Don't Let People Get Too Far Gone -- Friends, Co-Workers, Neighbors, Et Al

This topic can get confusing for people. Let me try to sketch it out for you.

I started thinking about it just recently again because I watched an EWU (Explore With Us) video about a case involving a man named Sonny Kim. He killed his sister (potentially half-sister), and the EWU Crew got interviews with his parents — who forgave him, ostensibly — and him. He’s in a mental facility as opposed to a standard, hardcore prison. The interview with him, which is audio-only, is at the back of this clip:

In that interview, the interviewers ask if he has any advice for families with troubled kids. He says, pretty simply:

“Don’t let people get too far gone.”

I think this is pretty important in terms of how we deal with a lot of societal and people elements. I’ve had problems with addiction in my own life, and I can tell you that, as you go through addiction, you will alienate people left and right based on things you said or actions you committed while intoxicated. Some of these people will cast you aside and never speak to you again, even though in many ways the root cause of the addiction is your lack of a community.

Most people that alienate you do so in the supposed interest of “self-care,” I.e. “I need to focus on myself” and/or “I cannot have you around my children” or something to that extent. I believe in self-care in the most general sense — who doesn’t like mani-pedis, right? — but I think the term has been hijacked to mean you can avoid uncomfortable social situations, even if you’re hurting another person in the process. It's a paradox, but many people choose themselves in a given situation, so it perpetuates.

I’ve said this before in other posts, but I highly doubt anyone emerges from a womb thinking, “My goal in life is to shoot up a school and kill people there.” As such, something has to happen between (a) the womb and (b) someone walking into a school with an AR-15. In reality, obviously, lots of things happen. And while it’s easy to blame and scapegoat after the fact, or fight about the release of specific manifestos and whatnot, the reality is that lots of people fail mass violence offenders. Lots of people ignore signs, and lots of people “let them get too far gone.”

Do I think that if we hugged people more or smiled at them more, we’d have less shootings? Probably not. I don’t think it’s a direct comparison. But I think in general we have problems with connective people tissue, I.e. knowing neighbors and saying hi and being friendly, and we have problems with empathy, I.e. understanding what someone else is going through at the specific moment and trying to relate to it.

I can tell you as someone that has experienced both addictive tendencies and infertility — two topics that most people don’t understand and even stigmatize — it can be very lonely out there trying to navigate those things. Some of my times in bars drinking 12 beers before 2pm is tied to that. Is it ultimately my fault and something I need to adjust? Yes. But lots of people also “let me get too far gone” by not really caring or reaching out.

The problem is mine to solve, but I didn’t wholly create it either.

Life gets busy for people and they become overwhelmed trying to please their boss, their spouse/partner, their children, their parents, their siblings, their friends, their neighbors, et al. It’s hard. No doubt. Certain people fall down the priority list, be it via proximity or kids’ ages or something else, and we don’t see their struggles and we let them — through no tangible goal of our own — get too far gone.

If we had a little more empathy and a few more check-ins, maybe life would be better and easier and we’d have less of the people problems.

Does that sound right, or naive?