Common Emotions, not Common Sense
I’ve struggled for a week to make sense of the Interstate shooters.
They were the shots heard across the county, over the mountain and on the farms. Persons unknown—but a 16-year-old juvenile and 19-year-old Slade A. Woodson stand accused—fired a bunch of .22-caliber slugs at and around cars on Interstate 64, into houses and buildings, through VDOT trucks, at banks and street lights and pretty much anything else that wasn’t standing still.
The shots, at least in the mind of this Casual Fridays observer, didn’t seem intended to kill anyone, although they certainly had that potential and did, in fact, wound two. These were not the planned and placed shots of a twisted sniper picking prey and choosing where to strike for most certain death. These were “damn it” shots, shots to blow off steam the way your hot water heater would blow into orbit were it not for the pressure relief safety valve that keeps it cool during a malfunction.
What valve does the brain have to blow off the pressure when it malfunctions? What outlet does the mind have when love, work, play, home and the pressures of life and making a living add up to one serious steam build up?
When jobs are hard, when love goes bad, when we don’t get what it is we want from other people — usually that which we won’t give to ourselves because we fear we aren’t worthy of it — we stew in a broth of anger and resentment and hurt, seasoned with healthy chunks of suicidal and homicidal thoughts. Sometimes those thoughts, mixed with a judgment-altering substance, lead us to a variety of bad behaviors from crashed cars to regrettable sex to maybe firing guns into occupied dwellings, banks, street lamps, cars on the freeway and the Virginia Department of Transportation.
It’s a perfectly normal reaction. Who hasn’t wanted to take potshots at VDOT on occasion, go ahead and raise your hands. Thought so.
How about the DMV? Just a few rounds in the window, there? No one getting hurt of course.
Yup, thought so, too.
OK, now raise your hand if you actually acted out on your emotions? Not that many. Unfortunately, others don’t have that valve that keeps them from acting on their emotions. That’s what the Shots Heard Around the County were all about. They were symbolic. Shooting at a bank while it’s closed is wanting to damage an institution that has somehow slighted you without actually hurting anyone. Shooting into a house is a similar incident. Shooting at cars on the highway is similar, except that real, live people are endangered.
Love and life can hurt so bad that people want to kill themselves, or other people or kill others and then themselves, thereby going to Heaven to meet The Maker on the buddy plan. Most of us don’t do it. We hire lawyers to torture the other person instead, but there are those among us who let emotion get away.
Feeling that way is one thing. Acting on it is another. The Shooters who Fired the Shots Heard Around the County stepped over the line when they actually loaded their gun, aimed it and pulled the trigger for the first time. In the end, one man wound up shot by police and hospitalized while two others were treated for minor physical injuries, although the long-term psychological injury may last longer. In the meantime, the shooters themselves face years away from society, without basic freedoms.
It’s a tragedy on many levels, created by emotions run amok.
I’ve been trying to make sense of the shootings. Unfortunately, the shootings don’t make sense, at least not in the common way.
Posted by Bryan McKenzie at 11:42 AM. Filed under: Knee-deep in Thought •
