Winter of Discontent

I cannot tell: the world is grown so bad,
That wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch …
                                                                    --”Richard III”, Act I, Scene iii

By now, everybody on the planet who has access to a radio, a TV, or an Internet connection has heard of the Newtown shootings.  It’s arguably one of the most heinous events this year, and likely will be in American history for many years to come.  If Euripides, Aristophanes, and Sophocles sat down together and tried to create the ultimate tragedy storyline, they probably couldn’t have bettered Newtown if they had a hundred years to work on it.  And once again, in the face of incomprehensible horror, we’re hearing the same chorus of voices.

“It’s the guns!  Ban ALL the guns!”
“It’s the violent media!  It’s Hollywood movies and video games!  Burn them all!”
“It’s the press!  It’s all their fault! Make them stop reporting tragedies!”
“It’s the lunatics!  Lock them all up for our own good!” 

There is the understandable desire to Do Something, or failing that to be Seen As Doing Something.  There are going to be blue ribbon panels.  There are going to be Congressional hearings.  There will be more drama and agony in the next year or so then there was during the actual event that sparked the whole thing.  And it will not end well for anybody.

 
Let’s take a moment to stop, take a nice deep breath, then look closely at what we know.  Not “what we think we know,” what we actually know.  We know a 20 year old young man killed his mother in her sleep, stole firearms legally purchased by and registered to her, then used those firearms to murder 20 schoolchildren, then fatally shot himself.  His computers were destroyed prior to his leaving for the school.  There is anecdotal evidence that the mother was self-sufficient and generous, that her son was very intelligent but socially awkward, and that she did not discuss her son or confide in any difficulties she was having with him.  It’s not much, and it will never be enough.  Some people are going to probably spend the rest of their lives trying to answer the unanswerable “why?” of this tragedy.

For the rest of us, we’re doubtlessly going to be bombarded by politicians loudly proclaiming “think of the dead children!”, by protesters screaming “Stop killing children!” to people who had nothing to do with any of it, by pundits and columnists who will chum the waters in stentorian tones, and who knows what sort of madness that will be reported and connected and magnified and denounced.  We’ve gone through this dance so many times, the steps so utterly routine, that the only wonder is that anybody is genuinely able to be shocked or horrified anymore.  We’ve already started seeing some of the fallout.  A little boy in Utah brought a gun to school because he was afraid of an incident like Newtown happening to his school.  The older brother of the Newtown shooter, who apparently wasn’t even living with him at the time, having a virtual lynch mob flood his Facebook page alongside the page for Mass Effect 3 with bile and vitriol.  It’s only going to get worse from here.

The problem with this whole thing is that there isn’t a single issue that will magically negate the possibility of something like Newtown ever happening again.  Events like this do not happen in a vacuum.  They sit at the confluence of certain rights, responsibilities, and privileges which cannot be isolated to the point they can just be removed.  It’s a strange, pulsating, mutually reinforcing tangle that puts the Gordian knot to shame.  But there is the constant pressure to DO SOMETHING, no matter what the consequences.  “Consequences?” (I can hear somebody saying) “What consequences?  We’ll have Done Something.  We’ll deal with any problems that crop up later.”  Which, not to put too fine a point on it, is probably how we came to this pass in the first place.

Let’s indulge in a little legislative theorycrafting, shall we?

Ban The Guns: In this scenario, the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban is brought back and expanded.  New enforcement powers are allotted to the FBI and ATF.  Ever increasing taxes are levied on ammunition and reloading equipment.  People who don’t have guns and never want them rejoice.  People who don’t have them but do want them are troubled, concerned over their personal safety.  People who have them eventually find themselves stuck, unable to do anything without breaking a law.  Hoarding and caching become the norm.  In their zeal to enforce the law, the ATF and/or FBI begin systematic harassment of gun owners.  New legislation eventually creates a permanent ban on all private firearms ownership.  The ATF causes an incident which quickly spirals out of control, leading to a massacre.  The FBI executes a raid which sparks civil unrest.  Pushed too far by the actual and perceived injustices of the federal government, what were isolated pockets of civil unrest become the early stages of outright rebellion.  The rebellions spread through the use of social media as they grow from urban and rural cells into regional forces, causing a multi-prong civil war which fundamentally destroys the United States as a political entity.

Note that there is at least some historical precedent for elements of this scenario.  Two of the grievances the American colonists had against England were the forced disarmament of the populace and the levying of untenable taxes.  However much Parliament may have been able to justify them, they were considered onerous by the colonists.  While the Ruby Ridge incident happened during the closing days of George H.W. Bush’s administration, the Waco massacre and subsequent Oklahoma City bombing both happened during the Clinton Administration, which had a notoriously rabid anti-gun stance.  And as we saw a couple of years ago, the successful revolutionaries of the 21st Century will be the ones who know how to use Twitter, Facebook, and other elements of the Internet to coordinate actions and release propaganda favorable to their perspective and goals.

Ban The Games: In this scenario, Congress decides to do to videogames what it almost did to comic books back in the ‘50s.  Sweeping censorship legislation, modeled after German and Japanese censorship laws, is mandated for games.  Prohibitions are placed regarding the depiction of blood, death, sexual material, and other behaviors deemed “antisocial” or “detrimental to the general mental health of society.”  With each new generation of games and game systems, more prohibitions are put in place: mockery of religion, mockery of political figures, questions of ethics, aliens, zombies, time travel, the cross, the Star of David, the crescent, the bald eagle, the American flag, anybody’s flag, elves, dragons, dwarves, robots, cyborgs, “cute” styled characters, “realistic” simulations, cellular automata, and so on.  Penalties for owning games with these elements are harsh, making games with those elements harsher still.  Games become increasingly abstract to the point of meaninglessness beyond word and number puzzles and spacial relationship settings.  Pre-ban titles are traded through obscure darknet undergrounds, culminating in a continent spanning sneakernet that passes thumb drives and high capacity Micro SD cards physically from person to person.  Immigration & Customs Enforcement establishes the Interstate Commerce Oversight Bureau, slowing interstate commerce and personal travel to a crawl as they search random vehicles for indications of smuggled data storage media.  Large segments of the games industry move to more friendly countries or create seasteading arcade cities that will cater to the crowds who want a simple Capture-The-Flag game or engage in a massive multi-party raid, thus depriving the United States of vital intellectual and monetary capital.

Again, elements of this scenario are not without historical precedent.  The frenzy whipped up by the book Seduction Of The Innocent by Fredric Werther was enough to gut the comics industry for a generation.  German video game censorship boards are far beyond draconian when it comes violence and especially anything relating to the Nazi regime of WWII, while Japanese censorship boards have increasingly grown hypersensitive to any sexually related material, even sex-positive outcomes such as non-sexual depictions of pregnancy.  The Chinese government in Beijing, without any hint of irony, banned the use of time travel as a trope or element in fiction, claiming it was “disrespectful to history” instead of considering it as an intellectual exploration of causality, free will, and the role of chance in the shaping of events.  Offshore gambling boats and data havens are already a fact of life; it would take a relatively small amount of capital to execute plans to host not only data but their users in international waters.

Ban The Crazies: In this scenario, Congress appends numerous mental health initiatives to the Affordable Care Act or creates a new law centralizing and mandating mental health screenings.  The Mental Hygiene Council is created to advise the White House regarding mental health directives and policies.  All new driver’s licenses and driver’s license renewals now include a written test to determine current mental health status.  School guidance counselors are now required to perform preliminary psychological evaluations on all junior high, high school, and college students, even through the post-graduate level.  The Social Dysfunction Index is developed from these early results, promising to identify at-risk individuals and direct them to potential treatment options.  Insurance companies begin to demand policyholders submit to regular mental health screenings or lose their coverage.  Congress passes new legislation that states loss of coverage due to refusal to submit to screenings will be penalized by involuntary commitment at the nearest federally approved psychiatric care facility.  This, in turn, spurs the insurance industry to demand policyholders maintain a minimum level on the Social Dysfunction Index or lose coverage permanently.  Socially awkward but functional individuals become an increasing segment of the involuntarily committed.  The rapid growth of involuntary patients and the rise of individuals who try to avoid the mandated commitment period leads to the evolution of the Mental Hygiene Council into the Federal Mental Hygiene Police, answerable only to the President.  Involuntary commitment periods become longer and longer, contingent upon increasingly esoteric and nebulous definitions of what constitutes an acceptable SDI score.  The Social Dysfunction Index is adjusted to account for those individuals no longer in society.  What were once ordinary behaviors are redefined as socially dysfunctional and eventually as aberrant: excessive displays of cynicism, pessimism, or optimism; willingness to argue or debate, refusal to endorse or identify with a political party, religious sect, or philosophical outlook; specific endorsement or identification of such.  Criminal behavior is ultimately reclassified as mental illness, even down to singular instances of petty theft and speeding.  Mental health institutions become dangerously overcrowded.  Reports of political repression and personal vindictiveness are routinely buried, and any professed belief in the potential for veracity of the claims are classified as delusional behavior,

The historical precedents are thinner in number here, but still present.  During the Cold War, officials in Soviet Russia routinely classified anti-communist thoughts or beliefs as mental illness and was perfectly willing to use the tools and methods of psychiatry to destroy minds rather than rebuild them.  In our own recent history, particularly in the last twenty years or so, we’ve seen incarceration rates and jail sentences increasing at a tremendous rate.  The number of individuals currently incarcerated in the U.S., including a large number of nonviolent drug offenses, has reached an unsustainable economic point as evidenced by a recent prisoner release in California.  There are also numerous accounts prior to the massive shutdown of mental hospitals here in America of individuals being sent to mental institutions not because they were genuinely mentally ill, but were politically or socially inconvenient.

I’d try and write a scenario about “ban the press,” but honestly, I can’t think of how much worse it could get with them.  Not to mention that in the U.S., there’s a very strong tradition of freedom of the press.  I’ll content myself to point out that the media conglomerates who currently run the major news outlets and hold local affiliates hostage probably would do literally anything for ratings, because there isn’t an editor or station manager with the balls to tell the shareholders they’re being evil.

I’m going to put forth the radical and potentially heretical notion that this is one time where it is better to Do Nothing.  By that, I mean that we do not empanel blue ribbon commissions to produce reports about what we are to do so that we can Do Something.  We do not flood the hopper of state and federal legislatures with bills banning guns, ammo, video games, and news reporters putting out bad news; nor do we throw bills in mandating involuntary commitment and forced medication regimens.  Passing laws are a quick fix.  They’re the ultimate feel-good solution.  Which in a way makes it worse when the next tragedy strikes.  Too many of us have it in our heads that just because we pass a law, it somehow will automatically prevent the activity or behavior from happening.  “But-but-but they can’t do that!” we cry when the newest atrocity rears its ugly head, “WE PASSED A LAW!”  Passing a law is easy.  Enforcing it, sad to say, is far too often a copper plated bitch.  And we cannot legislate our way out of this one.  There is no one law, or package of laws, that is going to dig us as a society out of this mess.

This time, I believe that we’re going to have to look within ourselves for the answers.  And it’s going to be hard, because we’re not used to it.  And it’s going to be ugly, because we have avoided doing it for so long, content to let other people tell us what’s wrong with us and what should be in our souls.  We can start small.  We can start by accepting responsibility for ourselves and our actions.  We are ultimately a product of our environments, our parents, our friends, our living circumstances.  But we can be better than where we came from.  The dross of urban blight, of our parents’ shortcomings and the failings of our leaders, all of that can be discarded if we’re willing to tell ourselves, “I am responsible for my actions.  I do not like the person I am today, but I am better than who I was yesterday, and I will work to make myself better still tomorrow.”  We might accept there are conditions in society working against us, but we must not blame society for what we do.

Get to know your neighbors.  For some of us, that’s pretty easy.  For others, it’s almost impossible at times, particularly these days when we’re already freaked out about strangers showing up unexpectedly.  Find ways to make it happen.

Help those in need.  It’s not just donating canned goods during food drives or volunteering at homeless shelters.  It’s being able to come up to somebody in obvious distress and asking them, “Are you all right?  How can I help you?”

Be polite to each other.  Even if the person you’re talking to believes in everything you abhor, be polite in your disagreement.  Civil society needs civility.  When we screech at each other with invective and hyperbole, when the firearms owners are described as “paranoid reactionary gun nuts” and those who do not own them are described as “wooly brained idiot sheeple,” we don’t improve the conversation.  When the gamers are called “fat desensitized robots” and those who don’t game are called “technophobic Luddites,” we’re not making things any better.  We don’t go anywhere.  We don’t accomplish anything except dehumanizing the people we disagree with.  And it’s damningly easy to do things to people when you’ve dehumanized them in your mind long enough and badly enough.

Don’t think with your passions or feel with your intellect.  Be able to set your feelings aside when you have to critically evaluate something.  The fact that you don’t like somebody’s position does not automatically mean they are inherently wrong or that you are inherently right.  Try to see things from their perspective.  Which means talking with them, getting to know them, where they came from, what they’ve experienced.  Accept the fact there are gaps in your knowledge and limits to your understanding, then do something to improve those conditions.

This is the winter of our discontent.  It is going to be long, and cold, and cruel.  But if apply ourselves, we can see a wondrous springtime ahead, if we can prove ourselves worthy of the moment and work to make our society and our country a better place.  Not because we’re legally obligated to do so.  Because we are obligated by history and by our shared humanity to make the effort.