility to be claimed. It would exhibit our commitment to no longer cycle through the same rituals, over and over again. To achieve all that would signal at long-last the arrival of a society that has the capacity to actually, in a very real sense, care—and the will to act upon that care.
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