On the Colorado Theatre Shootings

Friday, July 20th, 2012, was the day that changed the movie going experience forever. Just after midnight, in Aurora, Colorado, at the premiere of Batman: The Dark Knight Rises, James Holmes opened fire in a crowded theater killing at least 12 people and wounding many others.  The horror that was poured out that night in the shape of a gunman's bullets, would eventually ricochet around the internet in one digital brow of woe, through the hollowed lives of the families and friends of the victims, in a resounding knell of why.

Why? Why do people do such things? Why Columbine? Why 9/11? Why do such things keep happening?

Why?

The question is sometimes aimed less at understanding the event and more at reassuring ourselves. It offers the comfort of a prayer in the simplicity of a chant. It sutures a wound with its needle and thread. While it asks heaven for an answer, it opens hell with its question. It is the name that such sorrows come by, asked like Hamlet asking his court jester and childhood friend Yorick: "where be your jibes now?"

Ultimately, a trillion answers will pour into the breach, and the flood of questions will be halted. Until next time. There's always a next time. But why?

 "Why" does the question of "why?" always follows such a tragedy, especially when most people don't really want an answer, at least not one that challenges their own sacred beliefs, especially about their beliefs in God or guns, capitalism or Jesus Christ.  That's because the answers can often feel worse than the tragedy that provoked the question in the first place. Everyone has answers. Indeed, the miracle of such horrors is how quickly those who provide us with the answers we want to hear are able to capitalize on such sorrows to offer the world their religious or political solutions. From the priest to the politician, to the meat cutter and the cab driver, everyone rushes to fill the square hole of that question with the round peg of their answer.

Glenn Beck, for example, opined after the Earthquake in Japan that "God was sending us a message." Beck never explained what the message was exactly, or how he knew it was a "message" at all, let alone how he knew it came from God and not someone or something else. But no matter.  For Beck, it was clear that God was punishing Japan, it's just not clear for what. Maybe  Japan was like Jesus, a purely innocent sacrificial lamb offered up for the rest of us. Or maybe God was punishing them for watching Glen Beck (which would make more sense). Either way, Beck's comments are quite possibly the most asinine words ever to be uttered in the English language.

From the left, the answer will be to "remove all guns everywhere!" while from the right, the answer will be to "arm everyone to the teeth!" For some it is proof the world has lost its way, and that we need God, prayer, and the ten commandments back in our schools. Others will blame the NRA, and decry this is the result of the ease with which people can buy guns in Colorado. Some will blame video games, violence in movies and on TV, atheism, commercialism, and practically everything else. An almost infinite number of reasons will be given to justify every and any political action desired.  Any political action desired will ultimately be designed to benefit the designers more than those it is allegedly designed to benefit. Such is the agriculture of politics that the tears of tragedy are channeled to irrigate and harvest political agendas.

But the question will remain, and it tolls for us. Why?

In 1966, Charles Whitman climbed to the top of a tower at the University of Texas and shot 48 people, and then himself. An autopsy later performed on Whitman revealed a tumor growing on his amygdala, which is a part of the brain that plays a role in the display and modulation of aggression. Could Holmes be suffering from such a tumor, perhaps one that formed from using his cell phone? Maybe. But maybe not. Either way, such an answer is hardly comforting, and fails to fill our emotional need for meaning, hope, and perhaps mostly, revenge. After all, justice demands an eye for an eye, not an eye for a reason.

Worse, such an answer also threatens to peal back the scab on the hidden parts of our society that no one really wants to have to consider, let alone talk about.  

But maybe the real answer to the question of "why" is simple. In fact, maybe it's too simple. And because it is so simple, it will eventually be lost. Indeed, for many it's too simple to ever be found, because it is too simple to be satisfying. The pebble of its reason can never fill the ocean of its wonder and rage.  Such answers are lost in the maelstrom of why and woe that always follow such a tragedy. Yet that answer, like the conclusion of a poem by Edgar Allen Poe, may simply be James Holmes,  and nothing more.

For it was either him, or us.