Over the years, as you might imagine, I’ve had reason to discuss “well can we fix it?” “Can we find out why it happened?” “Can we get some answers?”

I’ve written here, a lot, about having an undiagnosed bone disease which has baffled lots of medical professionals. When it first showed up, there was pretty much, mixed in with the disbelief, an assumption that we’d get to the bottom of this, that there was a “normal” explanation. We’re used to that after all; for decades, for centuries, as we’ve learned more about science, the human body, disease and antibodies, medicine, bacteria, viruses, drugs, electricity, imbalances, we’ve been able to fix oh so MANY things. In one or two generations, for god sake, we’ve gone, often from “fatal” to curable, from “crippling” to “treatable in a huge range of conditions and diseases.

When I had back surgery in 1974, for example, my mom, who’d had the same thing done one generation before assumed I’d be in a body cast for weeks and weeks. No way – in a few short – really if you think about it – decades, we’d learned stuff. I never was in a cast, and in fact, was on my feet walking the next day. Amazing shit, really truly amazing.

I bring this all up not to talk about my stuff again but to raise the topic of “knowing how to fix things” or even “knowing we CAN fix things” or assuming we can. Assuming we HAVE the answers. That answers are findable, that they’re out there and we can get to them. And I find myself wondering about that. Is it naiveté? Is it optimism? I mean we’ve gone from humors and phlegm and miasmsa to stem cells and TENS units, from blaming evil spirits and witches and curses and being low class or evil or unsaved, to a knowledge of antibiotics and sterilization haven’t we? That is real progress I would venture to say, and it leads us to have thoughts that “this can be fixed”. We do it – we all do, don’t we? It’s why in part, it was so stunning to realize that there I was, on crutches for the 8th month and nothing was fixed. These things don’t happen. We know the causes of disease and disabling conditions. Okay, mostly. ‘Course, we still don’t know exactly why aspirin works or why migraines are.. But we’ll get there, maybe; meantime, mostly at least I know I DON’T CARE. I am curious certainly, but for the ost part? I’m glad that imitrex works, even if we still don’t know why I get the damn migraines. I understand gate theory in pain research but what I really understand is that when I swallow the Oxycontin in the morning, I will at some later time be able to move. And I’m content with that, though still curious.

I still don’t know why I have what I do or what happened and while I’d still like to know, I’ve had 20 plus years to get to “I may never know. I probably will never know.” And that feels weird. We WANT TO KNOW because we want to fix things. We’ve gotten pretty used to that feeling. And I think we have real trouble dealing with the possibility that there are things that simply, fundamentally, cannot be fixed.

Is that true? Here’s the dilemma – am I simply pessimistic or cynical? Is it optimism or realism to think that some day – and yes, this is why the whole thing started in my head days ago – we will know how to fix the Cho Seung-Huis and they won’t ever want to shoot anyone. That we will be able to predict behavior and treat it, even when the person doesn’t want to be treated, that somehow we will get there, get everyone to see they are fixable. I doubt it. I have always doubted it. Back in grad school, where I studied criminal justice,we spent a fair amount of time in some of my classes looking at causes of crime and how to “fix” them. From poverty and racism to mental illness – among other things. It was pretty clear to me then that we can’t always know why one person will react to a set of circumstances differently, nor will we be able to predict who shoots and who drinks and who doesn’t, and just gets up in the morning and goes to work. Of course that’s not totally true, but prediction of, say, who is likely to commit crime is not something we can do with success. Sure, we know a lot of factors, but when it comes down to it, if we screw up and lock someone up whom we THINK would do something and we’re wrong, well that’s where it really messes up, because we (the we here is very vague I know – let’s sort of assume “Americans” or “adults” or “the smart people we put in charge” and cross our fingers) do not want to be the types of people who punish the innocent, right? I mean, gods, look at the people who’ve been released from prisons in recent years because of new evidence, new DNA tests, the Innocence Project. We HATE that these people served prison sentences for something they did not do. At least I hope we do.

But for all the letters to the editor about gun control, about Cho’s behavior and why wasn’t he locked up (there were apparently lots of signs of problems and lots of attempts to help), for all the concerns we have, or at least I have about the ease of getting guns and big ammo clips and automatic weapons. THAT aside for the moment, I see these calls to “fix things” as relatively useless. Understandable mind you, but sort of a waste of breath. People want to ensure it never happens again. People want to ensure ANY ugliness that comes from human nature rather than, say Mother Nature, never recurs (and we’d like to get there with Mother Nature too, but we still can’t predict earthquakes, funnel clouds or where major hurricanes will touch down. And if we can, we still can’t move everyone to safety ( We COULD stop developers from building in some high risk places which would mean maybe that fewer homes would slide down hills, or be flooded because the folks up the hill took out all the trees for THEIR condo project, but well…yeah.) But passing laws, which is probably the only way people can think of to “fix” this seems pointless in so many ways. Because it involves so many things we don’t know and cannot fix.

Knowing how to avert rage and hatred before it mutates into psychosis, or stopping psychosis if it’s there all along. We’ve done so much - developed at least drug therapies which can treat some schizophrenias, some disorders like OCD. Some have horrid effects that patients can’t stand; can you imagine a drug that does so many icky things to you that you won’t take it even if it means still having nasty symptoms of a mental illness? (Mind you, as my boss at the half-way house program said years ago, “some people like their delusions. Some people want their hallucinations.” One of our residents hated his meds because, well he LIKED talking to god. More than one person I have known with manic-depressive illness has talked about how AWFUL it is to lose the high of the manic state. It’s like nothing else.)

But is it defeatist of me to believe that we will always have people like Cho? That we will never be able to stop some things? I don’t doubt that many things will continue to improve, but I also tend not to think that every puzzle has a solution, at least not in the foreseeable future. And not without consequences. We could probably find a lot of people with serious horrible hate who are going to do something very severely bad and drug them into zombieism. We don’t, I would suggest, have the right to do that – and if we gain that right, I would suggest also that we would lose something more important. Forgive me if I talk about the soul, as I don’t really believe in it, but there’s something there to talk about; taking away the right to think, even hatefully, is something that diminishes us if we do it. And right now, there are people who would have to be THAT sedated in order to do no harm. We don’t know which one will act and which one will just talk. Maybe we will some day but I haven’t seen any signs of that “science” improving since my days studying this stuff 30 years ago. And while I don’t want to dwell on salacious cases, I think it would be very interesting for example to know if anyone, say, saw signs of meltdown in that astronaut who apparently went pretty bonkers.

I don’t think we CAN solve this. I’m not arguing one way or another; if we can, I want to hear about it. What I’m talking about though is WHY I think that and maybe you don’t. Am I truly that much of a pessimist? Or am I realistic? Should I hope more – hope and believe that we can solve anything. I know, I’m not big on “should” statements, I just wonder. Wonder why it is that all these letters I’m reading (ok the ones that aren’t incredibly stupid about how it’s the fault of the “failed Clinton administration” or who/whatever. Let’s blame Cthulu.) It’s just when I read “all we have to do is” or even “the place to start is”, and I find myself muttering “that won’t change anything” I wonder about my negativity.

I don’t think Cho could have been stopped. Had he not bought his guns across the street, he would have bought them across a county or state line, at a gun show, on line, in a bar, whatever. As the one store owner said, he was clean-cut, didn’t show up on the federal database and wasn’t fidgety. Do I still believe in gun control? Absolutely, and not just because of this but because of accidents and because too many people resolve too many issues with too many guns. Because they make me queasy. Because I like Jim Brady (“Killer trees, killer trees!”) But not only did I/do I expect the bomb scares that followed and the copycat stuff that could come, I just expect that we cannot “fix” everyone and everything. Maybe it’s that I have learned the hard way that not every puzzle has an answer, even now, even 14 years ago when the doctors held up their hands in the universal “beats me” shrug.