The Triangle

The NIU gunman news is old news by now, but police are still looking for clues and everyone else is still wondering what prompted it all. Blame it on the meds or lack thereof; blame it on his godfather never coming to his mom’s funeral; blame it on his failed stint working at a prison compound; blame it on his girlfriend encouraging him through blithe acceptance of packages of guns, ammo, and books about the Antichrist and serial killers. Those things are enough to skew any normal, well-adjusted, convivial person’s view of life and its relative worth.

Maybe Kazmierczak quit the zombie-izing Prozac and let his mind become active again only to realize he couldn’t control it—and as we’ve all learned thanks to an intranet quiz this week, self-mind-control is the first and most important step to maintaining a good mood.

Maybe the childhood memories brought up by plans to reconnect with his godfather last weekend proved too traumatizing to handle—maybe he had never dealt with the reasons behind the growing relational distance between them, letting the sense of abandonment fester for 15 long years.

Maybe the abyss of prison life stared into him too long, and he started to stare back.

Maybe Steve’s girlfriend unwittingly supported his mental deterioration by not modeling positive spiritual habits or providing him with healthy psychological reinforcement—given their shared interests in criminal psychopathology, maybe she was just as likely to crack as he was, and he simply went first.

Maybe, as Jerry Davich writes, Kazmierczak was no more screwed up than you or I and snapped for no particular reason—maybe his actions are inexplicable and will always be, at least until another one of us snaps and mows down a bunch of Hanoverians, at which point he or she will finally be able to understand where Steve was coming from.

Woot for enlightenment—what better way to bring the reasoning, the facts behind this tragedy to light than by indulging our own destructive impulses, recreating this guy’s mental atmosphere in our own minds? Hanover’s all about investigating what doesn’t make sense to us; Hanover encourages us to explore uncommon ways of thinking, right? Except for when it requires horrific, dark, irrational fits of violent behavior and attitudes, because being an enlightened individual also means that you don’t indulge in those things.

Being enlightened means that you’re not supposed to try and understand the worst side of humanity or practice using your own capacity for it against others. Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I thought being enlightened here at Hanover means that we respect diversity and treat others with kindness, no matter how strange they seem to us or how much we would really like to gun them down for no particular reason.

If being enlightened means we don’t give in to our worst impulses, why are we spending so much time trying to understand and relate to a guy who actualized them all to the worst degree? Are we trying to vicariously experience the ultimate ethical breakdown through him, or something? Is spreading hate through Wiley and vandalizing the one official place of worship on campus not fulfilling enough for us? Is lambasting the hard work of theatre majors for making decisions that we don’t understand too small-time? How many of us are quickly growing tired of thumping around our rooms at 2 a.m. in order to antagonize our neighbors—what’s the next level, throwing bricks at profs of minority ethnicities? Oh wait, no, that’s already been done.

If I were you, the number of normal people on this campus would freak me out enough to want to skip classes for the rest of the week. But no, we’re Hanover, so academics are WAY more important than making sure everybody feels safe—making sure that nobody gets away with abuse or violence of any kind—making sure that nobody suddenly cracks and sends a note to their significant other that reads, “Don’t forget about me!”

A word to the wise: next time you see a normal person, make sure to tell them they’re unforgettable. Maybe then they won’t feel the need to come up with a new un-reason why.

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