The day-of a traumatic situation is always better than the day after.
In the day-of, the body produces chemicals of survival, like adrenaline, to focus, execute, and live.
The day-after is the hangover.
The body, depleted of energy, with a recently-encoded memory of powerful effect, and otherwise starved (the last thing you feel like doing in the middle of a threat to survival is eat) is forced to reckon with the “now what?”
Collectively, when a country experiences a tragedy, the responses can be categorized in one of three ways – sadness, anger, despair. Rarely is there indifference, You Will Be Made to Care in a threateningly interconnected world.
Anger dissipates the quickest and sadness lingers for a few days and tends to drift. Despair puddles into hopelessness.
From the midst of these shifting brain chemicals and rapidly firing neurons comes Attempts to Understand, and that’s where we’re at 72 hours after an event in Texas.
I’m careful to remove any emotion or graphic descriptiveness. You can get that anywhere and it’s numbing. Nothing hastens despair like consuming the word “horrific” a few dozen times in a row.
An event occurred and what follows is a individually-reached, collectively-felt Attempt to Understand what happened.
The brain’s pattern recognition is the first line of defense in attempts to detect threats.
When things seem “off”, or pieces are missing from the narrative, the Attempt to Understand accelerates.
This is taxing on both time and energy, which is why most people are busy enough not to bother with this type of thinking.
That’s probably not a fair assessment despite being accurate.
I’d argue it’s more of a horseshoe.
The ends have more in common than the center, but I’d go one further and say the ends are an end of their own opposite the center.
The only difference between the newly-aligned ends is the level of curiosity and speed of processing.
Some may think that Something Isn’t Quite Right and then be satisfied knowing that’s the case.
Others go deeper down the rabbit hole, educating (and sometimes mis-educating) themselves (pattern recognition can be a real bitch) about subjects they had no prior interest in.
But back to that pattern recognition.
To.
The.
FBI.
The nefarious draw a thicker line through it – “Aha! They’re behind it!” – severely overestimating the competence of that or any three letter bureaucracy.
They’re doing a bang-up job!
It’s not like they miss big things frequently.
Speaking of which, was anyone ever fired?
Of course not.
Imagine the DMV running everything and that’s basically The American Government.
we will have a response in 3-5 business days”
