Tag: inactivity

The Dad & I Dream

Don’t know my age when it started. Seemed like I was a young adult.

Dad and I were sharing a smallish but modern apartment. A winter storm howled outside, snow pummeling the world in unending shovelfuls. A general sense of disturbing chaos reigned.

I had a few cats. I was trying to feed them but they were running around, attacking each other, hiding. In the midst of this, in the living room by the stereo, I discovered a large window was broken. I stopped to check on it, inspecting it, confirming, because it was hard to tell, yes, a panel is gone. You’d think that’d be easy to see with snow falling, cold weather, a murdering wind, but it required earnest consideration of it for me to figure it out in the dream.

Yes, the window was broken. Several panes were missing or shattered, laying in pieces in a growing snowdrift. The cats tried to get out. As I lunged to pull them back, they retreated on their own, discouraged by the storm. Confusion seemed to paralyze me.

Dad came in, talking about a need to go somewhere, to get food, I think. Impatiently, he told me to hurry up. I was grabbing a cat, checking on the cats, looking at the broken windows. Concern over the stereo getting ruined rose up, so I moved components. Dad shouted at me to come on. I locked the cats in another room and followed Dad out. As we went, I was telling him, “Dad, there’s something you should know, there’s a window broken in the living room.”

It felt like it took some repetition of telling him this before what I was saying sank in. Then, he responded in alarm, “You should have told me this before.”

Next thing I knew, we were going back home because he was worried, and I was defensively trying to tell him that I’d been checking out the window, and I tried telling him but he wasn’t listening.

Then we were in the living room. The heater was running, hot air coming out of vents but snow dusted the floor and crusted the sofa, table, and chairs. Many things were turned over. Things were missing. The stereo and television were gone. We realized people had broken in; we realized, looking out the window, it was teenagers. They were running away with our stuff.

Dad said with bitter disappointment, “You didn’t do anything. You knew this had happened, and you didn’t do anything. Why didn’t you do anything?”

I was an adult now, and shocked. He was right; why didn’t I do something? Why didn’t I take action? I could have called someone to repair the window, or put up boards. I could have done something, but I didn’t.

Dream end.

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Not Unimaginable

‘UNIMAGINABLE’

The newspaper headline is about the Orlando mass murder in a night club. Fifty people are dead, killed by one person with an automatic weapon designed and manufactured to kill people in mass. It’s disgusting that they print that this is ‘unimaginable’.  The proper headline is ‘INEVITABLE’. 

Inhabitants of most of the modern world expected another mass murder record in the United States, another high count of victims gunned down by someone out to make a statement, someone who believes violence is the answer. If you carry that logic further, then you might think, more violence is a better answer. That’s apparently the NRA’s solution. More guns and more violence, and we’ll all be better.

It’s bullshit, but it’s not unimaginable. It was a matter of time. As racing cars go faster, as the wealthiest become wealthier, so will there be more and larger mass killings with automatic weapons in the United States. Why not? What policies have changed that would circumvent new bloody records from being set?

I’m a fiction writer. I can imagine killing and being a mass killer without actually being a killer, but just by being a cold, hard thinker. Learn from what other mass killers have done. Study the lessons learned. Decide on your course of action and put regrets aside. Segregate and compartmentalize your emotions. Rationalize your decision. Deal with the ramifications that you are going to kill and you will probably die. Pick your location, select your weapons, load up, block doors if you can, and go in and indiscriminately kill.

The headlines should be ‘SICKENING’. ‘DISGUSTING’. ‘REVOLTING’. ‘HEARTBREAKING’.

But never unimaginable, because, without making changes — and America is loathe to make changes about gun laws and automatic weapons, because there’s too much fear and profit in them, too much fraudulent machismo, too much shallow bravado and thin patriotism — more headlines  about mass killings will be published.

Unimaginable? No, the bar has been raised, 50 dead at this count, more critically wounded. Unimaginable? No, this will be another event that we’ll look back upon when the count goes higher again, another glance back to mourn the dead and increasing violence, all without doing a damn thing.

That’s what’s really ‘UNIMAGINABLE’.

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