Can an Entire Nation go Insane? Can an Entire People lose its Soul?

Yet another shooting that defies understanding. But even without understanding, the story will be scripted in scars across a paralysed body, and in the minds of children.

I once saw a young man lose his mind.

One day, he was lucid and clear as water, sharp and smart, cynical and blaming, counting up all the pricks and pokes that daily life sent his way, sure that he was better than all the distained realities that oppressed him, and that he would transcend them.

And the next time I saw him, he was no longer tethered. He’d begun to be prodded by what he couldn’t see, but which he could hear, voices telling him things, scaring him, daring him. His cynicism was now free-floating, detached from the realities I knew, and from those of his girlfriend and community, the world he’d known.

Our communication, which had always been strained by tensions between what was and what ought to be, between the offered and the demanded, it now devolved into desperate lunges at meaning that eluded and shape-shifted us to exhaustion. Until we could only make exchanges of raw emotion, of wanting, or dismissing, of coming or going, yes and no, on and off.

This was a white young man, by the way. This isn’t that kind of oppression tale.

I hadn’t known that sanity could be lost so suddenly.

I watch the news, and the political conventions in the self-proclaimed ‘greatest nation in the history of the world’. And I wonder if an entire people can lose its collective mind, become insane. Does a nation, a community even have a mind? And if so, can it become severely disordered?

A young woman, slippers on her feet, as though she just left her living room. Maybe she plunged through her television screen to enter the drama unfolding blocks away. She is excited, as though she’s just been called up from the audience by a game show host, and now gets the chance to spin the Big Wheel. But she stands in a store, looters smashing display cases all around her, grabbing up plastic baubles and cardboard boxes. Exultant. Exuberant. Not wanting to miss this moment.

A young man, dressed like the citizen-soldier of a Marvel comics universe, transported by duty and super-hero fantasy, for God and Country, protecting property that isn’t his. Filled with fervor and carrying an automatic weapon which will soon leave two people dead.

Two of thousands or millions, talking back in their souls to the talking heads that don’t hear us or each other. Language that will not translate anymore, because there are no rules for translating passion and propaganda into lived, shared truth.

I didn’t know that sanity could be lost so suddenly. When a body cannot reconcile its visions of right and wrong with the world in which it finds itself. When it will not turn down the volume of its own fantasy, to accept why it can never be reality – these puffed-up, animated, choreographed and sound-tracked dreams.

Maybe a nation raised on Batman, Skywalker and Superfly cannot grasp the need to do its laundry. Vigilantes, revolutionaries and citizen tricksters, made into familiar storybook figures, devoid of responsibility or conscience, or the need to step backwards, and to sleep.