You Might Want To Rethink That...

File under: Maybe this wasn't as good an idea as you thought...

A man who sparked panic by walking into a Walmart with a rifle and body armor told police he was testing his right to bear arms in public.

Dmitriy Andreychenko entered the shop heavily armed, days after a mass shooting at another of Walmart's stores.

"I wanted to know if that Walmart honored the second amendment," the 20-year-old told police after his arrest.

Prosecutors have charged him with making a terrorist threat.

I have a certain amount of sympathy for Mr. Andreychenko, who appears to be being charged with feloniously thoughtless scariness ("The terrorist threat charge covers an act which 'recklessly disregards the risk of causing the evacuation' of a building, or 'knowingly causes a false belief or fear... that a condition exists involving danger to life'.") for his admittedly ill-advised "social experiment." The response to this illustrates the degree to which our legal system, cynicism aside, is designed to respond to public fears and anxieties. Terrorism doesn't usually involve recklessness or scaring people when there is no actual threat.

It also speaks to the strange relationship that we have with firearms. In a manner of speaking, Mr. Andreychenko did nothing illegal. There's no indication that the weapons he was carrying were illegal or that he wasn't allowed to possess them. (Although now, according to the article, he'll have to surrender his guns even if granted bail.) But his (possibly soon to be ex-) wife was correct: people were going to take him walking into Walmart "heavily armed" very seriously. But to be sure, what people really objected to was him being so visibly armed; after all, he was held at gunpoint by another armed customer in the store until the police arrived, and there's nothing in the story that indicates that this man was also detained.

But is also illustrates the disconnect between two different constituencies that simply can't understand where the other is coming from.

"This is Missouri, I understand if we were somewhere else like New York or California, people would freak out," [Mr. Andreychenko] said, according to police filings.

While in this case, Mr. Andreychenko wasn't as in tune with his community as he believed that he was, the general understanding that people in the central areas of the country have a different relationship with guns is true enough. Had it occurred to him to try this experiment in, say, January (assuming that no more mass shootings were widely publicized in the meantime) he may have provoked nothing more than exasperation with his need to test Walmart on their perceived constitutional commitments. But as it is, he's looking at prison time.

Dark Places

When I first encountered this picture, it was accompanied by the following, exactly as I found it:

Suicide was never the answer to your problems, my friend. It never was. You see, Life has hardships and we have to live with them whether we want it or not. Everybody experiences pain, yet some people are just there, being a coward, trying to kill themselves. Yes i said it, coward. Well what do you call someone who runs away from everything?

It may take your pain away from this "cruel" very world, but think of your loved ones, even yourself. And think what would happen if you killed yourself.

You see, everybody gets sad, depressed or whatever. You just gotta have to think of the good things that happened in you and think how life would eventually get better if you will stay strong and positive. If you're killing yourself, you'll miss out a lot of good stuffs.

I never speak ill of the dead, especially when it comes to labeling suicides as cowards, in the service of salving my own feelings of hurt or to make myself feel strong. The dead cannot come back and defend themselves.

A smirking hipster with a sign is no substitute for really attempting to help another human being through the dark times in their lives. When people kill themselves, it's not because they suddenly stop believing in lights at the end of tunnels - it's because they understand themselves to be trapped in a cave in. And that feeling may be fleeting. I recall being told that the gap between suicidal ideation and taking action may be as little as five seconds.

When I was in college, I understood for the first time just how much many people fear dying. Anything that can overcome that fear must be powerful indeed. So simply expecting people to buck up - telling them that everyone has to deal with pain, and that being unable to deal with whatever is hurting them is a sign of moral failure - that's not helping. That's saying: "Not only has life dealt you a hand that you can't understand how to deal with, but you're culpably weak and therefore detestable." And I don't know that it helps to say that to someone. They labor under enough sorrow without my self-righteous condescension on their backs.

But with all of that having been said, I think I understand the impulse to label suicides as cowardly and selfish. It's a common enough perspective that it's clear that it serves a purpose. Just not, I think, the purpose that one might wish.

Secrets

So I found the following thread on Reddit: "China has Tienanmen Square. What historical event does your government not want you to talk about?" Cue any number of people going on about this or that thing that some nation had done. But one commenter noted that most of the examples given were: "bad shit that countries did but openly admit." And I mostly agree with that. None of the examples I read that were raised for the United States dealt with items that I'd never heard of, or seemed to have been scrubbed from search engines. And this is common with discussions like this. People take incidents that they are personally very invested in and treat a failure to aggressively broadcast them as evidence of a coverup and/or official censorship. I have yet to find an situation where someone says: "The mainstream media won't talk about this, but..." that couldn't be found in the mainstream media. It was never front page news, but it was there nonetheless.

But in thinking about what an American version of Tienanmen Square might be, I started to wonder what sort of event would the United States government effectively attempt to render classified, such that speaking of it could be construed as revealing state secrets. For the most part, I couldn't really think of anything. But I don't have a security clearance, so if there are such events, I wouldn't know about them. And that's what makes the question not really work in this context. There are probably any number of covert operations that, if someone knew anything about them, they'd be sanctioned for speaking up about. Take the NSA's looking into metadata from cellular calls, for instance. But that wasn't a public event that took place within a major metropolitan area. It was behind closed doors from the start.

When it comes to historical events, it's not the government that wants the role of censor; it's some or another segment of the populace, instead. In other words, at least in the United States, it's not the government that has staked some important aspect of its identity on a particular understanding of historical particulars. Segments of the citizenry, however, may be a different story. So what tends to keep events out of the major "official" channels isn't the threat of prosecution, but a combination of limited space and limited attention. But to people who understand that a given event should have received more air time than it did, that's not a particularly satisfying conclusion. And so we end up with an idea that the government is strangely incompetent, gamely attempting to hide events that even cursory research quickly surface.

Unnoticed

I am, at least most of the time, comfortable with my own insignificance. I understand that in the grand scheme of things, the difference between my being here, and my not being here, is vanishingly small. The Universe will not miss me once I am gone. There are a few people that might, and that may have a heavy impact on them as individuals, but existence will proceed, pretty much the same as it would were I never to have been here.

This is not a particularly popular position, and I have encountered a number of people who have been inclined to dispute it with me. The reason for this, I believe, is that many people associate it with a tendency to self-harm. The insignificant have no reason to continue their own existence, as I understand the general gist of it. But it suits me, and I'm still here. And, perhaps more importantly, it frees me from having to prove to a world that seems uncaring that it should care. I can be content in the number of people who do express caring, and not need anything from the rest of the world.

Dame White, Slayer of Witches

Of all of the Disney Princess costumes that were in evidence at the local Renaissance Fair this year, this was the best for my money. I know that for the "purists" this sort of thing is a travesty, but the sense of fun and whimsy that goes into many of these makes them worthwhile in my opinion.

And the shield is amazing.