The media has been all over a tragic story out of Georgia today. It has caused me to reflect on my deeds, my addiction, and a sense of uselessness about not being able to fight the fight to fix stuff for other people.
I'm also outraged that all the media outlets I've seen are leaning into political correctness and hateful finger-pointing instead of taking this opportunity to shine some productive light on one of our society's worst-kept secrets.
Eight people, seven of them women, have been killed by a single gunman. All the victims were in massage parlors or so-called spas. Six of the ladies were of Asian descent.
The media is spending almost all their coverage today with what seems to me to be their hope that this is a racial hate-crime targeting Asians. Yeah, that would be an awful thing, and yes, there has been an increased number of attacks on that ethnic community in recent years. But making that the central part of their journalistic guessing is deflecting attention from another real problem, and the opportunity that such a horrible event may present.
Out of dozens of stories about this tragedy today, I've seen two that mentioned — almost in passing — that the shooter had admitted to police that he has a sex addiction problem and had frequented these establishments. One anchor followed that report with a comment that was basically a 'whatever' disconnect as she introduced her next guest, and together they bashed the politicians they hate and promoted the narrative that makes them feel productive.
Maybe I'm not being fair here, but massage parlors — particularly, but not exclusively, the Asian variety — unleashed my sex addiction, and I'm too aware of what goes on in most of these establishments. I do not want to get graphic here, and neither do I want to cast aspirations on legitimate massage therapy businesses, but I'm pretty sure that the only person the killer of these likely sex-workes was hating was himself.
He did an awful thing. The insanity of his addiction turned against others, and people are dead who should not be. More often than not, the person who dies is the addict who can see no other way out. Apparently, this young man's addict brain convinced him he could solve his problem by making other people dead. I grieve for everyone involved, including his parents, who had the unthinkable tasks of acknowledging this was their son and then turning him in.
I've never heard anyone express a desire to harm the people who work their craft in these so-called businesses. That has never even crossed my mind as a solution, but I have been frustrated and concerned at watching the proliferation of massage spas with very little community effort to keep them from becoming sex shops. Instead, when it all goes bad, we gravitate to conclusions that ignore the issues of sex-trafficking and addiction so we can vent our vitriol toward stupidity.
Again, that's just me, and I could be wrong. But I'm not. And I don't know what I can do about it other than shed tears for a fellow addict, for a society that allows this to grow and feed the disease, and for eight dead victims who did not deserve this.
When I first heard the news about the shootings last night, I knew what the story would be. I don't know how I knew, it did not resonate with me in any way, but I knew this was someone like me who horribly lost his way. I want to be wrong about this. I hope to be so embarrassed at how wrong I am that I rip this from the web and keep my mouth shut about future incidents and journalism gone south. There is no good answer to explain something like this, but I really don't want it to be this one. But I know it is.
Several months ago, I realized I needed to do an amend to the women I had taken advantage of in these places. I could not figure out a way to do it in person, so like the other amends I've done in only written form (under the guise of not doing further harm), I put my sadness, apologies, and grief out where it might get read by the right person at the right time. I know that's not much, but it's all I got for now. A Mend in Time tells more of my story and my grief.
It is one of the curious paradoxes of the program that I must remember some things that I so much want to forget.
–JR
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