A Dissenting Opinion

This question is all over the headlines.

There is only one way I can answer this, and not all of it will be the popular opinion. Probably most of it won’t, but that’s fine.

I knew him before he was born.

His aunt was my best friend through school from sixth grade on through. In my teens, I babysat him.

I moved away for many years and when I came back and married, he was right there, on the periphery, a best friend of my husband’s nephew.

I knew he was in the Army Reserves and he worked with my dad and my brother-in-law. He hit on my sister at my wedding, and he raised a son.

He built a house and for help putting a roof on before the snow flew one year, he traded my oldest son a car.

It was a piece of shit Ford Escort, and the passenger floorboard was rotted out, so you had to be careful where you put your feet when you got in, but my two oldest children happily drove to school and wrestling practice and work and he gave them freedom and independence.

Another son played horseshoes with him every Wednesday night during the summer.

He is a human being, like you and me. Imperfect, but trying.

The Robert Card I know is a good man. Even though he did a terrible thing.

The night before last, he allegedly shot a classmate of another son of mine, along with too many others.

He may not have deployed, but he signed up to potentially trade his life, so we have the freedom to make shit up and speculate on who he is and spread rumors and innuendo and point blame and vilify him, when in fact, the blame lies on all of us.

How many times have these mass shootings happened and afterward it came out that the shooter had tried to get help and couldn’t or something like it? How many times have we heard we need gun control?

All of them? That’s just a guess, I bet its pretty spot on.

I, like every other Mainer, was glued to the news and Facebook Wednesday night. I did not sleep. I haven’t slept yet, two days later.

Like many others, I watched the flight tracker- (why did we need that when we could hear the helicopter?) and I wondered why they weren’t going up the river, why they only went down as far as the dam. He parked at a boat landing, and he is from Maine, as were all the police officers searching at that time. Why not up the river? So easy to get away, I thought. Why were they making it so easy?

I saw the reporters outside of the hospitals and listened while they told us nothing. I saw talking heads and commentators from away and the next day watched Janet Mills in disgust. All of them saying nothing and falling right into line.

Don’t get me wrong. I lost a sister to murder at twelve years old and I get it. I know personally what will happen to a family. How people deal differently. Some will go inside, and some will act out. Some will turn to drugs to escape the horror and families fall apart. I know how you don’t talk about it and how all the things you say are wrong. We break. Due to our mental health.

I read about how he was schizophrenic, which to my knowledge he was not, and how ‘everyone in town knew to stay away from the Card’s, they are fanatical gun people’. WTF. Fucking media. I never heard that and I lived next door for a lot of my life. I read about how it’s the guns and it was his politics and shit that, in the end, is all just wasted air and words from people who know nothing.

It makes me wonder about what other lies they have force-fed us. All the other mass shootings. There are so many these days that we are all numb to it. Until it happens to you, in your neighborhood and everyone begins to take sides.

There was and still is so much bullshit being thrown around, that I stopped watching the news and Facebook and started praying instead. And I’ll keep doing it. And when and if they catch him, I will log in to see the eyes of a boy I knew his whole life, even if we were not close and I hadn’t seen him in a few years and I will cry, probably a big ugly cry, like the ones of the last few days.

I will speak now because I know that even though he was never deployed and never saw any ‘real action’, he still got broken. He cracked and there was no one to pick him up. I know he was clearly at war with his own mind and there was no one who did anything. And I know this because I have been there. Because I have fought against a system that was broken for my entire life.

Unless the list of wounded tips the scales, it appears that most of those killed were of a certain demographic group.

I will speak because I know from personal experience that when you go into a psych ward their biggest goal is to ‘stabilize’ you. That usually means copious amounts of drugs until you are drooling and can’t think, so how could you hurt yourself or anybody else. And then you are on your own. Just stay on your medication. But you don’t. Because you can’t think, and you can’t function, and you can’t feel your life. So they begin by switching things up, try this pill and this one and this one, on and off medications while they tell you to go to therapy and ‘fake it until you make it’, but you can’t because now you don’t even know who you are. But if you are at least able to show up at work and continue to function as society says you should, then you are ‘getting better’. And in the end you have been on 1,800 different medications and you still feel like shit. And you are still hearing voices and you are still seeing things that are not there and you still feel as though everyone is against you, and they say they are not, but the truth is that now you are somehow, ‘less than’ the person you used to be. And you know it to be true because it is inside you.

So you’re angry because you still don’t know what the fuck happened to get you here and now your family is against you and the world is against you and you begin to take it out on everyone around you. You lose your family, your friends, your children, everyone you care for. And you don’t understand why. If they still speak to you, they do it cautiously, slowly gauging your mood. And this hurts. And on it goes.

I am not saying this is what happened to Robbie. I am saying this is my own experience and the experience of many others.

Men in this country are fucked. We teach them to man up and not cry and tell them to figure things out on their own. We expect them to be strong and not show weakness. We do not teach people to feel it until you heal it, we teach them to fake it till you make it. And it fails.

Then we tell them to be soft and because you shed a tear or can’t get your shit together, you are not a real man.

And for those with mental illness, and for our veterans, especially, our country has failed them and in turn, failed us.

Our country is us.

We have failed spectacularly.

The time it takes to heal a cracked mind is not acceptable in this country. The methods required are not as mainstream as they would lead us to believe.

Healing is hard, it requires much introspection, if you are to succeed. Which requires time in the quiet and nature. It requires sitting still. It sometimes looks like just plain remembering to eat a meal and drink your water and to have a solid bedtime routine, so you sleep at night. It is accepting your own failures and your weaknesses and figuring out how to go on. One teeny, tiny step at a time. It is learning how to quiet your own mind and when you can’t, it is learning to sit with it and question what it is that is unsettling you and it is seeing the ugly answers. Then it is actually doing something about it, while you feel as though you are walking through three feet of snow in a blizzard. It is inching forward while it feels as though you are sliding backwards. It sucks. There is no easy timeline.

But time is money, right? Let’s all medicate and get back to work. Money, money, money.

With every one of these incidents, more people crack.

With every one of these incidents more prescriptions for antidepressants and antianxiety medications go up. You are welcome, big pharma. Go fuck yourselves.

With every one of these incidents, people rage more and more about guns. Thank you but I want my people to have guns. If I didn’t believe in the constitution, I would live elsewhere. If you wish to sit here blind and rely on our government to protect you, you can go, I’m fine with that.

History books are filled with tyrannical governments. Except for the parts where they have begun to try and change history.

I watched as people commented about how this doesn’t happen in countries where guns are banned, like the UK. Well, duh. But remember the Revolutionary War? The reason for the second amendment? England went to war against their own countrymen in the United States? Yeah, ok. I’ll keep mine, if you don’t want any, that’s fine. Like most gun owners, I will do my best to protect you too.

Last night I watched in horror as the search warrant was executed at Robbie’s family home.

While the police and every law enforcement agency for miles sat a quarter of a mile from the house I grew up in and made a show of calling out to him to come out, I listened for the shots that would end his life, while deep inside I knew he wasn’t there because he is smarter than that.

Then the camera panned and I saw the throngs of people lining the road and I knew those weren’t Bowdoin’s people. That was the media. And, instantly I thought of Waco. I hated that my mind went there, but things were beginning to get a weird déjà vu feeling.

I thought about the helicopter track, and I thought about how he threatened his unit, which is against the law. I thought about how they sent him home. I thought about how Maine has no ‘red law.’ And things started feeling too convenient.

And why lights out in Bowdoin last night, while the ‘search’ was underway?

I would want all my lights on, so he knows I’m home, and he doesn’t come in to face my guns.

I saw the reports of his search history and his likes and of how I have Google searched somewhere along the lines of all those things and I wondered what they would say about me.

I watched them at his family home and knew he was too smart to be in there and too smart to have a phone on him. He is a Mainer, born and raised, a man who when he signed the papers dedicating himself to the service, during a time when we were ‘in conflict,’ he signed knowing he may go and not come back. And he did that for you and me.

He was trained by our military and grew up in the woods of Maine. C’mon now.

And we are searching the river today? Two days later? When his car was found there Wednesday night? Seriously.  Draining a river? I didn’t even know that was possible.

Do I need to say it again? Trained by the military and Maine.

I am wondering about so many things right now. And my mind has gone into some dark rooms I did not desire it to go.

When they let him go, were they hoping he would shoot up his unit? Then they would kill him there and it would be just another mental soldier. We need gun control, turn the page.

Did he surprise them with this attack on family people? On regular people out for a good time on a random Wednesday night?

I can almost guarantee, although it will never be said, that they knew his likes and dislikes and searches long before yesterday. Because if they want to they will know yours and they will know mine, and we can’t stop it.

Robert Card is a good man who got a raw deal and he hurt a shit ton of people and, if they get the chance, they will scapegoat him.

I have seen the calls for his head.

An election year is coming, and this is all sure convenient. It is not what party you belong to. I really don’t care. I myself don’t believe in any of them anymore. We have watched them fail us again and again and the only thing you could do at this point is break it down and start over, and I don’t trust one politician to do that.

They will use this to distract us from what is going on elsewhere, they will use this to get more tax money to put into their pockets, while we all suffer and hide from ‘the fanatical gunmen that roam our streets’. All the while talking about how ‘the system is broken’ and they will go and make more drugs that dumb us down and make us more docile and ready to follow.

We failed Robert Card and we failed the victims families and I am disgusted, as you should be.

Are we the people ready to make some real changes? Can we unite? Or are we going to let them tear us apart?

I fear that they will shoot him down, Bonnie and Clyde style, regardless of whether he has guns on him, in effect, murdering my family’s friend in the name of public safety and gun control, ensuring we will never hear his side. I pray he is brought in alive so the families of the victims can have some closure, even though that’s not a real thing. There is never closure.

I know that right now, I pray he has a chance to make his amends to God and all those he hurt. That’s another challenge for those of us weak enough to get broken by something. You then face everyone with the full knowledge of what you did while you were ‘out of your mind.’ I just pray he gets a chance to.

And for now, all I can think, as Veteran’s Day is almost upon us and with a mustard seed of faith, is “Run, Robbie, Run.

Update: May you rest in the peace you yearned for. Thank you for your service.