I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

by Jason Pargin

In the time since, she had developed a very specific theory about the potential for domestic terror in the USA spreading, not as a mass political movement but as a social contagion. The country was full of isolated weirdos who were rapidly trying to find ways to make their lives meaningful and, she believed, would eventually run out of options that didn’t involve scattered corpses in a food court. Her views deviated sharply from the bureau’s in that she believed all mass shootings were acts of terrorism, even if they didn’t conform to the government’s suffocatingly narrow definition of the term. They believed “terrorism” required a specific ideology, but these modern attacks were a grab bag of loosely held beliefs that secretly all pointed in the same direction: a desire to destroy the ability and willingness of individuals to gather in public and form communities. They were attacks on social cohesion, pushing a vision of the future that, in many cases, not even the attackers were aware of.

People who had rough childhoods, guys like you and me, you grow up scared of being happy. It don’t feel right. You find yourself sabotaging it, because you’re so scared that you’re gonna lose it that you’d rather just trash it yourself, so at least you can say it was your choice. So, you go hunting for grievances, to give yourself an excuse.”

“Oh, goddamn it,” grunted Abbott. “It says these Takis expired a month ago. Shit, I knew they tasted off.”