World Gone Mad.

I am normally only motivated to write at any length when something happens that sparks in me some degree of passion, revulsion or plain old knee-jerk anger. In this instance it is a blend of all of those things, with a liberal dose of confusion and sadness on top of the list of usual blog ingredients.
I read, with a mix of horror and fascination, about the recent shootings in Cumbria on June 2nd where 12 people lost their lives, and a further 11 were injured. This grisly copy conjured up memories of several gun-related multiple killings here in the UK, most notable because we have little knowledge of guns in this country, and even less instances where guns are responsible for mass murder. To get hold of a gun in this country, you have to either be vetted as being someone super sensible and with a bloody good excuse for wanting one, or know “Mr X” from the underworld. Either way, the chances of encountering anyone in possession of a gun in the UK - although rising - is still very, very slight. This is why whenever something happens in which many people lose their lives to a gun, it is at once seen as utterly horrific and extremely unusual.

The 1987 Hungerford shootings, carried out by the deranged Michael Ryan who shot and killed 16 people - including his own mother - and injured another 15.
In 1996, scout leader Thomas Hamilton showed us the very meaning of the words “Cruel” and “Unfathomable” when he walked into a school in Dunblane, Scotland and casually shot dead 16 children, and their 45 year old teacher. These innocent little victims, without a hope of self-defence, were aged between 5 and 6 years old!
These senseless shootings, inevitably labelled a “Spree” - with the flippancy of describing a day of heavy shopping - have several things in common, some of which I will attempt to make some sense of here. Now, this being a very sensitive subject to cover and being very aware that we are dealing with real people, real emotions and the all too real shock wave that follows the loss of any family member, even in what we would deem “normal” circumstances, I wrestled briefly with writing out of character, but quickly dismissed that idea in favour of my usual modus-operandi of plain speak. Why else would I even bother to write about it, if I can’t speak my mind?

I can easily understand the desire for revenge, we all can. We’ve all had times when we’ve wanted to cause someone who went out of their way to make us unhappy, some very real harm. Most of the people who read this will fully understand the feeling of wanting to get even with someone, that all consuming urge for action, that animal instinct that wells up inside of us, making our breathing laboured and face a contorted mask as we imagine what we’d like to do, before we consider ourselves compensated for being robbed, made a fool of, cheated on, or one of a million other crimes against us, real or imagined. Of course, in most people these feelings diminish with time, often dissipating into a cloud of realisation that A: it would have been foolish to act on it, B: you wouldn’t have done it anyway, and C: it isn’t worth it. Who needs it? With this, we usually just either allow a grudge to simmer quietly over the years, secretly hoping circumstance or fate provides the fare for the ferryman to deliver them to the far bank of the afterlife, or (rarely I suspect) we simply put it down to life experience, then forgive and forget.
Either way, it is uncommon for anyone to act on revenge, to the degree where it actually involves the murder of someone, who’s crime probably amounted to no more than greed, stupidity, or - as in the case of your partner’s infidelity - a cruelly synchronised collision of opportunity and hormones. Crimes yes, worth killing over, no! So, we can all perfectly understand the human response of revenge. This is why many of these killings in America involve former work colleagues, employers and topping the list, former spouses. We wouldn’t be functioning correctly if we didn’t feel anger at an unfair decision at work, colleagues that hit the same nerve too many times, or former partners that have decided to trade us in for a newer model. When several of these come together in a short space of time, or are linked in some way, that anger will multiply in relation to the number of grievances we have suffered.

As I have already said, we wouldn’t be firing on all cylinders if life didn’t sometimes inspire in us, feelings that are normally kept on the shelf in the back of our minds labelled “Emergency Only!” The fact that most of the time we either don’t act on it, or only take it as far as telling friends how much we hate so and so, means we are perfectly normal. When you make a conscious decision to actually act out all of these grisly, and hitherto only imagined acts, the things our darker selves usually only touch base with on occasion of extreme duress, is when the discomfort of ridicule becomes an itch that can only be scratched by the use of deadly force. There is usually an unsuspecting witness who later reports a strange glazed expression in the killers eyes, or a look of determination they haven’t noticed in that person before. Some have reported an almost otherworldly look about the killer, as if they aren’t really there at all. In a sense, by then they probably aren’t. Despite what we see in movies - and this will feature prominently, later in this blog - to actually go out and kill someone, much less a five year-old child, is something well outside the conscious capability of modern humans.
The depiction of someone casually squeezing a trigger, and then calmly  blowing the smoke from the barrel following the shooting, is something you could only get in a movie. This act, in reality, would provoke extreme trauma in the rational mind, not least by the very sight of the damage a bullet can do to human flesh, followed closely by the realization that we have done something we thought ourselves incapable of. So, the calm and casual shooting is not something that exists outside of a movie or inside a rational brain.

In modern society the only ones of us who would be in a position where there is a high degree of possibility that we will have to kill someone, are our armed forces. Even then they aren’t in combat all of the time, and when they are in actual combat much of it is spent a good distance from our enemy - well in range of a bullet certainly, but not exactly eye to eye. I have a great interest in history, especially Roman history, where to be involved in warfare meant standing behind a wooden shield, with someone doing their very best to make a hole in you with a piece of sharpened steel. What must the typical legionnaire have felt like, having to kill at very close quarters, over and over again in the same day? After a night in a fortified camp, the chances are you’d have to do it all again that day, with the blood that has congealed between your toes and is soaked into your armour, barely dry. Some of the sights they would have seen in the course of a normal 25-year military career - if they lived that long, as many died on their first campaign - would make the average modern mad a very mixed up individual indeed.

The fact that most soldiers of all races were all technically serial killers for a living - and killing that was hard work too - and the fact that Gallic warriors routinely walked around carrying the severed heads of vanquished foes, would seem to us modern folk, an utterly barbaric and horrific way of life, yet to them it was the way it was, with dead  enemies seen simply as corpses to be looted and stripped of arms and personal belongings, rather than a reason to feel bad about what they’d done. I often wonder if they saw a severed finger, lost in a carpentry accident to a saw for example, as a reason to laugh heartily, before tossing it into the pot to add flavour to the rabbit stew. We’d run around screaming, before falling into a dead faint and requiring a sterile environment in which to have micro-surgery and months of physiotherapy. I even read how one decorated soldier cut off both the thumbs of his children to exclude them from military service * so to answer the question we all know the answer to, yes, life was brutal back then, but it was what people were accustomed to. 
The fact that we have left beheading's, dismemberment and quartering in public, many centuries behind us, has seen us become increasingly less tolerant of violence in general, and to see the murder of a child especially, as the ultimate crime against humanity and the very soul itself. In Greco-Roman times, children were routinely executed along with the parents of anyone suspected of treason. The Roman dictator, Sulla, a forerunner of Julius Caesar in terms of seizing power from the Senate, had entire families killed, as well as reintroducing the - by then abandoned - punishment of “Decimation” when a legion lost a military engagement. Those days are long gone and all of this reads more like some weird horror movie script from this distance in time, rather than the historical manuscripts I have actually quoted from. +

So, even us modern folk know all about revenge, why we feel the need for it and the fact that most of the time we have no intention of acting on it. We know revenge is not a new thing, nor is killing in its name anything new, it is simply quite rare these days. We do know that we would be able to pull that trigger if our family were in extreme danger, and we faced the choice between our family surviving, and the intruder in our home, whom we have somehow managed to wrestle the gun from. In this instance we most probably would be able to do it, but I doubt we’d do it with a casual air, and we surely wouldn’t be blowing down the barrel of the gun afterwards. We even have a term for surviving an ordeal like this, and killing someone into the bargain - we call it “Justifiable Homicide”. What no one could ever justify, is the killing of a child.
There is a whole universe of difference between acting to protect a child and killing one. As animals, we are social creatures that prefer to live in groups, and within those groups we look out for each other - especially our young - as it is part of our genetic coding to respond to danger by going into either combat or flight mode, and in both these instances we would enter combat mode to protect offspring, or carry them off to safety as we flee from some danger we feel we could not overcome. How many times have you read of some stranger going into a burning building to save a child, or someone risking their own life to run across the road and push a kiddie out of the way of an approaching car? Lots of times you say? Rightly so too. We have an instinct to protect.

Sometimes, in certain circumstances, these instincts don’t work as well as we’d like to, as in countries where poverty means many kiddie's live with barely enough to eat and the children suffer as a result. Normally the parents are very upset and more than aware they are failing their children, but are unable to act upon it with any degree of success. In other cases, closer to home, this instinct is missing altogether, replaced by pure self-interest, as we saw in the recent case of Bay P - as he was known - the child who’s mother stood by as he was systematically beaten to death over a period of time. Before that, the Victoria Climbie case, which was similar in nature, and in the fact that the instinct to protect had broken down. In both cases a male partner - who wasn’t the biological father - was the main offender, but the mother was equally guilty for standing by while their child was killed. Why did they not act to save their child? Selfish reasons. The boyfriend would probably leave to look for someone else younger and weaker to torture, if the mother interfered, so they put up with the treatment - even joining in - in order to maintain the relationship (for what it would be worth to any sane person) the fear of them going without love being greater than the fear of their child being deprived of love, or for that matter any semblance of human decency.

This is the part I find so hard to digest. Where I can easily grasp the concept of revenge against another adult, equally as capable of self-defence as the attacking party, and can even understand how someone could actually carry it to the nth degree, I simply cannot imagine any circumstance where I would willingly harm - or allow to be harmed - a child. Most of us, given an ultimatum, would lay down our lives for our children without a second thought. In the case of Baby P, his mother would sooner be continually abused by a monster - and let’s be frank here, it’s hard to imagine the guy who did that to the poor boy, being the kind of lights-out, once a week on a Saturday night, kind of lover - which makes cases like this trigger within me the “Let’s tick the box marked bring back hanging” side of my personality which I reserve especially for creatures like her. Enough said.

So, some women will be so selfish as to allow a partner to abuse their kids, some will be so utterly me, me, me, as to go on holiday and leave a defenceless child alone - remember the “Home Alone” case? - and even more will turn a blind eye to a less extreme form of abuse that involves activity short of causing physical death, but does a good job of ensuring the death of their own sense of right and wrong, where they grow up harbouring a deep resentment and a violent allergic reaction any sentence with the words “Step-parent” in it.
Some grow up to be very disturbed individuals, who in turn inflict the same on their kids and you have the makings of a grisly self-perpetuating cycle.
As we move increasingly into an era where all kinds of corporal punishment is seen in the same light as murder would have been a hundred years ago, we are going to increasingly look for reasons when we encounter such horrific acts as the shootings, the child abusing and murders. I see they are trotting out the old “Violent movies” chestnut over this latest mass murder. If violent movies really caused outbursts like this, we’d all be walking round in hockey masks and boiler suits, brandishing 14-inch butchers knives and turning around as if we have our entire upper-body in a surgical brace.
I don’t doubt for a moment that movies can make some people act them out. How many kids walked around in Ninja Turtle costumes following the movie success? When we saw Bruce Lee as kids, we spent the following week jumping everywhere, rather than walking and going “Hiiiii-Yaaa” as we King Fu’d our way around the Pick n’ Mix section of Woolworth's. It didn’t make us murderers. So, whenever I hear the “Blame violent movies” argument, and can hear Mary Whitehouse saying “Told you so!” from beyond the grave, I feel compelled to throw me shoes at the TV, when they wheel out these so-called experts to tell us all why this has happened.

I’m not going to detain you much longer good reader, and I do thank you for reading in the first place, but I will tell you exactly why this happens, in plain terms we call all digest as easily as rice paper panties. Some people repress emotional stresses that have built up, pressure cooker style, until the mounting pressure has nothing else it can logically do except escape in an explosion of action that usually involves either their own suicide - a more noble act than murder surely? - or the destruction of part of the society that they deem to be the reason they feel like they do. The logical choice of target is other people. The victims are of course, almost always blameless and nothing to do with the guy’s state of mind, they just happen to be in the wrong place, at the wrong time, whilst the perfect storm rages within the mind of the killer. The culmination of a chain of events that have led to this moment where he points and pulls the trigger. After that, even if he snaps out of it to some degree - which is unlikely - it is already too late. As these things almost always end in the gunman taking his own life, there is obviously some rational thought left, something that tells them the jig is up and it is time to pay for their actions. How much easier is it to point the gun at yourself, than it is to do the rest of your natural life in a psychiatric hospital?

In the case of the man who walked into the infants school and killed all of those innocent children, I have no real evaluation to make, as to be honest with you, I am so utterly disgusted at a man so cowardly as to take out his rage on 5 year old's. All I can conclude is this man was one of those rare species of depraved individual, with a history of being bullied at school maybe, and an adulthood unremarkable in its achievements. Many, many people of course, are living lives in which they feel they could have done more, or achieved more in life (one of them is writing this!) but thankfully most people just go for the “Make the best of what we have” option, rather than look for a child to take it out on. A monster who thoroughly deserves no mercy from whomever he meets in the afterlife. I wouldn’t normally look for a convenient cliché, but having wasted for too many words on this person (not even deserving of the title ‘man’) I just really do hope he burns in hell!

As for the mother’s who allow psychotic partners to enter their lives, and then stand by whilst they abuse their children - fuelled by cheap alcohol, a good sense of their own worthlessness - these people themselves are of very low self-esteem, the kind who think that any man, however evil, is better than no man at all. These women place their own pleasures, be it drink, drugs, or even a holiday abroad (leaving the kids at home alone) well above any sense of responsibility to their offspring, and often seeing them as nothing more than someone standing between them and a good social life. I know there are women out there who see their own kids as just in the way.
I actually witnessed with my own eyes a woman who met her daughter out of school, and when the little girl proudly presented mum with a picture she had painted, the mother tore it from her hands, before screwing it up and tossing it into the gutter, saying “We’ve got enough fucking crap in the house!” She was even so delusional as to look at me and roll her eyes, as if I’d understand her actions. She clearly didn’t see me biting my lip hard, and I later hated not having said something to make her feel bad. I doubt it would have helped and what made me feel even worse, was the fact that the little girl didn’t seem at all surprised, making it perfectly clear that this was routine, rather than a genuine case of not being able to get in the house for kiddie paintings.

Some women, like some men, are just plain bad people. It is no more mysterious than that. They may have had a tough childhood, and may well be carrying the baggage of those early years, but there is still no excuse for treating a child that badly, or for shooting people at random in the street. Many of us have had bad times, but the trick is to try and learn from our mistakes, improve upon the skills we have. We change what we can change about our lives, and have the good grace to accept the things we cannot change. That’s how life works. If you can’t do someone some good, why do them harm? If I hit my finger with a hammer I don’t go and look for someone else to hit with it. These people either by design, or by lifestyle, weakness and lack of backbone, cannot face their problems, so they look for someone to heap trouble of their own upon. These are lives deserters, rather than the kind who stand fast, shield in hand and face all that life throws at them. These are the people for whom I cannot muster sympathy, nor the energy needed to try and understand any weak excuse they may have for doing these evil deeds. These are the people who deserve no mercy, in this life, nor the next one.

** Audio books I am listening to. “The 12 Caesar's” by Suetonius.
+ The History of Rome. Brilliant Pod casts by Mike Dunn. Also available on:  http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/

I thoroughly recommend Mike’s work, even if you aren’t a huge history fan as they are read in a very entertaining way and are not at all heavy going.
Just type The History of Rome into google if you prefer. Its the type pad one.
My Roman camp video and my women’s cancer video are both on You Tube
http://www.youtube.com/user/SteveGad

Stephen Gately Article

Having just read the newspaper article everyone seems to be talking - and complaining - about, it strikes me that there is either some extreme naïveté afoot, or someone cares so little about the feelings of this young man’s family and friends, that they would press the button marked “Character Assassination” with the same flippancy they’d use to switch on the kettle.
Whilst this certainly is a hot topic, a kettle it is not.
I am, of course, referring to last week’s tragic death of Boyzone star Stephen Gately, found dead in his holiday home of apparent natural causes. The article in the Daily Rag allegedly infers that his downfall was brought about largely because of his lifestyle. It also infers that we shouldn’t be too surprised to wake up to the news of any famous person’s death - and bizarrely, even going as far as listing a few to look out for!

The only difference between the man in the street and someone who enjoys some degree of fame, is just that, the fact that they have become well known for whatever it is they have done, or are doing. These people don’t actually live inside the TV set, not do they (for the most part) live life at 300mph, in a sea of class-A drugs, whilst hanging from the ceiling in a rubber cat suit. It’s preposterous to the point of tedium to imagine these folk are any different from you and I, and yet  many people do. What’s more disturbing is the fact that this short-sighted and juvenile view, can not only be shared by a supposedly intelligent professional, but foisted onto the entire readership of the paper as being hard fact.
Even if this young man did live a hedonistic lifestyle, and get blind drunk every night, what business is it of ours? Even if he did enjoy relationships with several partners, then he is no different to millions of other young guys, gay and straight alike, it’s hardly a news story in itself.

What’s really got stuck in this particular journalist’s craw, is simply the fact that we know so little about what really happened to him that night. We’re so used to having an instant, blow by blow account of everything these days - including deaths - that to be denied the juicy gossip has caused a short circuit in the writer’s synapses, triggering the spiteful article hormone and causing the very same shock wave she was deprived of, by not having the nitty-gritty on this poor boys last breaths. She seemingly fails to grasp that this was a young man in the prime of his life, with a loving partner and family who’s lives have been thoroughly shattered by recent events. What his parent’s will think when they read this article is anyone’s guess, but I’m betting it won’t be very pleasant for them, to severely understate matters. The writer must have known that this story would be received with the revulsion it deserves, and surely knew that to make sweeping generalisations, based on every homophobic cliché that ever existed, would cause uproar?

 Maybe she did. Maybe she felt that not being told what she felt to be “The truth” about Stephen Gately’s death, deserved a new truth to be fabricated, so that like-minded folk had something to talk about over the weekend. It seems to be told nothing - when we are clearly owed nothing - about his death, was a slight that simply had to be avenged and this is absolute proof that the pen is not only mightier than the sword, it caused just as much damage when wielded by an insensitive and bitter individual, on a crusade to warn the artistic world of impending doom, should they not conform to the image she has in her mind, of what a celebrity should be.  With such a clear degree of prejudice, I shudder to think of how the article would have read, had Stephen also have been black!

It would be the most supreme instance of poetic justice, if in coming weeks, her closet was to burst open and hoards of skeletons come charging out, resplendent in S&M gear, furry pink handcuffs and carrying a large selection of forged expense sheets and hard drugs. I wouldn’t put any money on it, but as pride does indeed preclude a fall, I wouldn’t rule out someone having the ability to dig up at least a little dirt on this wretched woman.