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WISE.

June 24, 2013 by Exangel

by David D. Horowitz

 

“He seemed like a nice boy, although he kept to himself. But I didn’t think he’d do this…”

No, the assistant principal did not know the student planned to change his name from “William” to “Killiam,” nor that he’d bought two pistols and several rounds of ammunition at a gun show last month, nor that he’d assembled a workable home-made bomb by studying various Internet sites, nor that he harbored a terrible crush for a girl, a classmate in his trigonometry class, who ignored him once when he tried to initiate a conversation. He felt crushed and privately vowed revenge, as his notebooks and Facebook page cryptically indicate.

But to shoot the girl in class, killing her, then killing the teacher, another boy (to whom the girl had been visibly friendly), and then himself? One reads about horrors like this in the newspaper, one sees reports about it on the nightly news, but to be an assistant principal at a high school where it happens… “He seemed like a nice boy.”

And yet, who has not at some point wanted to kill another person? Who has not fantasized about an enemy dying? Who has not vowed retaliation over a petty, even an inadvertent, slight? “Wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them…” Hamlet’s profound rumination resonates with another: “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”

Humanity emerged from nature, and in nature killing is remorseless, although rarely focused on a particular individual for revenge. We nevertheless inherit a monster of violence in our hearts and hungers. And we must struggle to overcome its influence. Whether through meditation, prayer, love, friendship, discussion, or all of them, we must work to cultivate empathetic awareness. We must work to evolve our conscience to appreciate others’ suffering and maintain civility despite dislike. I seldom argue we “must”—but restraining violent impulses is for me a rare exception. Capitulate to random thoughts of violent revenge, and who would be alive in a year?

Another boy at the same time as the murder-suicide felt depressed because he could not find a summer job, his ex-girlfriend was openly dating a friend of his, and his father’s business was floundering financially, causing his father to drink heavily and indulge frequent tantrums. The boy visited his school counselor. He volunteered for a charity through a program at school. He visited the school librarian to learn how better to write a résumé and research online employment sites. He considered cities to which he would like to travel—Paris, London, Istanbul, Beijing—to help motivate himself to continue seeking remunerative employment. He did not buy a gun. He considered an act of violence once or twice, but immediately rejected the option. “Alas, poor Yorick…” The boy had recently studied Hamlet in his English class, and he’d lost a beloved uncle to cancer the year before. He knew grief. He hoped others never endured any more of it than resulted from naturally occurring death. Moreover, his life did not feel “weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable,” but full of promise, albeit difficult to realize. And now his school had been shattered by this violence. He had been casual friends with the murdered girl, and last year he had taken the math teacher’s trigonometry course. The student thought the killings terrible—but not “senseless.” He understood well enough the impulses that could impel a young man to kill—but one did not succumb. Wise people know we need not behave like monsters.

 

Filed Under: EAP: The Magazine, Summer 2013: Monsters.

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In This Issue.

  • Who Was Dorothy?
  • Those Evil Spirits.
  • The Screaming Baboon.
  • Her.
  • A Tale of Persistence.
  • A Conversation with Steve Hugh Westenra.
  • Person Number Twelve.
  • Dream Shapes.
  • Cannon Beach.
  • The Muse.
  • Spring.
  • The Greatness that was Greece.
  • 1966, NYC; nothing like it.
  • Sun Shower.
  • The Withering Weight of Being Perceived.
  • Broken Clock.
  • Confession.
  • Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse.
  • Sometimes you die, I mean that people do.
  • True (from “My Life with Dogs”).
  • Fragmentary musings on birds and bees.
  • 12 Baking Essentials to Always Have in Your Poetry.
  • Broad Street.
  • A Death in Alexandria.
  • My Forked Tongue.
  • Swan Lake.
  • Long Division.
  • Singing against the muses.
  • Aphorisms from “What Remains to Be Said”.

In The News.

That cult classic pirate/sci fi mash up GREENBEARD, by Richard James Bentley, is now a rollicking audiobook, available from Audible.com. Narrated and acted by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio, you’ll be overwhelmed by the riches and hilarity within.

“Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges is your typical seventeenth-century Cambridge-educated lawyer turned Caribbean pirate, as comfortable debating the virtues of William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, and compound interest as he is wielding a cutlass, needling archrival Henry Morgan, and parsing rum-soaked gossip for his next target. When a pepper monger’s loose tongue lets out a rumor about a fleet loaded with silver, the Captain sets sail only to find himself in a close encounter of a very different kind.

After escaping with his sanity barely intact and his beard transformed an alarming bright green, Greybagges rallies The Ark de Triomphe crew for a revenge-fueled, thrill-a-minute adventure to the ends of the earth and beyond.

This frolicsome tale of skullduggery, jiggery-pokery, and chicanery upon Ye High Seas is brimming with hilarious puns, masterful historical allusions, and nonstop literary hijinks. Including sly references to Thomas Pynchon, Treasure Island, 1940s cinema, and notable historical figures, this mélange of delights will captivate readers with its rollicking adventure, rich descriptions of food and fashion, and learned asides into scientific, philosophical, and colonial history.”

THE SUPERGIRLS is back, revised and updated!

supergirls-take-1

In The News.

Newport Public Library hosted a three part Zoom series on Visionary Fiction, led by Tod.  

And we love them for it, too.

The first discussion was a lively blast. You can watch it here. The second, Looking Back to Look Forward can be seen here.

The third was the best of all. Visions of the Future, with a cast of characters including poets, audiobook artists, historians, Starhawk, and Mary Shelley. Among others. Link is here.

In the News.

SNOTTY SAVES THE DAY is now an audiobook, narrated by Last Word Audio’s mellifluous Colby Elliott. It launched May 10th, but for a limited time, you can listen for free with an Audible trial membership. So what are you waiting for? Start listening to the wonders of how Arcadia was born from the worst section of the worst neighborhood in the worst empire of all the worlds since the universe began.

In The News.

If you love audio books, don’t miss the new release of REPORT TO MEGALOPOLIS, by Tod Davies, narrated by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio. The tortured Aspern Grayling tries to rise above the truth of his own story, fighting with reality every step of the way, and Colby’s voice is the perfect match for our modern day Dr. Frankenstein.

In The News.

Mike Madrid dishes on Miss Fury to the BBC . . .

Tod on the Importance of Visionary Fiction

Check out this video of “Beyond Utopia: The Importance of Fantasy,” Tod’s recent talk at the tenth World-Ecology Research Network Conference, June 2019, in San Francisco. She covers everything from Wind in the Willows to the work of Kim Stanley Robinson, with a look at The History of Arcadia along the way. As usual, she’s going on about how visionary fiction has an important place in the formation of a world we want and need to have.

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