Tinsel Town
I was in North Carolina when the news broke on the music festival shooting in Las Vegas. I happened to check my phone news-feed late in the evening, and there it was. The text displayed a estimated number of casualties at the time. I clicked on the video/audio clip associated with the story. Immediately I recognized the metallic, cyclic slamming of the bolt against the receiver of the firing weapon. Before I could think, that sound —-a weapon firing on full auto, a pure sound of death. More is now known about the massacre of the individuals attending the concert, and about the shooter. Aside from the collection of weapons at hand in his room, signs of his premeditation to die and take a maximum number of others with him–apparently nothing out of the ordinary has been found in his background. That fact ought to trouble us. There does not seem to be anything obvious and shocking that separates the shooter firing from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay and the man-on-the-street enjoying the outdoor concert. Something snapped for Stephen Paddock. He was not unlike you and I.
We are living in the greatest revolution in history–a huge spontaneous upheaval of the entire human race: not the revolution planned and carried out by any particular party, race, or nation, but a deep elemental boiling over of all the inner contradictions that have ever been in man, a revelation of the chaotic forces inside everybody. This is not something we have chosen, nor is it something we are free to avoid.
This revolution is a profound spiritual crisis of the whole world, manifested largely in desperation, cynicism, violence, conflict, self-contradiction, ambivalence, fear and hope, doubt and belief, creation and destructiveness, progress and regression, obsessive attachments to images, idols, slogans, programs that only dull the general anguish for a moment until it burst out everywhere in a still more acute and terrifying form. We do not know if we are building a fabulously wonderful world or destroying all that we have ever had, all that we have achieved!
….Man is ready to become a god, and instead he appears at times to be a zombie. And so we fear to recognize our kairos and accept it.
–excerpt from Conjectures Of A Guilty Bystander by Thomas Merton
