It’s all over the news now and the internet. The President has made a special address and showings of The Dark Knight Rises are being cancelled across the country. The talking heads on Fox, CNN, MSNBC and all the rest are foregoing moments of peace and silence in order to find something, anything, to blame. People are scared, angry and in shock about something so senseless and it’s hard to just let the answers be something as unexplainable as mental illness, so we’re hanging on to every word, waiting to find something other than a 24 year-old man named James E. Holmes to focus our feelings of impotent rage at.
FBI profiler Clint Van Zandt speculates that Holmes was someone with a “dark, Trekkie-like fantasy world” that got the best of him. My extreme left-leaning friends think this is a sign to start banning guns across the board, while my extreme right-leaning friends think if everyone in that packed theater had a concealed weapon, then less lives would have been taken. I’ve seen conservative Christians blame violence in movies warping our minds and bringing us back to the days where we watched men be torn apart by lions, live and in stereo. I’ve read about Holmes’ parents, reaching out to all the lives their son destroyed, wondering where their little boy went and how this mass murderer took his place. I’ve even seen the blame land squarely on Twinkies, for clouding our minds with poison that leaves us empty and hollow like a zombie.
Before looking for something to blame, some reason for Holmes’ killing spree, I couldn’t stop thinking about the victims. They were my people. Film geeks of the highest order, dressed up and excited to be some of the first people in the country to see The Dark Knight Rises. All they wanted from yesterday was to let the lights dim and be transported away into a world where heroes never give up and there’s always someone to catch you right before you fall. They went to the safest place on Earth and died there. You see, the theater is my church, films are my gospels and directors are my apostles. Last night, a man desecrated my church (our church) with smoke, violence and bloodshed. And make no mistake, this is going to change how we view movies in public from now on. Whether it be pat downs, metal detectors or just no more midnight screenings: something is going to change. Just like it did after Columbine.
Every time some sick and crazy individual does something horrible that shocks the nation and brings the media together (however briefly) in a shared attack on something, whether it be violent video games, gory movies or controversial music, we come closer to shutting down that church forever. Whenever fear becomes the controller in the decision making process, the heroes get further and further away, and we’re left with no one to save you from the fall. All we’re left with are the “what if’s” and the “we can’t”s, any sort of validation for our open-ended fear. For every villain out there, I strongly believe there’s a hero, and the more we let the villains make the rules, the more we let our heroes die, disappear and slip away from us. So maybe this time, just this once, we can try a little less hard to find a place to lay all this blame and anger and fear. Maybe this time we can mourn those lost, share in our grief and then look to the sky for signs of heroes.
This article appears in Jul 19-25, 2012.
MAKE LOCAL JOURNALISM HAPPEN
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
You are a fabulous writer and have a great message to share.
Thank you, Jared, for the heartfelt words. Your feelings for the sanctity of the movie theater are mine exactly. You are right: We are all past blame. I am afraid, though, that we will merely succumb to handholding (and meekly succumb to the next infringement on our civil liberties). To today’s peace vigil I am carrying a sign that reads: “Can we (at least) TALK about Gun Control?” The national conversation has become so skewed that those of us who support sensible restrictions on the sale of automatic weapons (which are designed for no other purpose than to kill as many as possible as quickly as possible) are scorned and ridiculed as extreme. Thanks, again, Jared.
Well said, Jared. Unfortunately, I’m afraid you’re right. Officialdom will use this as a reason to add yet another level of control over our lives. How odd that the act of a single nut case leads to changes affecting a broad swath of society, while the entire financial industry misbehaves and almost nothing is done to punish the wrongdoers and protect the innocent.
A single nut case sunny boy? Did you mean a single case this week. The sooner we get another level of control in this area of our lives the better. That said, even this won’t jar any kind of legislation.
Give me an example of the level of control you’re looking for, Gadfly.
Ummmmm, how about a ban on assault rifles like every other developed nation? Because if you’re suggesting that’s off the table and that we just look to the skies for heroes, you’re not really bringing much to the dialogue.
And you completely missed the point of the article, champ. I’m a die-hard liberal who doesn’t own a gun and could never even hurt an animal. I have tons of thoughts about the gun control laws that I purposefully didn’t bring up in the article because the focus was on not allowing fear to guide our decision making process and remembering to keep some of the wonder and joy in our lives. The partisan arguments can wait.