Late, or not so late reflections on the November 7th shooting...

It has been said and written on countless occasions that 'Nothing can surprise me any more'. Personally, I cannot agree with that. Cynical as I am, I feel perplexed when, for instance, I hear news about one more shooting in a school or in a mall, for example.

Of course, people will forget or get over it. They always do. But how about this? Picture an ordinary, rainy morning. You are seeing your kid off to school. You are saying something like, ‘See you later, honey’. You close the door. You return to your daily business. You cook, or clean or something. A few hours later you learn that your kid is shot dead. Why? Because ‘humanity is overrated.’ As simple as that. There is something infinitely monstrous in all this. It simply doesn’t make sense. Yet violence and mindless killings seem to become an increasingly common feature of our reality. So what is going on?

We see kids every day. Laughing kids, drunken kids, kids, driving their motorcycles, just kids… None of these kids strikes you as a potential murderer, so why a regular teenager would go ahead and kill? We have been teaching our kids all the right things, have we not taught them to respect human life, to extend kindness, to uphold justice, to care for the environment, to learn correct lessons from history… In other words, are not we repeating to them a thousand times that violence is wrong. Aren’t we? Well, think again.

We love to talk about politics, atrocities of fascism, communism, living hell of totalitarian regimes. Why so many people, especially young people at that, seem to be ready to embrace violence and plunge themselves into this very hell then? Well, why not? Speaking of the lessons from history – was not the very lesson all these ‘engineers of human happiness’ taught us? Stalin, Hitler… They were people of action, were they not? While it seems that all the present democracies can accomplish successfully is to banish cigarettes from restaurants, those odious figures of the past were able to turn the world upside down. They took pains to ‘liberate’ millions from the chains of their oppressors (of course, things like that require liberating millions of people from chains of their earthly existence as well, but so what…)

It was a long time ago but the message is still alive. Just get rid of all redundant elements who do not let us build a happy society (shoot them!) and the happy and just society would come! While we live in an anemic world where the war in the Middle East, for example, can drag indefinitely (even WWII took only five years), an angry young soul might want to take an action. It simply makes sense. Are we indeed living in an Orwellian world of a ‘permanent war’, or as another well-known apostle of justice Leon Trotsky put it, in a world of a ‘permanent revolution’?

Are not we promoting things like military conscription, access to guns for youth and discourses along the lines of ‘look here, boy, be a real man! Stop acting like a sissy! Grow tough! Grow strong! Grab this gun, knife, etc.’ On the other hand, no matter how often we talk about justice, things do not seem to be change anywhere. So why should we be surprised if some dupe would decide to take justice in his hands and blow your brains out?

We can blame young radicals for all kinds of weird beliefs or we may condemn state for a failure to teach them right values, but this hardly answers the question: why these young people choose to hold gun, to wear a swastika or a red star, to collect pictures of Hitler and Stalin, and so on. Why do they prefer all these terrible things to humanitarian ideals? The answer might be quite simple: because they are sick of them. Because they are sick of our lies and our bankrupt beliefs, of our double standards and the suffocating control of ‘wise elders’. Because all of us, armed with sermons about freedom, justice and humanism, fail miserably to accomplish anything real except lapse into an endless demagogy over so called ‘lessons of history’.

Because living in this world, where dullness is an everyday mode of life, where getting drunk twice a week does not seem to be such a miserable option, where survival on a dole is increasingly the only option for the future, where charity is the domain of bureaucrats, it might begin to seem that humanity indeed is a bit overrated. Because it is not cool to be a pacifist any longer. And finally, because so many ‘well wishers’, ‘humanitarians’, Marxist academicians, privileged intellectuals and state bureaucrats would love to take over your life and make all the right choices for you, like it or not. It is no wonder that one can get tired of it, especially if one is young and clinically depressed. Then psychotic accidents would occur.

I am sure many would be inclined to label this tragedy as yet another import from the US, sort of ‘Made in US’ sort of thing. On the other hand, ‘the Great Bolshevik’ revolution was mentioned. Is it an imported issue as well? Shall I remain you of the fact that during this ‘Great Revolution’ Finland was a part of the Russian Empire and it participated in the Russian Civil War?

On the morning of November 8th as I walked down the street past Turku Museum of Art and accidentally, the stone relief I had seen many times before: a medium size plate screwed to the wall of an old building, made in the memory of Vladimir Iliych Lenin (or shall I say – Grandpa Lenin? Our beloved Vladimir Iliych? Hey! I was born in the Soviet Union, so forgive me this 'tude'. ) Of course, I noticed the great many flags, waving at half-mast. I had no idea what it was all about. Now I know.