pessimistic math

i feel cold admitting that i feel like all the hoo-ha about the virgina shooting is overplayed. is it sad? sure. tragic? unquestionably. but one, what does your fucking sympathy do? not a damn thing, not sympathy from afar. not you parading your little VT t-shirt around campus here in Kansas. it doesn’t change what happened. it just makes you feel better, makes you feel like you’re a part of something important and meaningful.

sympathy when you’re hugging and crying with someone you know is different. but sympathy from ten states away? you know what? people kill fucking kill each other. all the time. all the time. if it’s not VT, then it’s columbine, if it’s not columbine, it’s 9/11, if it’s not 9/11, it’s our war on terrorism, if it’s not our war, it’s one of the dozens of others going on right now.

as much as i loathed my western civ class at the time, it brought up the interesting idea of human universals, patterns that are repeated over and over in every culture in every time period. i think the major two are religion and fighting. humans seem incapable of living without either and sometimes they intertwine very tightly. i understand religion, that people need to feel there is something that makes life bearable and worthwhile. and maybe all the fighting is the reason we need religion. because we treat each other like crap. if you think about it, every major civilization and time period in human history could be easily defined by its wars.

i really do not understand it. where does all the hate come from? is it an inescapable part of our nature? is it an escapable part of our nature but we’re too weak? why do we do this to each other over and over and over again? if we’re not fighting over religion, then it’s race or politics or oil or women or maybe even ketchup. the constant factor is not that things keep appearing that are worthy of fighting for. it’s that we keep finding them, no matter what.

i guess my point about VT is that after a while, all the killings blur together. it’s just one instance of millions of us hurting each other without explanation so why is this one any special or different? i guess i feel like it’s never going to stop either; in two more years, it will just be something else.

it makes me sad and i wish i could understand it but i really can’t because violence is not part of my nature. i have plenty of flawed tactics that i use, but violence is not anything i resort to to solve things for me and it’s so preposteriously illogical to me to even consider that it could fix anything or be anything less than 100% wrong in 99% of cases. i guess maybe each one of us is good at convincing ourselves that our case is that 1% case that is justified. 

anyway, my second point is that i am beginning to really believe that hate and violence are part of being human and it makes it hard to be optimistic at all.

i tried to be a nerd and put this into a math equation but calculus has left me temporarily. basically, as violence approaches infinity, faith in humanity approaches zero.