~Originally posted on Blogstream.com on Friday March 13th 2009~
You always see the same line up, the same witnesses, they all share the same stories, the faces are always different, and the players live in different towns, but its the beginnings and endings that always seem to get you, right there in your gut, their stories always get you to thinking, wondering, damn, I knew somebody like that. Yeah, I knew somebody like that once. Normal guy, real neighborly, family man I heard, life just sort of rolls along and then one day without rhyme or reason, with a flick of a switch, a light goes on, and everything in his world changes. he wakes up, loads his pistol, and kills his whole family, walks out the front door and the neighbor lady waves to him never ever seeing what is in his hand, as he raises the weapon and fires on her without provocation, from there he goes on to take six more lives, six lives that never ever touched his own in any way, and yet they died, perhaps for no other reason than they were unfortunate enough to cross paths with this oddly out of sorts human being.
You see the faces on the six o’clock news, yeah, the story is always the same, nobody saw it coming, nobody ever does, he seemed so normal, don’t we all? They try to find the cause, the catalyst, it brings out the psychiatrists and psychics in droves, barking out their labels and theories of probable cause. Its TV, its video games, its rock music, or perhaps the person was merely a byproduct of a society that has lost touch with or simply abandoned its own humanity a long fucking time ago. A lot of guess work, a lot of finger pointing, buts its funny how the finger never seems to point at the right person, the one that pulled the trigger. Call it stress, call it mental fatigue, call it whatever you want to call it. Somewhere, somehow, something crept into this so called normal human beings fragile psyche, and began to tug at him, pull at him, in ways that no one ever seen, or few could ever hope to understand, until the day he finally snapped, taking nine lives before taking his own.
They say we’ve grown cold, distant to one another, daily our lives are exposed to more violence, more sex, more corruption and greed. The rich keep getting richer and the poor continue to sink lower into the depths of their own depravity and despair and are left to their own devices to feed off of each other. But here’s another truth for you, its short and simple, people are just unpredictable animals, sometimes they just get pissed off for no particular reason and just do bad things to each other. No rhyme, no reason, some people are just assholes, its just that some of them are better at hiding it than others. Meanwhile the debate continues, what caused him to go off like that? Did he lose his job? Was his wife cheating on him with another man? Was somebody bullying him? Or did he just blow a fuse? More questions than answers, definitive answers that could only be found on the lips of a dead man.
Meanwhile the experts talk it to death, analyze it, for weeks on end, on TV, on the internet, in the newspapers. To them its just another story, some conclude that society just done this guy wrong, others think that he was just another time bomb ticking away until someone set him off. The pressures of everyday life for some people can mind numbing at times, the pressures of the job, or the possibility of losing your home, maybe your spouse, maybe your children, maybe you’ll lose everything, some of us? We hold it together, somehow we make it through to the next day without incident, we have good days and bad days, but we always seem to work through it, without turning a gun on the rest of the world. Sooner or later the story eventually fades from the spotlight, until the next Columbine or Virginia Tech or the next big thing in Alabama, the next story, the next case, the next set of witnesses who never saw it coming. So what really does make people go crazy? Maybe we’ll never know the answer to that question,and given the fact that no two people are exactly the same, mentally or physically, it seems the only answer that we are likely to find is that there really isn’t just one.
~Scratch~
