Newtown Shootings.

By all accounts I am a pleasant chap, father and previously son. I guarantee I will not shoot anyone. But that hasn’t stopped me and my sons at one time or another hating our parents as ‘agents of the state’ and its unspoken social norms. I guess that’s fairly normal and in most cases we’re given enough latitude to find ourselves, our self as a unique social, loving animal being. I also sense I have matured two quite different identities: One the social and one the individual. I feel lucky that for me these two largely overlap and neither one inhibits the other much so both have been free to develop benignly. I can easily imagine this not being the case, where an overwhelming social identity will suppress the individual and the individual more visceral identity will react antisocially.

This ‘final straw’ can be as ferocious as a camel as you break its back. Somewhere in the individual a switch is thrown. And somewhere in the individual the switch can find its way back to find genuine remorse for what’s been done.

In my youth there was little television, little wealth and the desire for it, and for fame and celebrity. Today we are far more the watchers and admirers of these things. The young are in a sense parented by screens on all sides and their parents also. The combination can be a feeling that within our social humanity there is nothing, no one that isn’t an agent of the state. Parents, media, the news, even much of the care professions seem in collusion to suppress the natural individual self, the only true sanity one has. And all, if you displease them, will call it insanity. It becomes a fracturing conundrum, a personal war with the universal zeitgeist. Parents and social institutions genuinely ask, “What more can we do?” They don’t understand that it’s an infection we all carry but only a few develop symptoms, so in an effort to help we crowd round their bed infecting them further.

If there’s ‘a cure’ I suggest it’s quite the reverse. Someone in danger of causing much social harm could be driven out into a deserted wild place with water, shelter and provisions and if possible a horse and left alone. They could be visited by someone robust and mature after 3 days and then weekly for two maybe three weeks, a sort of decontamination period. No help, no therapy, no contact. And at not much cost either.