How is it that the Dow, NASDAQ, and New York Stock Exchange finish the week on an upswing after the monumental tragedy in Las Vegas less than a week ago? Hell, how are they still open? And how, in God's name, does our CBS television affiliate find it appropriate to run an advertisement for a local shooting range, right after a sobering memorial piece on Sunday Morning? Seriously. Now, I don't expect the economy to come grinding to a halt after any devastating event, but I think it should. Business as usual is supposed to offer some kind of comfort to us when our faith is shaken, but in reality it only comes off as disrespectful.
Mass shootings themselves have become something of business as usual, the periodic output of a culture and society that suffers from sicknesses we refuse to address in any meaningful sense. We have an economy increasingly based on suffering, death, and fear of both. As long as there is profit to be made from prescribing drugs, guns, and other products in response to personal and social cataclysm, that is what we will continue to do, business as usual. We'll see more ads for Zoloft and lawyers and life insurance and yes, firearms. "Have you been injured in a mass shooting? If so, call (insert your local law partners here)."
That is the basic problem, of course. We insist that the economy (business if you will) and the government, cure our ills. Legislation and products and services are how we handle everything else, so why won't they work in these cases of catastrophic violence? I would argue it is because commerce really is not solving anything. It is creating and perpetuating economic inequality, raising personal and collective stress into the stratosphere, and dividing our society in every conceivable way in the interest of promoting exclusivity, luxury, and lifestyles we are supposed to aspire to but that in reality are devoid of anything spiritually and emotionally fulfilling. Business as usual is the business of making you feel inferior while making empty promises that you can run with the rich and famous if you only invest your money in "this."
Meanwhile, our government will conduct business as usual, too, because the business of government continues to be insuring not the welfare of our citizenry, but the "wealthfare" of corporations and industry. The deathcare industry certainly gets a boost with every terroristic act, and then gun sales soar because we are conditioned to believe that if we are armed, then we won't be a victim the next time. Wow, we really didn't learn a thing from the kindergarten playground, did we?
The new bully on the block is still the old one: the gun lobbyist, the oil and gas tycoon, the climate change denialist, the bully-pulpit President, the pharmaceutical industry that profits from our misery, and on and on and on. We don't get the results we want, the results we need, as long as we let them all run rampant. We can no longer elect people to office who are not like us. We need to elect our neighbors, our literal neighbors next door, and the coworkers we admire who demonstrate leadership with compassion, respect, cooperation and compromise. People who are not so far removed from our circumstance that they can afford to ignore us.
The cure for stopping massacres like this is....us. No one else is going to do it for us. Remember Smokey the Bear's slogan? "Only you can prevent forest fires." It still rings true, and it applies to more than just those wildland conflagrations. It means fires in every other sense, too.
The fire next time....could be worse if we don't manage the forest of humanity with the proper compassion and care it needs and deserves. Products don't work. Hugs, handshakes, generosity both financial and social, and participation in your community. Those are things that work, we just need to do them more often. Tweet the positive, the non-product ideas. Post the pictures of your community garden. Let your neighbor know you care. Let us not all be where we are now, with this overriding sense of being misplaced, dropped in a selfish, fearful, and wealth-obsessed society, determined to be relentlessly marching on, Business. As. Usual.
Ramsden on Calhoun? Moral decay could arise “not from density, but from excessive social interaction,” Ramsden says. “Not all of Calhoun’s rats had gone berserk. Those who managed to control space led relatively normal lives.”
ReplyDeletehttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-mouse-utopias-1960s-led-grim-predictions-humans-180954423/
We seem to have an overpopulation, as well as an excessive social interaction (through social media) problem. Perhaps they are both right.
Business as usual. As the population grows, so does the number of social deviants and more incidents like this one occur. The desire to become famous is encouraged by the media's response to each incident, and gives inducement for the next sick individual.
I concur with your comment....to a degree. No question we have too many people on the planet. I don't think excessive social interaction is the problem, but the *kinds* of social interactions are often non-productive if not outright negative. "Swipe left" and "swipe right" comes to mind. Superficiality is the order of the day.
Delete