I have been thinking a lot the last few days about identity. In the world of sociology, everyone carries multiple identities. I am (in no particular order): legal assistant, girlfriend, daughter, friend, aspiring copywriter, niece, coworker, granddaughter, and so on. It's interesting to me to see how long it takes someone, when they move into new a role, to accept it, and to identify as such. I was reading another blog earlier, where the author came to this realization upon her marriage that in a world that is so often focused on the individual, she compromised to take her new husband's name because it gave her a sense of "we". We live in a society which focuses on, celebrates, and utterly condones the individual. There is nothing wrong with this, except perhaps we are losing something. Human societies evolved in a way where we were all interconnected, we depended on each other daily for food, to watch each other's children, to survive freezing winters and summer droughts. Now we need no one. It is entirely possible to survive with only the human contact we establish via the internet.
The man who so calmly strode into a Philadelphia health club, and killed three women and injured countless others, before turning the gun on himself, was a blogger. His death, his plan, was on the web for the world to see. According to news outlets, his pain and loneliness, his feelings of inadequate control over his life, dominate his entries. In a twisted way, did he blog out of hope? Did he hope that someone, somewhere, would see his blog, and reach out? He posted pictures of himself, and even wrote of the first time he went to that same health center before "chickening out".
If someone had seen this, could we have prevented this tragedy? Would someone, somewhere, become his friend, found counseling, provided support? Or would he have been like any other "crazy", locked away before he could harm anyone? I am certainly not advocating what he did. His was a senseless crime, a bloodbath that claimed the lives of innocents as the answer to his own painful loneliness. The families of the victims, those who witnessed the crime, those who knew someone who knew someone...all these people were touched by that crime, and will be forever altered by it. Will it give them a new identity, a new role? Will it make them appreciate the "we" that is in their lives, make them grateful for all those relationships that give them, however inadvertently, a role to inhabit? I hope so.
The more everyone embraces the internet, telecommunication, email..everything that takes away face to face communication, the sound of anothers voice on the phone, the more we distance ourselves from our roots, and perhaps our humanity.
