ColinResponse

(trigger warning: mental health & violence)

You know what I noticed? Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that like, a gangbanger will get shot…or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics. Because it’s all “part of the plan.” …Upset the established order and everything becomes chaos.

-Heath Ledger as the Joker

This sh*t is so f*cking chilling because with what went down yesterday in Colorado, I wonder if the shooter was a Batman buff and also (as a Ph.D student in neuroscience) had taken this type of thinking into account. If so, this type of (psychopathic) thinking only induces/increases public fear, thus decreasing the chances of any type of critical democratic dialogue that could move us all towards authentic safety and security (not that the gunman was searching for such). We should also remember that after delving so deeply into this role, Heath Ledger killed himself. Isolation + a lack of legitimate suffering (too much comfort/privilege) seems to equal psychosis in hella cases.

A ton of my critically minded homies and mentors have constantly been pushing to put a spotlight on the ways suffering is taken with much more seriousness in middle-class white (heteronormative, Christian, etc.) communities, than it is elsewhere. This situation is no different and again we find a (deranged) white male being treated with more justice and human dignity than many of the poor and working-class young people (primarily of color) who die each year in America’s pockets of poverty, or in one of our two wars in the middle-east. Still tryna make sense of…or decide if its worth trying to make sense of, all of this…