Is it every week we see a story on the news about a man killing his family and then turning the gun on himself? It feels like it. The stories don't stay on the front page for more than a few hours before they are sent to the archives where we can forget they ever invaded our senses. Today it was Louisiana, last week Texas, before that Maryland. Always tragic, always suicides. And why? Because we are in a recession? Because our lives are that awful? Or because a similar story rooted in our psyches to the point where we forgot what was wrong and what was right and what was real and why there is anything at all? Maybe the man in Louisiana thought he was the man he read about from Texas, or maybe he thought he was just following the script.

There's no way to know. There's hardly any way to empathize. We read this stories, we react more or less depending on how nearby it happened. We resign ourselves to the fact that it will happen again, soon. What else can we do? It's a dark hole in the flimsy fragment of our society. These things happen and it's easy to say it should have been spotted when he didn't show up to Church, or when he called a female coworker something derogatory. But no. It's never something that can be seen ahead of time, by the family or even by the killer. It is a momentary snap, an offroad car, a tear in the universe. How can we prevent a tear in the universe?

I wonder if in prehistoric times teenage boys would wake up one morning, grab a nearby ax and chop his family to pieces while they slept before jumping off a cliff. I wish the answer ever came back as yes, that probably happened. But no. For some reason it feels as if what we are seeing on the news every week is unique to our times. It is an animalistic reaction to a world which has removed the animal from our being. It is an act of violence against the wave of progress, against the television screen and against our mundane existences. It is an appeal to the world to be reborn as nothing more than a drop of blood in a stormy ocean. Life would be easier then wouldn't it? To follow the scent of violence from meal to meal and listen to nothing more than the wolf inside.

But we can't be wolves. We have to tame the wolves inside of us because we aren't animals anymore. But isn't there a danger if we never let the wolf out? It is naive to think we aren't animals. We breathe, we pump blood, we fornicate, and we die the same death as our wolf cousins. What happened in Louisiana, and what will happen next week down the street from someone very similar to yourself, is the voice of nature. It is the world's way of saying I'm still here, I'm in each one of you, and I'll be here when you're gone, Don't forget me because I'm still ruler here and you are just leasing a small acreage.