“I saw Joe Pesci at the grocery store yesterday. I’m pretty sure he was packing heat,” my mother said the first week after my family moved to Las Vegas back in December of 2005. You can swap out Pesci for just about any name you want, be it Elvis or Aunt Maude, Vegas is a gun toting town. It fits with the city’s history. In Vegas, the mafia found a place when the government was willing to turn a blind eye, the men who worked for the mines of the surrounding desert figured out city loopholes could let them spend hard earned cash on pleasure. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas the billboards tell us. And we all know what that means.
Grief, however, stubbornly refuses to stay in one place.
In the past twelve years I have found that whether you love Vegas or hate it, the city has the amazing capacity to lull you into a state of complicity. Friends who turned their nose up at my family moving there in a self righteous huff, now write #prayforvegas all over Facebook.
Even though the bottom has fallen out of real estate, new homes are being built daily as if by some sort of inertia. I once had a boy visit my family from North Carolina, and watched over the course of six weeks as he dissolved into a porn loving, whiskey drinking, emotionally unavailable lair who insisted he wasn’t “really like this back home.”
Maybe he wasn’t. Vegas seems to give us all permission to act badly.
What happens here, stays here.
Those who have taken the time to know me well, know that I am a person who has been aquatinted with grief and suffering for much of my life. I fell in love with Las Vegas partly because it affords just about everyone the opportunity to shake off their mourning clothes and forget what the tears were ever for. Vegas is a place where you can forget your disability, the vast influx of money from the elderly means that investment is made in making infrastructure wheelchair accessible. Roll up craps tables, hotel rooms with hoists, pavements which don’t crack because the temperature never gets anywhere near freezing.
To me, Las Vegas has always been like that irresponsible friend most of us have growing up. The friend who loves to party hard but is also incredibly sweet and kind when you finally get a spare moment to spend one on one with them. You don’t want reality to hit them. Even though you know what they are doing is deeply unhealthy, there is still a side of you that doesn’t want them to ever see the direct consequences of their behaviour. Don’t grow up. Don’t come face to face with how harsh this world can be. Stay ignorant. There was something charming about that ignorance. I fell in love with it.
If we just mind our own business, no one will get hurt.
If we keep quiet, things won’t get messy.
What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas is very much the lie our society is based on today. It embraces the notion that life can be compartmentalised, that we can behave one way towards one person, differently towards another, and that inconsistency has no impact on who we are. We have been sold the myth that our actions don’t actually have an impact compared to the actions of world leaders, bought the falsehood that Facebook posts and calls to pray create social change, and sought a combination of complicity and amateur dramatics over confrontation.
For me, complicity is a luxury made unaffordable by experiencing the cost of suffering first hand.
It has become a custom in our society when mass shootings and other man made horrors occur, to beat our chests and wail at each other, tweeting GIFs to express our ‘’sadness’’ before posting another picture of a cat, or expressing a similar heart wrenching distress at the death of a rock and roll star. We invite each other around for coffee, roll up a fag, and work up tears in our eyes for shooting victims we’ve never met, and insisting that our egotistical liberal way of seeing the world is somehow not only ‘right’ but would result in much less pain for everyone. And then we tell ourselves, ‘those’ people won’t get it, they don’t feel things the way we do. So we feel good about the cry we have, pay for our coffees, and head home. It’s always somehow easier to believe we are right than actually try to make change happen.
Many of my friends get angry that I don’t collapse into floods of tears with the rest of them when tragedy strikes. They take my dry eyes and intellectual analysis as a sign of harshness, pointing to me as part of the problem, someone who can’t see past themself and chooses to be unbroken. They forget that someone who has suffered much, will be forever changed by that suffering. Seeing others suffer rips my heart out. But I have found no way to compartmentalise grief or compassion, no way to control the tears enough to pay the bill and make it home. I refuse to collapse, because I have witnessed so many people collapse as a result of what I have faced, thereby failing to help when I needed them the most. Collapsing until there is nothing left leads to it’s own complicity.
All we can do is pray. What else is there to do?
Bullshit.
Anyone with an understanding in theology, religion or ethics knows that this utter rot is the mother of all complicit excuses. Yes, there are groanings of the soul, sounds and prayers we make when there are no words to explain the pain. But those agonising utterances must be saved for victims, witnesses, people who have suffered direct loss as a result of a horrific event and those who need to process the trauma they they encountered first hand. If we dare to get caught up in that level of grief when it is not genuinely ours, we are complicit yet again,
In this very broken world, it has become the burden of the victims to create change and demand justice. We say ‘all we can do is pray’ and then watch as those who have lost far more than we have organise, pursue, and campaign to get things done. Floating from one tragedy to the next is perhaps the greatest sign of how egotistical we have become in approaching these horrors. They are awful, they ruin our day, the nightmares attack us in our sleep. But creating positive change as a result, well, the victims can do that better than us really. Let them take care of it, we will just pray.
Will those who mourn be left uncomforted?
Las Vegas cannot insist on staying the same. The city will no doubt try. We as humans are somehow brilliant at both denying grief and demanding that no change is made. Nowhere has this proven to be more true than the city of Las Vegas. There will be no monument to the dead on the Vegas strip. The hotel room of the shooter will be turned into a cleaning closet or an office. Someone will put a hotel where the music festival became a killing field. The aim will be to distract the tourist from this tragedy, allowing it all to be paved over rather than processed, ensuring that little is done to wake us from our drowsed state.
As much as the horror that happened in Las Vegas will spark off another debate about gun control and freedom, we must seek to understand how our own actions and cycles perpetuate a world where these events continue. Tragedy, grief, and anger never stay put. Their effects seep into our very roots and, if left unchecked, will inevitably fester. We are beings who find it easy to remain complicit and ask ourselves to compartmentalise rather than examine our role in creating this culture. No place personified this more than Las Vegas. Like any victim of tragedy, in order to survive this community must either learn to face grief and sorrow head on, or cling to it’s blind spots in a vain attempt to avoid the fragility of the human condition.
The things that happen in the dark and grieving places of our hearts, never simply stay there.
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