Reality bites—M.G.Sondraal

I’ve observed an increased irritability, a rising intolerance, and a simmering anger in the world. I see it in the rudeness of drivers, hear it on the radio talk shows, read it in the comments on social media and letters to the editor. There is a shameless self-absorption and entitlement that shapes interactions, and a startling lack of kindness and compassion. And this includes me.

I’ve discovered to my horror that I’m capable of a profound hatred and loathing of someone I will never meet, but whose continued appearance on the world stage and the behaviour of those close to him is so appalling I strictly limit my news consumption to reduce anxiety. This is a revelation to me. I am a no-capital-punishment, no-wars, no-guns-in-the-house pacifist…but I could be persuaded to make one exception.

Into this quagmire of abhorrence, mass shootings are born. Just not in Canada.

It’s not that we don’t have guns here, nor that we lack people who fervently believe their guns should not be registered. It’s not that there aren’t deaths from gun violence. Gangs, extortion threats, hunting accidents, and murder suicides are documented too much. Not on the scale of the United States and not in clusters, but it happens and we acknowledge and regret them.

Multiple casualties? An urban centre, yes. The United States, definitely. Small-town-Canada? Absolutely not.

In Tumber Ridge, a small town at the end of a dead-end road, in a remote part of British Columbia, it is most unexpected and made more tragic by its rarity. The grief of the parents, extended family, friends and neighbours is unfathomable and the despair of the youth responsible must have been overwhelming to have done such an unspeakable act. My heart aches for them all. (It does not ache for those who are vilifying the trans community when white heterosexual males are responsible for 99.9% of mass shootings and nothing is said about that demographic after one of these events.)

Every day I immerse myself in pseudo-reality, the fictional world I create for a purpose of telling a story that mirrors real life in some measure. It doesn’t matter that the town is fictional and the streets names don’t exist, or that the town is in a different time, past or future, or that this fictional world is off planet. The world seems real enough for the fabricated characters to function seamlessly within it and allow the story to unfold. And it should on some level allow us to reflect on happenings in our own.

Our writing group regularly comments on the peculiarity of our imaginations that know many ways to kill people without experiencing any violence on that level ourselves. In crime writing, violence is always present, though how graphic it is and whether the reader witnesses the act or only the outcome of such violence is determined by the subgenre. It’s a safe way to experience the intensity of those emotions and still be in control. That’s useful, I believe. That’s what we tell ourselves anyway.

In times like this, I wonder if the fake violence crime writers produce contributes to the violence simmering around us. I’m not published, so mine hasn’t, but it gives me pause, nevertheless.

I guess it depends on whether killers read. Do they? Are mass shooters readers to be influenced by a well-chosen phrase and nudged into action? I don’t suppose we’ll ever know since the usual outcome is death by bullet, often self-inflicted. It probably does no one any good to speculate about cause and effect.

In these uncertain times where old men with no skin in the game send young men to die for oil, rare earth minerals, and trading advantage in the guise of imagined threat and boundary lines and take countless citizens with them, what can we do? At a minimum, we must support one another every day, not only in times of crisis, but in the small moments of disappointment, the traumatic times of shaming, the agonizing events of fear, disconnection and loneliness. Kindness and compassion should be our default and maybe, besides helping our own mental health and our local community, we can prevent another tragedy like Tumbler Ridge by working together to be better people while our politicians show us the worst.

And in my crime fiction, some of my characters, perhaps most, must channel the goodness in people in case mass shooters do read and read crime fiction.