agencies agree
you don't wanna look in there
aggression won't stand
__
It'd be proximity. As well familiarity, but not the kind from which one's guilt would trip the sense that one'd deserved what'd come. What, me worry? No, the familiarity that says, "I know you." The creepy familiarity that says, "I knew him." and the proximity that says you've been there before.
I don't frequent such places that draw such madness, and draw, for the mad, the eye of the bull or the bear. At least not frequently. Had I been there, it would have been at someone else's behest.
The culture is there. Call it German... y. The warmed glühwein of the yule is the wurst of it all. Crowds gathered to saunter through rows of stands, each like the other. A more colorless use of the colorful I cannot imagine. Well, I can imagine almost anything. I'm just not familiar with so drab a use of splashy.
Not suprising is atrocity here or there, even if so often so very far away. Nor suprising is how it was put in one local print paper I saw this morning, albeit briefly, that "we" have been "struck in our heart". Weihnachten, Christmas, is "our heart". All we hold dear. "We" is, again, the familiarity.
But let's be honest, it's really proximity. Familiar is how an editor wants to paint a picture. Again with the colorful commentary. Again, I see maudlin and gaudy. But I don't begrudge the affected their sorrow or sentimentality.
I do question how one decides they have been affected and dutifully says so, and how one decides they are not affected and keeps their mouths shut. We can't speak up all the time, I guess one might say. Save it for the neighbor. Your family. Your neighbor's family.
As to man-made atrocities, what leads to such furious anger is, as I imagine, a logical progression from having been made familiar with a massive fury that utterly destroys something or someone with whom the furious anger, once potentially at peace, if only barely, was already proximate.
It matters not the inconsistency between this perceived furious response and the assumed cool & calm with which the most genial figure on the face of the planet can deliver the same from a distance. I can only imagine that the forgone reaction to that would entail a frustration that eventually seethes.
Of course, I cannot assume every fury is the result of outside injustice. One hears that morbid curiousity has led some to murder. But there's a cause for everything, reasonable or not. And one's reasonable is another's nightmare. How to organize to navigate these causes & effects is a task primarily for those who'd be foolhardy or narcissistic enough to want to speak on everyone's behalf and act accordingly -- or not.
So as they state that they're seeking to confirm or rule out the familiarity of the suspect with a network of influence, with a mentor or teacher who told him how to steal a truck and drive it into no friends of his, ask yourself: What difference at this point does it make?
