The Wrong System

The Orlando shooting has me thinking. Honestly, not as much as other mass shootings have - for the reason that in the process of avoiding grieving the loss of my brother I have become much more adept at being ignorant to tragedy. This doesn't mean that I am not grieving, either this shooting or my brother, as I might make it sound, only that I have an overactive streak of ignorance in this way, more active than I think is healthy anyway

But this streak aside, I have this to say: There are two competing processes here: Process 1 - where people en masse debate blame, and Process 2 - an internal process of grief, by which tragedy is reconciled with the beauty of life. Grieve - that is the proper process.

Process 2
Like I said, I have a streak of ignorance that stunts my progress in this department, but I'm trying. I'm learning to invite in tragedy, and I'm also learning to appreciate the beauty of life, and not have it completely dashed by tragedies like this. I'm inexperienced.
Still, it is this process of grief that seems to be the most sane to me. It emerges from priorities like compassion, understanding of an ambiguous situation, and courage. The products of this process are the voices of individuals, called by compassion. These messages are the kind I feel comfortable allowing to guide change. I trust our collective grief as knowledgeable, appropriate, action-worthy, honest.
If we lost our ability to process tragedy in this way, we would never act, The screams of victims would fall on the ears of busy debaters. We would never feel the need to act, because it would cease to become tragedy but instead a rational consequence of our larger system.

Process 1

When you hear about such a tragedy, you can turn to social media, you can turn to the news. The solution is presented as obvious, but somehow obstructed. You are processing the tragedy. It is a frustratingly simple solution, and you know exactly what to do, but are prevented from doing it. You trust the messages of a news station, a politician, a public advocate. The actions surrounding the event are easily placed in categories of right and wrong, and you can pick the right ones.

This is a process that is maintained by incentives of drawing attention, and maintaining power. The priorities of those involved are assigning blame, coming to quick & definite conclusions, minimizing vulnerability. 

This system does not care about your individual voice and reactions, and in fact it benefits from suppressing your individual voice in favor of a voice that you can follow. This system does not benefit from definitive societal change, but rather it benefits from tragedy because that is what draws attention. This system resists compassion because compassion is vulnerable, subject to attack, and does not stake a debatable claim.

We cannot continue to pretend that there are perfectly rational ways of understanding situations like this. I won't say not to use news and social media as sources of information, but I will say that we have the ability to pick between two ways of processing tragedy. I think real change would come if we listened to the voices of grief, and not of debate.

Here are some of the voices of grief that I have been listening to:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toap7iPpTbs 

http://www.thoughtsandprayersthegame.com/

If you read this, let me know what you think.