Tragedy makes no sense

One way we make sense of senseless tragedies is to frame them into political debates.

My Facebook feed seems to be split between two perspectives on the Santa Barbara shooter's misogyny. One is that his violence was fed into by sexist online cultures and attitudes that turn women into commodities. Another perspective is that the guy was, plain and simple, severely mentally ill, and misogyny has nothing to do with it.

It's easy for me to turn the conversation about the Santa Barbara shooter into a conversation about masculinity and misogyny, because those are topics that I want to talk about, anyway. I'll check my privilege and admit that I have no idea what it's like to be a woman who has to deal with our society's conflicting expectations. But when I studied feminism, I was captivated because we went even further beyond gender into unpacking all of the inequalities and false assumptions that underly society – including capitalism and militarism. My role models for “manly men who recognize how screwed up gender roles are” include people like George Carlin and Louis CK, who also take that leap into recognizing how screwed up everything is.

Do we need to talk about misogyny and online cultures that turn women into objects? Absolutely. Would this guy have found something else to drive his rampage even if he hadn't bought into those sexist attitudes? Probably.

When something terrible happens, we struggle to make sense of it. Can we really make sense? I was just reading Roger Ebert's review of Elephant, a movie about a school shooting, and he praises the movie because it doesn't give us any easy answers. It just presents, without comment, the lives of the people affected by the tragedy.

One way we make sense of the ambiguity is to make political points about it, putting the unexplainable and horrible into a less unsettling box, with ideas we already know how to talk about.

Look no further than the gun control debate. I don't even need to ask to know that there are two different perspectives emerging from this tragedy. On the gun control side, people are lamenting that he had access to guns, and calling for stricter regulation – then this wouldn't have happened. On the pro-gun side, people are imagining what would've happened if one of the victims had a concealed carry and was a good shot – then this wouldn't have happened.

We want to make sense, and we have things we already want to talk about. But when faced with something so horrible, no matter how we slice it, we are trying to make sense of something terrible that defies sense.