TBH at this point I think the routinization of mass shootings in the public consciousness is just another way our society sustains and justifies broader affective and material economies of misery and precarity
that McSweeney's gets at it the posture this regime cultivates: we would all be so grateful to return to being just normal participants in capitalism, who don't have to imagine our random murder mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-don…
instead of having the time or emotional resources to demand more, or even imagine radical change, you settle, besieged, for, "I just work here/live here, and am happy to get out alive (IE die otherwise)"
this serves all sorts of purposes. (1) it ratifies an implicit status quo of where violence is "supposed to" or even "should" happen, and who should experience it (IE: on "the streets," to the "urban (read" black or Latino) poor). IOW: Not me! Not MY office! Not in THIS zip code.
relatedly, and also - and I think it's hard to overstate this - this resignation (2) shapes your expectations, at a corrosive, insidious level, of how much to expect things could be different. We train ourselves, and our children - it's a kind of pedagogy in the possible.
I don't think it's a coincidence that we've gone from traumatizing children with pointless duck-and-cover exercises to traumatizing them with active shooter drills.
Practically pointless, and misdirections of focus as policy, they're actually tutelages for children in what to expect as facts of life, telling them what are the things they can only *react* to, what institutions of human evil are beyond their power to change.
To tie a bow on it: I also don't think it's a coincidence the generation raised on Duck and Cover drills never actually *solved* the threat of ever-present nuclear annihilation (thanks, Boomers!). And TBH I don't see much reason why the same won't apply to this nightmare either.
I keep thinking about what this does to our children, this tutelage in fear. The pedagogy of resignation, the training of what to expect from the world, from adults, from our country.
I think too of the structures, material and affective, that make this possible, and so frequent: our militarism, our brutality, our indifference, our investment in inequality, our willingness to profit off death.
The sober, calculating mind reels at thinking of how to confront and transform these things in their size and complexity. And the heart strains at the prospect of the sustained, loving, committed emotional energy necessary to do it.
The one thing, you would think, that might cut through the forces of inertia, habit, and complacency, would be the suffering of children, paradigmatically innocent, vulnerable, our responsibility. And yet time again, we find ourselves here.
re-sharing this, from back in November, about mass shootings, the suffering of children, and the broken, quasi-theological logic by which we condemn ourselves to repeating this, again and again nytimes.com/2017/11/08/opi…
