Another lost soul, plotting his own demise through the destruction of innocent lives. Tragic, sad, disgusting, impossible. How can a human enter a crowded room of strangers and open fire? What rage, what insanity allows for a disconnect of such epic proportion?
The onset of the industrial revolution in America brought people into cities, crowding them together in neighborhoods at first, and then dispersing them into the anonymity of suburbs and faceless apartment complexes. That was almost two hundred years ago. Today, Americans don't know their neighbors. In too many instances, they're not interested in knowing their neighbors. They have replaced family, friends and neighborhood with TV's, Internet, and personal devices. They are "social" with no human interaction. Isolation and mechanization create bubble universes where loners live with their unfiltered and untested notions. These crazy people go undetected because nobody bothers to look them in the eye, greet them as humans or question their behavior.
Eventually these sick individuals become totally isolated in their selfie world. Invisible and imagining themselves as heroes in a fantasy of their own design, they lose touch with everything warm, loving or human and become hateful monsters.
It won't help to build more walls. We've already built walls. It won't help to try to isolate people because of their ethnicity or religion or sexual orientation. We have more than enough isolation.
Wake up world. It's time to slow the train and insist that everyone get on and off in an orderly manner with an appropriate greeting and acknowledgement at every station. It's time to make eye contact, to speak, to listen and to care. It's time to start talking, not just to friends and loved ones, but to strangers, not through text and tweet, but face to face, person to person. It's time to begin caring for one another again. The human race is under siege. The enemy is among us. Humans don't randomly shoot strangers. Crazies kill other people and themselves. It's time to find the crazies before they go too far. It's time to knock on every nearby door and make eye contact with every stranger in our midst until we learn to know and understand them. Wake up world, before we all say good night.
