Commentary
By Gary Kopycinski
We can’t help but wonder: Why?
Why the madness in Arizona? Why the deaths?
A nine-year-old girl. A federal judge.
Shot dead.
The news cycle spins on and on about the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, as it should. Giffords was the intended target today, shot "through-and-through," according to her surgeon.
She survives.
A nine-year-old girl is gone.
Gone.
I’m currently reading The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The book is about a lot of things, cause and effect, how we look for reasons, study events, and make suppositions about the future. We want life to make sense, and, much of the time, it doesn’t.
Taleb writes:
Our tendency to perceive—to impose—narrativity and causality are symptoms of the same disease—dimension reduction. Moreover, like causality, narrativity has a chronological dimension and leads to the perception of the flow of time. Causality makes time flow in a single direction, and so does narrativity.
We want to tie tragedies up in neat little packages so we can quantify, qualify, and move on.
Years ago, during Vietnam, it was the political left acting erratically at times. Today, it is often the right.
“I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative,” John Stuart Mill once complained.
Okay, so there’s that, from John Stuart Mill. Years ago, and sometimes today, the left is no more wise.
Today makes no sense.
A nine-year-old girl is gone.
And there is no neat package we can put that in.
So it will make sense.
So we can move on.
