The UCSB shooting exposes a couple of important issues but unfortunately most of them will be buried under the hot button topic of gun control. However what really stands out is how lonely a lot of people are in our society. We often go to a college intentionally far from our families because we have been ingrained with a narrative that says that we cannot find our identity in the presence of our family. We push our parents into nursing homes, visit begrudgingly, and infrequently. As a caregiver I have borne witness to sons and daughters waiting impatiently to collect an inheritance, often treating their mothers and fathers as little more than obstacles between them and a paycheck. We get married and think of our spouses as glorified girlfriends/boyfriends but not as indispensable and irreplaceable family members. Divorce is a common reality for children this forces them to see only one parent at a time thus creating a perpetual void as one parent is always missing. Our sense of community is laughable. Many of us don’t even know the people that inhabit our own neighborhoods. The growing culture of American Individualism leaves many people feeling desperately lonely. This is of course a boon for the economy as we attempt to fill that void with consumption. Most marketing relies on subtle messages to tell you that you are incomplete or less than without the given product. Indeed we are incomplete but it has nothing to do with the cars we drive or the clothes we wear. Not only was the incident at UCSB a tragedy but the entire state of our nation is tragic. No man is an island and until we grow closer to each other we will continue to perpetuate a culture in which we are all paradoxically both connected through technology and hopelessly disconnected in every other sense. The fact that the shooter was of affluent lineage just goes to show that there is no monetary cure for the loneliness that plagues us. We can restrict guns all we want but as this case shows knives, cars, and other mechanisms that maim or kill will always be readily available. The answer lay not in gun control but in the control of violence through friendship, family, and community.
Posted on: Sun, 25 May 2014 16:31:42 +0000
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