18 December 2012
By Kayla Chang, Copy Editor
We tell ourselves stories. We impose a narrative line on the shifting phantasmagoria that is actual human existence. We look for the social or moral lesson in the killing of ten. We encase pictures of bullets and blood and yellow police tape in the glass of our televisions like a museum display.
The victims of the Connecticut school shooting all died tragically (though very few people die any other way). Nothing epitomizes the futility of human striving like the murder of 20 children. It’s an open acknowledgement of a collective unspoken fear: the fear that all human effort is foredoomed to failure. The fear that the civilizing effect of society is just a well-crafted illusion. The fear that centuries of progressive agenda have been in vain. And we wonder: what does this suggest about the fate of man?
This fear seems to manifest itself in all different ways. You hear talk about gun control, about mental health care, about the sensationalistic news coverage of the mass media. About how God will heal us, how God has forsaken us. About this country’s culture of violence and the cognitive factors that beget it. About our schools and our kids and the triumph of the human spirit and it’s all just more abstruse ways of saying old things. Sometimes it feels as though we wake up more tired than when we go to sleep. So why do we try?
There exists a certain unbearable lightness to being—one that keeps us only marginally engaged with the dailiness of life. Such is the ontological necessity of man’s existential dilemma. Here’s the thing though: we can defeat it. And all this talk you hear? All those voices slicing through the silence, crowding the void of your echo chamber? That’s how we do it. That’s how we give weight to existence.
Tragedies like these are fundamentally absurd—a series of disparate images with no meaning beyond their temporary arrangement. Hence we can’t just neatly frame it in grief then let it gather dust. By doing so, we create a forgotten monument to a time when we were all robbed a bit of our humanity. With every senseless killing, it’s our job to recover sense. These killings—they’re not barbaric relics of our troglodytic past; they’re our reality. A reality we make incoherent with sentiment and, in doing so, deny.
So keep talking, lest we forget. Don’t let the conversation die. Don’t grow weary. Stay engaged. Send your words your anger your fear arcing through the air, intersecting flight patterns. Tell your stories. Tell this story.