Let’s be more than simply sad about or sympathetic for those now dead or injured in Orlando. W

Let’s be more than simply sad about or sympathetic for those now dead or injured in Orlando. We need solidarity over and above sympathy.We need to dig to answer these questions: How does it make perfect sense that a “security guard” is also a terrorist? How does it make perfect sense that a murderer shot down BY police loved taking selfies in NYPD shirts? How is it that a man spurred to violence in the face of male-male love can also be spurred to violence in the face of heterosexual love (c.f. his assault of his ex-wife)?How does it make perfect sense that a secular and intolerant Islamaphobic discourse will be the right-wing, homophobic Christian’s response to this act of homophobic violence? What kind of disavowal must happen here? How do we figure that the security offered by more guns will remedy the insecurity highlighted by gun violence?These contradictions aren’t very hard to work out, but we continue to sit back, aghast, and shocked by what we see. This perpetual naivete is perhaps best summed up by that Onion article on another mass shooting, the headline of which reads “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” Or maybe Susan Sontag said it the best:“Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood. No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of OthersMaturity will mean working out these ostensible contradictions, realizing how each pole in these oppositions is implicated and necessary to its other. This is, of course, what queer theory does every day. -- source link

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