The Day After Yesterday

You who build these altars now,

to sacrifice your children,

You must not do it anymore.

A scheme is not a vision,

and you never have been tested, by an angel or a god.

-Leonard Cohen, The Story of Isaac

Some of the shock has worn off, but I'm still pretty angry, I'm even more sad.
It's in my nature to start to try and analyze things that impact me this strongly.  I have read many articles and blogs about various aspects of the Newtown shootings.  I have heard people blame our rather poor gun control measures, which certainly seems to be a conversation that needs to happen. I have heard people blame the fact that we don't let teachers pack heat to work, which, quite frankly, is insane and is a conversation that doesn't need to happen.  Let's just say that guns are dangerous, and as such should be regulated, and those who want to own them responsibly should have no trouble doing the paperwork and paying the cost of that regulation.
What is far more interesting to me is the discussion about the zeitgeist (spirit of the age) of the culture in which we live.  There have been a few who have observed that America is rather obsessed with violence, there have been a few who have observed that the media make monsters into celebrities.  This is not a new idea, Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers is almost 20 years old.  The role of the media in this disaster is right in our face.  They're on the scene, they're frantically breaking news as fast as they can.  They engage in speculation about motive, they misidentify perpetrators, they hang on every word that already overwhelmed emergency responders and, even worse, survivors and victims families can mutter into a microphone.
Ultimately though, I can't blame the media any more than I blame drug dealers, they're just supplying the needs of the addicted.  Our culture is addicted to the next big crisis, we wait for it, we prepare for it, and yet somehow we're always surprised when it turns out to be worse and different than the kind of calamity we were anticipated.
The question is: why?  Why are we so addicted to catastrophe?
This was the first dramatic national news event that I witnessed via Twitter.  I had a moment where I felt like Neo when he first started to see the Matrix.  The Tweets gradually all focused on Newtown, they moved into a fairly synchronous expression of sadness and outrage, for about four hours.  Then the blockheads got their bearings and the people who said this happened because we banned prayer in public school started to pop up here and there.  The radical gun control people started shouting, "We told you so!"  A few hours later the anti-gun control people responded, with almost maniacal zeal that the problem was really not enough guns, because as you know, if you ban guns, only the bad guys will have them.  Sorry, I thought I really had dealt with that above.
The point is that the twitterverse moved like a living creature, it adapted, it expressed emotion and eventually it lapsed into neurosis.  This morning, things are more or less back to normal, except for hashing out the details and the occasional reaction/analysis piece.  I began to see the potential, and the danger, of the electronic social sphere that many of us, most of us under 40, inhabit.  You can see information undulate before your eyes: fact and opinion, sanity and mania, honest wrestling with issues and propaganda.  The problem is, unless you have a fairly solid intellectual, emotional and spiritual grounding in the "real" world you are fairly ill-equipped to tell the difference between the helpful and the harmful.
As I discussed yesterday, our culture seems to be living in a perpetual state of spiritual dysfunction.  Our parents (the leaders of our nation, and the experts and celebrities who become defacto leaders) are having a rough patch, they have been for a long time.  They don't communicate, they just shout at each other and they can't even pull it together long enough to have a nice Christmas dinner.  The kids (us) are starting to act out.  The most vulnerable and unbalanced wonder what they can do to get anyone's attention, apparently the answer is kill children.  It certainly gets our attention.
I can't help but think of the parallel with the old gods of paganism.  Pagans would invent a system that they thought would please their gods, it usually involved sacrifice.  You make the right sacrifice, the god is pleased, he/she gives you what you want.  The problem is that those gods tend to get progressively thirstier; at first grain and fruit is good enough, then it has to be animals, then it has to be humans (no worries there though there are always some enemies you'd rather get rid of anyway), but even that doesn't work so it's on to virgins and then eventually, you guessed it: children.  Think that's not how it works?  Read the Bible and just about any history of the collapse of Aztec and Mayan civilizations.  It's way too consistent to be coincidence.
I'm sure there were some sane, level-headed people who said, "hey wait, we can't do this to our own children."  They probably became ancillary sacrifices, just to make extra sure.  I'm going to go out on a limb and be one of those people.  We have to do better.  Our "modern," "educated," secular society is living out some very old patterns, and the only thing that can put those old gods to death is the One True God, who instead of demanding the sacrifice of children, became a child instead.
We need to get better, we need to get better at handling mental illness, we need to get better at how we treat each other from top to bottom.  Most of all, the thing we need to put to death is the idea that violence solves problems. We will never be able to protect those we love perfectly, but we can do a lot better than we're doing now.