Monday, April 16, 2007

Time to answer the questions

It's been long since I first started writing all these things. Now while I watch at the news showing the terrible events that took part at the tech University of Virginia, I have realised that the experiment that took place in the nineteen fifties seems to acknowledge that every man or woman could be considered a killer if she/he was told it was her/his job to do it. The result of that experience has an enormous importance to me until nowadays because it helped me realise that one has to question things and do not take anything for granted. Taking the case of this 'guy' who just began shooting at people as he was in some videogame sort of thing, I can imagine that he had convinced himself that he was an outlaw, a man who got no place in society, and who resentful unleashed all his fury in many people in this university. That would be perhaps the 'cliche' explanation as it is impossible to know why that person did it. Perhaps he was depressed, he had split personalities, he was 'Falling Down' as Michael Douglas did or even he could have just been a man who wanted to test himself simulating a combat situation to see what he was really capable of doing by killing a couple of people he did not like--or even he could have done it because he was curious at how it felt to kill someone (Seeing the number of casualties, he probably have liked it, who knows); he could have even felt more alive by administering death to others as if he were incarnating the reaper in order to feel more powerful. It could even be possible that some of the people could have been killed by the policemen by accident in an attempt of taking down the shooter. Anyways, the reason remains uncertain and will probably remain uncertain forever regardless of the explanations others want to believe. Although I do believe, I 'want' to believe there is a reason as everybody does, perhaps there is an explanation behind that we are unable to understand and that no matter how much psychology, psychiatry has evolved it would be almost impossible for them to answer 100 per cent sure.

Even though I am aware that what I'm about to say is far from being an appropriate association, this idea has been disturbing me lately and I thought it was now necessary to share it with anyone who reads this blog--quite a few people--. The case of Virginia Tech raises a series of questions in me that I think many should have to start asking themselves since I only mentioned the cases I imagined. An abundant of explanations could arise from this terrible incident, but logically most of them will be discarded leaving only a few as possible answers, thus creating an imaginary 'real' way of how things happened. It is at this point that I begin questioning myself, did that really happen in that way? and if it did, why? I have seen that many of us tend to imagine and draw our own conclusions to create a certain picture of what happened, yet sometimes we may either misunderstand or incorrectly assume much of the information. Yet, in these cases, the survivors' testimonies are by far the most credible ones, so most of us will create that picture taking their versions.

However, I do not like to assume absolutely everything as taking things for granted has been proved to be a mistake as History as shown us. As I have been told, the only things that I have to take for granted is that some day we will all die because of the philosophy that everything that has a beginning has an end. Well, it happens to me that even though I am sure some day I will die, I am not quite sure whether everything must have a beginning or an ending. I know that it may sound ridiculous to many as human reason, most human thought bases its knowledge on this idea that everything has to be born and then die. Regardless of whether there is life after death and all that, I believe that no matter how much we evolve, neither science nor technology, and especially not religion is going to give an answer to all of our questions. As the philospher Karl Popper mentioned, there is no scientific theory that can explain every aspect of the universe. Nothing is absolutely certain in the Universe, so trying to determine the origins of our specie with an accurate source or trying to establish the Universe's age by assuming it had to be generated somewhere will only lead us into another confusion. Even if we do get answers according to some theory, that theory could be proven wrong in a few years later just as history has shown with Copernicus (and many others) theories are discarded one after the other. At the same time,
Please do not get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that assuming things is wrong, the fact that I do not like it is a different thing. my point is that as it is an unconscious process that we apparently are not aware in which, in some occassions, may lead us to something that turns out to be half or very close to what we have imagined. In that sense, all I'm saying is that we have to be a little more reflective of what things are we taking for granted. I know using the Virginia Tech case could mislead many to think that I'm encouraging people to have a gun to protect themselves in case somebody like Sho appears. No, that is not my purpose, security is something that we should assume, but which unfortunately, due to the media's encouragement of fear, people have assumed. Things like security of living safely in your own country should be taken for granted, making allowance for a very very little probability that something like this could happen. However, something that one should question--and I hope us citizens do not hate me for this--is why a shooting like this is given so much mediatic exposure in the US when in a different country, many more were killed in a similar way. It is a cultural matter in my opinion, but who knows?...What do you think?

1 comment:

Tales from Afar said...

I liked the names of the guys, nevertheless, it felt asi if it were a B side of Harry Fuckin' Potter. Good story though, you should continue it and make it be far from HFP