What a day I’m having… That little post I put together on the train while coming to work has caught people’s attention. My normally sleepy little blog has by now logged 1,646 visitors. Up from a high of 200-some, a few months back.
I’m pretty excited about this, and checking where the traffic is coming from, Alphainventions and Condron.us are both feeding me. Alphainventions mores0, but Condron is doing it, too.
It’s a pretty intense jump — a 10-fold increase over what I typically get. Dizzying. It’s kind of depressing, that this happened as a result of me talking about terrible things happening, but I guess in these times, everybody is paying closer attention to terrible things.
I think that perhaps we’re really trying to figure out how to handle it all. It’s not easy, living in these times, and I suppose it’s human nature for people to ponder imponderables. That’s not a bad thing. In fact, it’s a good thing. Writing about terrible things isn’t the most pleasant activity, but if we can come away with some lessons learned, then we may be able to turn negatives into positives.
One can only hope.
I talked to my friend today about their nephew. People think it was a drive-by shooting. Stupid, stupid, stupid. What’s the point?! What does it give us — anyone — to strike out against others from a safe distance?! From the safety of a passing car… What is the point?
I can think of a number of reasons someone would want to do such a thing. I can think of a whole lot. In a small way and on a very limited scale, it certainly has allure. But on a grander scale, within a community context, it has on meaning at all, and it only serves to destroy what little connection we have with our world.
And I think about how this relates to TBI. And PTSD. I can’t help but think about it. I wonder if the people involved were cognitively impaired, in some way. If they were socially impaired. If they had been injured so often and so badly by a wrecked family system and a wrecked culture, that there was no way they could get through it in one piece. If they were so brutalized by the inequities of this culture we tend to adore, that there was no hope left for anything but violence. Shooting. Cowardice from a moving car.
Certainly, whoever did this was alienated from their community, else they wouldn’t have done this. People are by their nature self-preserving. They do most things because they get something out of it. My logic is getting all tangled around, I’m sure, because I’m so pissed off about this shooting — about all the shootings that have been going on. But it seems to me that people who feel they have a place in the world, who have a future ahead of them, who can clearly see how they are interconnected with one another, and who have positive, mutually beneficial relationships with others they care about, are not going to run around shooting other people from moving cars.
But, you may say, people are responsible for their life choices. They have to make wise decisions and act on them, and if they choose the lesser, then they should be caught and punished… possibly put away for a very long time. I’m not saying that isn’t true. I agree with it. Personal choice is critical in all this, and I do believe in finding, catching, and punishing wrong-doers. I hope whoever killed my friend’s nephew is found, tried, and sent away for good.
But if someone is so f’ed up by a long, long history of abuse and neglect, and thanks to many beatings and falls and fistfights, their brains have been altered in ways they’re unaware, so that they’re doing things and making choices whose reason escapes them, and their skills and abilities are eroded by lifetimes of neglect and misunderstanding and seemingly random punishment, what chance do they have of acquiring the ability, even skill, of assessing their behavior and their situation and figuring out how to set right what’s been wrong for so long?
I do think, based on my own experience, that head injury probably plays a much larger role in our society’s ills than we care to admit. Certainly trauma and post-traumatic stress does. We should probably look closer at it as a nation. I suspect we’ll have ample opportunities to do so, as our veterans return from Iraq and Afghanistan, many of them with TBI and PTSD — and not all of them diagnosed and treated or supported in any way. I fear we are headed for social melt-down, even as our economic situation worsens waaaay past where we thought it would bottom out.
This is not to say that I think everyone who’s been hit on the head or suffers from PTSD gets a “pass” when it comes to bad — even evil — behavior. Some sh*t is precisely that — pure evil. The thing is, with brain injury, you don’t always know how evil your behavior is. It’s when you start to approach your injuries and deficits and learn to understand it and you get your broken head around the ideas of what’s right and what’s wrong and what you should and should not do, that you have the chance to examine your choices, become conscious about them, and become capable of taking responsibility for what you’ve done.
But until you can look at your injury and the after-effects, and come to terms with the person you’ve become as a result, you can’t really even start to approach the level of self-examination that’s so important, even vital, to responsible behavior.
My friend’s nephew is dead. It is a goddamned tragedy. Hearts have been broken, and some of them will never heal. This happens every day, all over this country… all over the world. And every time it happens, it is a tragedy. There’s no two ways around the awfulness of it all. But the worst thing of all is, this sh*t keeps happening, and we don’t seem to learn. We can’t seem to figure out how to stem the tide of this wretched self-destructiveness, and we can’t seem to figure out how to make our streets safe. Not just the nice streets in the nice neighborhoods, but all streets. In all neighborhoods.
I’m just one person looking on from something of a distance, but I am holding onto some hope. Maybe it’s easier for me to do it, because I’m not in the middle of my friend’s family’s pain. I’ve been in similar pain… and if nothing else, I cannot lose hold of hope.
I can only pray that maybe someday we’ll figure out ways to approach our social limitations with common sense and compassion, find the courage to reach out to ask for (and offer) much-needed help, and force ourselves to look at social ills not just as opportunities to capture and punish the anti-social dispossessed, but as gateways to greater understanding… Gateways that not only make it possible for us to understand, and sometimes forgive, but which force us to face up to the terrible things we have done… and change our ways.
Maybe I’m being overly optimistic. I’m sure on some level I am. But after all I’ve been through and survived, after having come through so much wretched difficulty in my own life, after having won so much and achieved so much despite my limitations, I’m convinced, there are such things as miracles.
Broken Brain - Brilliant Mind 