In Fuck Everything, Nation Reports, The Onion hits the nail on the head:
Following the fatal shooting this morning at a Connecticut elementary school that left at least 27 dead, including 20 small children, sources across the nation shook their heads, stifled a sob in their voices, and reported fuck everything. Just fuck it all to hell.
All of it, sources added.
What a tragic, fucked-up day. Children. Children! It feels like a strange day to write about food and television, but we did, because I guess that’s what we’re supposed to do. Read the news, talk to each other, drive to Walnut Creek and back, publish the posts. Rachel Maddow had a good show tonight and I was gonna wait until that came out in an embeddable format and then I could post it here and we could have a post here to address what we all learned today about how enormously fucking evil a human is capable of being. All on his own. No self-defense, no drugs, no war-related brainwashing. Just a person choosing to do an evil thing because he wants to, and then doing it. Nothing happens in a vacuum, of course, but after everything wrong with the world that brought him and us to this day, he was literally alone walking in to that classroom.
I admit I’ve always skeptically eyed the media coverage of tragedies like these, skeptical of the fine line between opportunism and honesty so many news organizations seem to tread. But here I am, watching said news organizations for hour upon hour upon hour, so obviously they are doing a thing people need or want. We do want to know everything, want to listen to people talk about it, contemplate the macro-level factors that got us here and the micro-level factors that freeze our bones. This is our culture and all its problems. I admire those who know where to begin — people who are certain it’s about gun control, or mental health care — because I don’t know where to begin. I mean, those two places absolutely. Absolutely those two are the top two on the list. But what else? I need to indict everyone, every aspect of this culture. (But also that man, that fucking man, who the fuck is this guy? Who the fuck?) (children 20 children) (And to think of places where violence like this is commonplace)
I think my skepticism was also because I knew the family and friends of the deceased were so monumentally depressed and devastated and forever-damaged that it was cheap for us to claim a part in that grief. Children. Does that make sense? But nobody is really claiming that, is the thing. It’s a different kind of grief, a much smaller easier transient reasonable temporary kind, it’s just that we don’t have words for all the different kinds of grief. I wish I wasn’t always so skeptical. Because some time this afternoon I finally understood why this communal grief happens, and that it’s real and genuine: we’re all just being honest. And honestly what we feel is a deep emotional connection to something that is very far away for most of us. I don’t know why, really. Maybe that’s the only reason humanity, with its myriad avenues towards evil and its plentifully handsome gates, hasn’t blown itself up yet: because we feel strongly about things that happen far away, because we care about each other. Because we’re born compassionate, because otherwise we’re savages. Because there are people who kill people, and then there are other people, like all of us here, who just can’t fucking imagine it. Just can’t understand it. We don’t understand these evil people. In a way they become monsters, and we’re jumping into bed from the other side of the room just in case they’re underneath us, arms extended, fists open.
I mean, honestly, all 315 million Americans confirmed.
