Why You Can Get Shot in America for…Knocking on the Wrong Door
Meet America's Newest Institution of Social Collapse: the Doorstep Shooting.
First, the 16 year old boy who was shot for…knocking on the wrong door. He was shot by an elderly man twice, including once in the head. Then, the young woman. Shot for…driving into the wrong driveway with her friends. A man took out a gun and opened fire, killing her. Then, finally, perhaps the most disturbing one of all. Cheerleaders. Who opened the door to a car that they thought was theirs. Realizing their mistake, they went to their car. The owner of the first car followed them. They rolled down their window to apologize — and…
The man came up to them. Roth rolled the window down to apologize and explain her mistake. The man pulled a gun and fired into the car, striking both girls, Roth told KTRK. Roth had a graze wound that was treated on scene. Washington was shot in the back and a leg.
"Payton opens the door and she starts throwing up blood," Roth told KTRK.
First responders flew Washington to hospital. Her spleen was removed and she is scheduled for more surgeries to repair damage to multiple organs, a coach said on Instagram late on Tuesday.
What on earth is going on here? Who in their right mind is…threatened…by…cheerleaders? Teenagers? Teenage girls? What possible explanation can someone have for following teenage girls for making the simple mistake of opening the wrong door…and shooting them point blank?
This is now happening so often that in the middle of preparing this piece, news broke that a six year old girl and her parents were shot for… her basketball rolling into a neighbour's yard.
What the actual…
There's been a lot of discussion about these events. I wanted to take some time to gather my thoughts. Three? That's a trend, not an anomaly. Three — now four — in a row. What's happening here goes like this.
America's seeing the rise of a new institution. An institution of social collapse. There are good institutions — marriage, European hugs and kisses on the street, the way French chairs at bistros face the street, so that you watch people…peacefully. And then there are bad ones. Implosive ones. Ugly ones. Ones that arise in the context of social collapse. Institutions in this sense means: everyday events that we begin to take for granted. You don't question — most don't — the way chairs at a French bistro face the street. It just is. That's an institution. This is one, too, but of a diametrically opposed kind.
America's pioneered many gruesome and strange institutions of social collapse. The mass shooting. The school shooting. "Medical bankruptcy," which doesn't exist in most other countries. Medical debt, student debt, lunch debt. People never retiring, never taking vacations, the way people have stopped saying hello to one another on the street, distrustful, resentful, fearful. These things don't exist much outside America — certainly not at mass, daunting, crippling social scales. And all these institutions haven't just accelerated during American collapse, as America's fallen apart, socially, economically, culturally, politically — and we'll come back to that — they are the everyday experience of living in a collapsing society.
This appears to be the rise of a whole new institution of social collapse. The doorstep shooting. Now, in America, you can get killed…just for knocking on the wrong door.
It's going to be hard for me to explain just how completely bizarre and disturbing that is, because by now, sadly, Americans are steeped in the institutions of collapse. Collapse is a slow burn. We adapt. That's not always a good thing, learning to tune it all out, shrug and get on with your day, normalize horror, terror, chaos, dysfunction. It gets you by, but it has a price, which is that you grow numb. To the bitter reality of collapse.
There's nowhere else in the world that this new institution is now rising. Nowhere. I can't think of a single other country, no matter how broken or ravaged, where people get killed just for knocking on the wrong door. Sure, there are violent nations, broken, unable to really police brutality. There, gangs and mobs and mafias rule. The men who shot these poor innocents — like the cheerleaders — weren't any those things. Not hitmen, and this wasn't a war over turf, power, drugs, property, or human chattel, as is so often the case in countries where brutality rules. They were just…random men. So this is a very different thing. It feels off, in a whole new way. And that is because it really is both of those things.
You are now witnessing the rise of a new institution of collapse. Think of how many Americans have had to adapt to. First, mass shootings, which became normalized, beginning in the 80s or so. Then school shootings began to happen, around the 90s — and grew to the point where they occur regularly today. Along the way, all these other institutions got normalized too — Americans had to just learn to live with healthcare that'd put them in lifelong debt, or education that would, never retiring, and so forth. This is a new one.
The doorstep shooting.
So. Why is this happening? Two explanations have been offered so far, and it's not that they're wrong…it's just that there's more to the story. The first, of course, is guns. I'm not saying guns aren't a problem. They are. A very big one. And yet there are plenty of nations in which guns abound, like, say, I don't know, Pakistan, or Colombia, or Mozambique, or Uruguay. Each of those nations has millions of guns. But if I knock on the wrong door there, I won't get shot to death. I'll probably just be offered…a cup of tea. Even gentle Canada has plenty of guns — one for every three Canadians. Did you know that? Knock on the wrong door in Canada? You'll probably make a friend. Nobody's shooting schoolgirls and teen boys in any of those places, despite, yes, their many problems. Only in America.
Let me emphasize that I'm not arguing against gun control. I'm saying that the story of why America is developing institution after institution of social collapse — right down to this new one, the doorstep shooting — goes deeper. It's about guns, but it's also about a society, and how it goes wrong. Wrong enough, that violence just begins to erupt…in parking lots…in once-peaceful neighborhoods…on doorsteps.
When you look at America, what do you see? I see a nation at breaking point. America's sick. I don't mean that as a moral judgment, the way a preacher would — I'm repelled, disgusted, etc. I mean it the way a doctor says it. Because when the social scientist in me looks at America? He sees a profoundly unwell society. Not in abstract ways, but very concrete ones.
America's at breaking point. You can see it in the statistics, and I mean all of them. Let's take a bellwether example of how a nation feels. Its suicide rate. America has the highest suicide rate among developed countries, and it's the only one that's rising fast. There was a chart going around recently that pointed this out in detail. It pointed out that suicide rates in the U.S. have risen 30% in roughly two decades. Meanwhile, the research showing that depression and anxiety are on the rise is voluminous by now.
Breaking point.
More than half of United States respondents — around 55 percent — reported feelings of high stress the day prior to being polled, according to a Gallup press release, while 45 percent said they felt worried "a lot of the day," and 22 percent said the same of anger.
Americans' stress levels were significantly higher than the global average of 35 percent, leaving the U.S. tied for fourth (alongside Albania, Iran and Sri Lanka) in Gallup's ranking of the world's most stressed populations.
And that research is from before the pandemic.
You don't need research to tell you this, really. We all know it. We experience it. In America, you can see it on people's faces. Harried, haunted, scrunched up in anxiety, hollow with despair. Nobody says hi to each other in the States because, well, nobody has the time or energy to. I spend an hour talking to people — old ladies, neighbors, the gay couple who lives around the corner — in my little European neighborhood, because it's a luxury we can afford in social democracies. But in America? Nobody has a free hour — LOL — to spare for chit-chat. Life is too stressful.
It's stressful because just existing is a constant, perpetual battle. It's harder, of course, for some than for others — women, minorities, the LGTBQ, kids, all of who are under severe, constant attack. And yet the theme of American life is that it doesn't have a social contract. Not really. It has the absence of one. You know it by now — it's summed in all those cheesy, foolish code-words. Personal responsibility! Freedom! Bootstraps!! All that just means: it's every man, woman, and child for themselves.
No "safety nets" — that's what Americans are told to call them. In the rest of the world? They're just…the social contract. In Canada and Europe, having healthcare and affordable education isn't, LOL, a safety net…they're basic human rights. Even if they're under attack, even there, still the understanding of how societies work is very different. Americans don't have much in the way of public goods at all, and that's left them…
At breaking point. Think of American life. What else do we know about? 65% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, unable to save, right on the edge, most of their lives. The edge of what? One mistake, and it's game over. You lose what little you have. The majority of Americans struggle to pay the bills. Life is a constant, bruising battle for existence, for subsistence. You wake up every day, and have to step into the arena, over and over again.
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But what does that do to people?
It ruptures social bonds. And this, too, you can see amply documented in the statistics. What makes America unique? I can't think of another country where social bonds have just catastrophically imploded the way they did in America. Not my opinion — this finding goes back to Robert Putnam's 1990s work, which he summed up in his book, "Bowling Alone." He found America was experiencing a calamitous decline in social capital — ties and bonds between people, among social groups, and what they create, produce, reap, sow, are: trust, community, belonging, meaning, purpose, happiness.
I can't overstate this, either. America's the loneliest country I've ever lived in, and I've lived in a lot. The statistics show it — this stunning collapse in social bonds and ties — but the reality of living it something different. Step outside America, and it's genuinely surprising how social life is. You have to make several hours a day just for social time — have to. There's no choice, really. I can't walk down my European street and just ignore everyone saying hi to me — that'd be as weird as stopping for a long chat in America. I wasn't kidding when I said in most other countries, knock on the wrong door, and you'd be invited in for tea — unless you looked like a maniac, I suppose. American life isn't like that. Social bonds and ties have completely ruptured, because that is what "breaking point" means, formally, technically, in a precise sense.
So I don't just mean emotionally. I mean that Americans are at breaking point in a deeper sense — I'm not just playing therapist here, though of course, there's nothing wrong with that. I mean that America's broken as a society, ties and bonds ripped apart. Much of that is because economically, they cannot make ends meet. They go deeper and deeper into debt, while inequality skyrockets, insecurity soars, and downward mobility becomes the norm, and of course, that only adds to the anxiety and stress and anger of just spending another day fighting for some sort of existence, which then goes onto rupture and sunder social bonds. Breaking point. Collapse.
Now we're at a point where I think we can understand something about this grim new institution, the doorstep shooting.
American life is a zero-sum game. For me to win, someone else has to lose. This is the mentality of breaking point. People aren't colleagues, friends, neighbors, even citizens in the shared project of democracy and civilization. They're rivals, adversaries, enemies. They're taught they have to be that way — kid, you better learn how to be competitive! How else are you going to earn a living! You've gotta be ruthless, indifferent, calculating, individualistic, materialistic, in it for number one. And everyone else? Who cares? They're not your friends. And you're not here to make friends. You're here to win. The game of life. Because if you don't win? You die. Only the strong survive, kid. The weak? They perish.
And far too many Americans have bought into this mentality. Maybe not you, gentle reader. But this mentality? America's famous for it, around the world. And it's encouraged and stoked from day one. It's taught in schools, the Ivy League's famous for it, the American workplace is notorious for it, culture celebrates it even in all those trashy reality shows. It's reinforced at every point possible, really. These people aren't your friends. They're your enemies, adversaries, rivals. Trust no one. Social bonds and ties don't matter — all that does is you surviving. This chaos, this dystopia, this madness. No matter the price to anyone else. But then how does anything ever get better?
Put all that together, and it's not too hard to see why the doorstep shooting is becoming the newest — and grimmest yet — institution of American collapse. Here's a society that teaches people everyone else is a rival, an enemy. Someone to be fought, just for basics, like healthcare, retirement, a bit of money, a place to live. Subsistence and existence aren't rights — they have to be earned. Usually, by taking them away from someone else — consider how rights are being serially attacked by a more and more fanatical right now, from book bans to shredding women's basic freedoms.
Breaking point.
You can feel it in the air in America, these days. The breaking point thing is palpable. It's not that America's ultra-violent, not that it's ruled by gangs or mobs or mafias like other failed states. But there is now the sense that anything could happen. Almost anywhere. That you might just be standing at the mall, watching people go by, and — bang — some madman with a gun just opens fire. That you could be talking to a friend at a cafe, and some lunatic could attack you just because your conversation included the clearly controversial ideas that women should have inalienable right and kids should be able to read books. You can sense this kind of pregnant silence in the air, and you can't help but wonder: is there some lunatic, right around the corner, who's going to…open fire…scream abuse…shout a death threat…do something violent, brutal, insane, and perfectly crazy? For no real reason?
That's the feeling of breaking point. You can tell me you don't feel that, but I'd say: who are you kidding? There are more mass shooting than there are days in the year. The fanatics are taking away rights from people they think of as subhumans faster than anyone can keep track of. Every lunatic feels empowered and emboldened to do their worst. Nobody can make ends meet, unless you're, LOL, a psychotically greedy billionaire, and everyone's stressed out, depressed, anxious, and that's before you have to factor in being attacked by some violent fanatic with a gun, or just a Telegram account.
This is what statistics like ruptured social bonds and catastrophic plunges in social capital and topping the charts in negative emotions predict for societies. What they mean. What their message is. Eventually? Breaking point. People just…explode. So far, that violence has been channeled, succcesfully, by demagogues like Trump and DeSanits. But it can and will and does take more inchoate, sudden, explosive forms, too — when it becomes normalized, incentivized, manufactured so constantly not just by disinformation and Big Lies and demagoguery, but more deeply, by a society that's become a zero-sum game. You have to lose in order for me to win. Your life? It means nothing to me. None of us have the right to exist, and certainly not you. It's me or you. And I've got a gun. Watch out, kid. Watch out, cheerleader.
Don't come knocking on my door. All this violence in me? This hate? All these negative emotions, simmering away, unchecked by social bonds or ties, fueled by demagogues, sparked by decline, reinforced by hearing it's me or you, and I'm the superior one, and you're just the subhuman? Don't come near me, kid. You dirty, pathetic thing. You infection. You're the one who took my chances, opportunities away. I could have been somebody, if it wasn't for people like you. So don't take one step closer. Don't talk to me, don't look at me. I'm ready to explode. What's behind my door? Breaking point.
Umair
April 2023
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