The Lesson We Still Haven't Learned...

I’m not sure what to make of a world where Randy Newman knows more about the human condition than the so-called experts.

More about that in a minute.

The girlfriend of the Northern Illinois University shooter did an interview with CNN yesterday. Here’s the story from CNN.com.

WONDER LAKE, Illinois (CNN) -- The girlfriend of the gunman who killed five people and then himself at Northern Illinois University last Thursday told CNN there was "no indication he was planning something."
He wasn't erratic. He wasn't delusional. He was Steve; he was normal," Jessica Baty tearfully said in an exclusive interview Sunday.
Baty, 28, said she dated Steven Kazmierczak off and on for two years and had most recently been living with him.
"He was a worrier," she said. He once told her he had "obsessive-compulsive tendencies" and that his parents committed him as a teen to a group home because he was "unruly" and used to cut himself, she said.
"He was worried about everything, he worried about me."
But, she added, that he had never exhibited self-destructive behavior during their time together. "Everybody has a past, and everybody goes through hard times," Baty said.
Kazmierczak had been seeing a psychiatrist on a monthly basis, Baty said. She said he was taking an anti-depressant, but he had stopped taking the medication three weeks ago because "it made him feel like a zombie."
"He wasn't acting erratic," she said. "He was just a little quicker to get annoyed.”
Police say Kazmierczak burst into an NIU geology class on February 14 and opened fire with at least a shotgun and two handguns, killing five students while dozens fled for their lives.
Authorities were on the scene within a few minutes, but by the time they reached the classroom, Kazmierczak, 27, had shot himself to death.
Baty knew her boyfriend had purchased at least two guns. He told her they were for home protection.
The day of the shooting, Baty was in class at the University of Illinois where she and Kazmierczak had transferred from NIU. He was pursuing a master's degree in sociology, and she is going for a master's in social work. He planned to study law and had signed up to take the LSAT test, she said. She is hoping to get her doctorate in social work.
The students in her class began to talk about a mass shooting taking place at NIU in DeKalb, Illinois.
Oblivious that Kazmierczak could have anything to do with it, Baty said she had tried calling him several times Thursday, but her calls went directly into his voice mail.
"I was worried about him because he was supposed to come to class," she said. "He never missed a class."
When Baty learned that Kazmierczak was the shooter, she said, "I couldn't believe it."
"I said, 'No, you have the wrong person. He's not in DeKalb.' He wasn't supposed to be there. He was on his way home to see me. It didn't make any sense at all."
She had last seen him Monday morning, when he told her he was planning to drive north to visit his ill godfather who he had not seen in a long time.
Kazmierczak "told me that he loved me and that he would see me on Thursday and missed me," she said. "That whole week I talked to him; he sounded fine."
"The Steven I know and love was not the man that walked into that building," she said. "He was anything but a monster. He was probably the nicest, most caring person ever."
She said she was talking to the news media about Kazmierczak because, "He cannot be defined by his last actions. There was so much more than that."
Since Thursday, Baty said authorities have intercepted several packages Kazmierczak sent her, including several items such as: the book "The Antichrist" by Friedrich Nietszche; a textbook for her class about serial killers; a package with a gun holster and bullets; a new cell phone that she had told him she wanted and about $100 in cash.
She read the contents of a note he sent to her.
"You are the best Jessica!" it read. "You've done so much for me, and I truly do love you. You will make an excellent psychologist or social worker someday! Don't forget about me! Love, Steven Kazmierczak."
But there was no letter explaining the NIU slayings.
"I'm praying that there's another one somewhere that tells why and what he was thinking and what he was feeling and why he wouldn't want me to help him," she said.
Though the two had chosen to transfer to the University of Illinois, "there was no hard feelings [toward NIU]," she said. "He said all the time how grateful he was that he went there."
She said she had never known her boyfriend to lie: "He was always open and honest. We didn't keep anything from each other."
"I would have helped him, I would have done something for him," Baty said. Even last week, when the two talked every night until the killings, she was not alarmed.
It was during their last conversation, a few minutes past midnight Wednesday, that she got her first inkling that something was amiss, she said. "He told me not to forget about him and he told me that he would see me tomorrow, and when we got off the phone he said 'Goodbye.' He never said goodbye."
Shaking and crying, her family at her side during the interview, Baty said she still loves the man she met in a hallway at NIU when they were both undergraduate students.
Baty said she feels sorry for the victims and their families and friends. "I know what they're going through, and I just can't tell them how sorry I am," she said. But, she added, "He was a victim, too, and I know they probably won't want to hear that, but he was."


Obviously, she’s right. The families and friends of those who were killed or injured don’t even want to begin to hear about what a “victim” the guy who walked into a lecture hall and started shooting was.
And while I don’t profess to having any credentials that would make my thoughts about the whole thing “valid” within the parameters of expertise, I do have a gut feeling about a couple of things.

First, there have always been, and will always be, people who are mentally ill. While we have come a long way historically from the dark age mentality of “crazy”, we still don’t think of mental illness with the same automatic and instant compassion, understanding and inevitability that we do physical illness.

Part of that, I would think, stems from the fact that getting the flu doesn’t often drive someone to buying a gun and killing college students.

So, it’s a little easier to feel sorry for the “victim” of the illness.

And I think we all still live, or at least hang out, in a state of denial, even when we see the signs of disturbance in someone. We don’t want to let our selves think that nice kid could actually shoot someone just because he’s a little more “erratic” lately.

Second, while it’s simplistic and knee jerk to “blame the culture” for the violence that seems, of late, to be the manifestation of the assorted shooter’s illnesses, it’s naïve, at best, and profane, at worst, to not admit to ourselves that the proliferation of violent content in music, music videos, movies, television, et al doesn’t have any impact on the very society that is pemitting their “air” as it were, to be filled with that particular toxin.

And when the air is filled with something, it’s hard to take a sabbatical on breathing,

As a creative man, I don’t require any convincing about the issue of “censorship” or even “stifling” of the creative process, thanks.

The problem with total and unchecked freedom, though, is that it’s like nuclear power.

In the right hands, it can provide illumination and warmth and energy to make life better for millions.
In the wrong hands, it can cause destruction on a global scale.

So, while it may not be any one thing or another that can be selected as the cause of these terrible outbursts of despair and death, it isnt a stretch to connect the dots.

A society that tacitly tolerates violence in its pop culture , if not stepping over the line of endorsing it.

Mental illness, no longer the stigma it once was, but still a long way towards being embraced in the early, critical stages.

And why these illnesses more and more manisfest themselves in the killing of innocent people along with the person suffering the illness instead of simply a sad case of a mentally ill person cutting their wrists or finding some gas to turn on in the small apartment?

Again, I don’t have the PhD that would validate my perspective. And the experts will continue to bounce ideas and opinions around from now until the cows come home…or chickens come home to roost, whichever occurs first.

Personally, I think Randy Newman figured it out years ago.

I ran out on my children / I ran out on my wife
Gonna run out on you too, baby / Done it all my life
Everybody cried the night I left, well, almost everybody did / My little boy just hung his head
I put my arm around his little shoulder / This is what I said, sonny

I just want you to hurt like I do / I just want you to hurt like I do
I just want you to hurt like I do / Honest I do, honest I do, honest I do

If I had one wish, one dream I knew would come true / Want to speak to all people of the world
Get up there on that platform, fiirst I’d sing a song or two / then I tell you what I’d do
I ‘d talk to the people and I’d say
It’s tough, tough world,a rough rough world and you know / Things don’t always go the way we plan
There’s one thing, one thing we all have in common / something everyone can understand

I just want you to hurt like I do / I just want you to hurt like I do
I just want you to hurt like I do / Honest I do, honest I do, honest I do

The irony of it all is that in an age of cell phones and webcams and chat rooms and emails and blogs, emotional isolation contines to flourish, with all of the ways that we have to communicate and reach out to one another, too many still lead "lives of quiet desperation".

Sad, lonely, confused lives.

That's a lot of misery to endure.

And misery loves company.

Until we really learn that lesson and get a better handle on that simple human truth, there will be more victims on both ends of the weapon.