STRANGERS AMONG US

It is with genuine shock and revulsion we view the outcomes of rage manifested in acts of senseless violence.  We call on the experts to explain why someone becomes sufficiently detached from reality and the gravity of the destruction the perpetrator visits on families, communities and the psyche of a watching world.

The truth is that any species when threatened with annihilation becomes aggressive. Human beings respond just as badly to being ignored, facing invisibility.  In a short analysis of a frightening trend in the US toward “outsane” instead of “insane” behaviour a number of years ago, the Utne Reader supposed that outsane constituted a person who was not likely to think of harming themselves until after they had taken out a number of human beings. The final stage of this “self intervention” to stop whatever oppressive feeling had overtaken a shooter’s psyche was usually suicide. There,  that feels better. Since the optimal state suggested to us by marketers, game manufacturers and the IPOD generation seems to be isolaton and emotional highs that are prompted by third party or “omniscient” experiences, feeling is perhaps more than most people can take. Raw anger, visceral hatred and truly primitive and primal states are foreign to us. We who have removed “negativity” from our vernacular. We who have attempted assimilation into a sea of rationality, passivity and un-emotion. Still, as animals, the imprint of our old-brain references cannot be assuaged.  The strangers among us who create world-wide headlines by planning, acting on and reaping the whirlwind of brutal acts, threatening communications and self-hatred are not so strange.  The obvious symptoms we search for in the behaviour of the violent and antisocial person are not as important as the voluble real or imagined, slights, rejections,  and day to day “not measuring up” anyone can experience. Some people are never in the right place at the right time.  All the social commentary of the sixties has taught us very little. Ralph Ellison in “The Invisible Man” talks of the invisibility of being black. Albert Camus talks of the outsider who lives on the periphery of three dimensional life, feeling part of nothing.  The social pathology of aloneness is both terrifyingly lonely and powerful at the same time. Nothing to lose. In a world where even our energy as beings is part of a huge and complex whole, why are people released like particulate matter into a cold, dispassionate place where their suffering, sadness and isolation is not only ignored, but savagely attacked by those who see, as Konrad Lorenz, animal behaviourist states “a vulnerable entity open to attack.”

As people of thought and spirit do we need to create a fenced perimeter where the lonely and lost have to walk alone?   The risk for humanity is the danger of exclusion.  Like a complex ecosystem the sensitivity and catalyst for growth exists within human communities only if conditions,  cooperation and natural symbiosis keep us together. Every person to a man or woman is part of the fabric of our own humanity.