The Sickness We Don't See

There's nothing in this world that makes me want to blog about the massacre by Devin Patrick Kelley at the First Baptist Church at Sutherland Springs. Everything about it is chilling and awful--this was supposed to be a safe space. This was a place where families were gathered to worship their Lord and enjoy fellowship as a community. This person mowed down lives of persons young and old for whatever reasons, and I think by now we should just discount the production of bullshit manifestoes.

Fuck it. If the monster was a socialist monster or a conservative monster--would it make as much of a difference as the frigging time-bomb in his head and the socialization malfunction that told him there were reasons to mow down innocent people with a rifle? Would being an Islamic monster or a Christian monster make the enormity of the thing he did less? He could be a democratic socialist atheist monster, and tick off every box of compatibility with my world view, and be no one I have an ounce of pity for, because one of my main thoughts about life is--you don't just randomly create a bloodbath of your fellow sentient primates because of some burr up your ass. He slaughtered mothers and fathers and children in innocent prayer. There isn't ever a reason for that action. No concocted worldview ever satisfies the why for that enormity. It boils down to his inability to see these human lives as anything but pieces on a board for some personal game--but what I do see, and always look for?

Domestic abuse. He was court martialed for abusing his wife and child.  How he treated the people closest to him, the most vulnerable and nearest to him, was a symptom or a sign of how he would eventually treat so many random others. This idea has been hashed out before, and I've documented it, and gifted feminist comedian and social justice warrior princess Samantha Bee just did a meaningful segment on the connection between domestic abuse and mass shootings. 

I don't really have anything to add--except my condolences to a community, a small Texas town where literally everyone knows someone who was affected by this tragedy. I care about their healing and want the church and it's communion to stay uninterrupted. But as long as I have a memory of violence and the causes thereof and the means thereof, I will continue talking about the toxic masculinity that sees violence as a necessary part of the enforcement of its claims on other people's behavior and sheer existence, and the acceptance of gun culture as a reinforcement of that toxic strain of social dominance. By murder. And by people accepting these tools and these unnecessary and petty ideas that lead to murder so easily.