A few years ago, a photographer in China captured a sign in a government office with one of those amusing translation errors. The sign said, in Chinese, 伤残评定办 (“Disability Assessment Office”), which was rendered in English as “Office of Mayhem Evaluation.” I found this phrase so charmingly bureaucratic that when I started writing about terrorism, I considered having it posted on my office door.

We at the American bureau of the Office of Mayhem Evaluation have suffered through a busy and perplexing few days. On Saturday, 72-year-old Huu Can Tran allegedly shot and killed 10 people in Monterey Park, California. On Monday, 66-year-old Chunli Zhao allegedly shot and killed seven people in Half Moon Bay, about 400 miles up the California coast. The first shooter is dead and left only fleeting traces of a motive. Zhao is in custody, and his motives are similarly resistant to evaluation, although according to early reports he is an ornery type. Apparently he was once accused of threatening to attack someone with a knife, and of attempting to smother him with a pillow (that most comfy of deadly weapons). Adding to the perplexity are these men’s age and ethnicity: both senior citizens, and both ethnically Chinese.

[Read: An Asian American grief]

Humans are by nature self-obsessed and prone to seeking meaning and patterns, especially in atrocities. I chalk up some of the early reactions to these tendencies: Commentators saw that Asian Americans were murdered, and speculated (wrongly, it appears) that the shootings were the most recent in the string of random, racially motivated attacks against Asian Americans, especially old folks. Surely when someone commits mass murder, he has a reason, even a bad one. So we speculate, sometimes in ways that inflame our anxieties, and wait for someone to discover the killer’s manifesto or rants on social media.

Sometimes that discovery arrives. But in my career of mayhem evaluation, I have found that a manifesto, or indeed a coherent motive, is a courtesy many mass killers fail to pay. The expectation that killers will explain themselves in clear, grammatical prose, as Anders Behring Breivik did, or in poetry, as members of the Islamic State did, will lead us on many a snipe hunt. Most shooters don’t think straight. For that matter, most nonshooters don’t either.

That is true even of those who meticulously plan their massacre. To date, the highest body count in an American mass shooting is held by a 64-year-old professional gambler at Las Vegas’s Mandalay Bay in 2017. Like the men suspected of this past weekend’s killings, he was unusually old. When the Las Vegas police issued their report on the atrocity, they came up with no motive whatsoever: no hatred of country-music fans, of particular races or religions, or even of humans in general. He was indiscriminate in all senses. Still others on the psychopath spectrum seem to have killed purposelessly, like the German who lethally injected several dozen care-home residents out of “boredom.” Coleridge called this species of evil “motiveless malignity,” and it describes minds far less sophisticated than Iago’s.

Such vacuous mayhem leaves little to evaluate. But in the aftermath of these horrors, we can at least try to maintain standards of decency by observing a few precautions. The first is to show restraint in drawing conclusions based on the killer’s or victims’ names, ethnicity, race, or religion. Yes, a shooter named Abdelhamid Abaaoud is more likely to be a jihadist than one named Huu Can Tran. But there are irritable loners of many races and creeds, and there’s little harm in waiting a day or two to make sure that you’ve distinguished the ordinary lunatics from the ideological fanatics.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: On murders, especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel]

The second is to remember, contrary to all instincts, that the story might not be about you—not about your pet subject, not about your community, not about the issues that affect you and occupy your thoughts, no matter how important or worthy those issues may be. When five staff members of the Capital Gazette were murdered in Annapolis, Maryland, in 2018, I watched the news and assumed that journalism was under attack. More precisely, it turned out, journalists were under attack for reporting accurately on a violent creep, who responded murderously. The beef was mostly personal. The victims died in the line of duty, but my preoccupation with press freedom—for which I make no apology—made me assume that the massacre was an attack on the profession itself.

Similarly, Asian Americans can die without Asian Americans as a class coming under attack. I grieve for the individuals slain in California; I am outraged about the beatings of Asian grannies on city streets. But decency forbids my treating the first group’s apparently unrelated deaths as an opportunity to bring attention to the second.

These recent killings, which may or may not remain in the “motive undetermined” category, do raise one issue that is salient irrespective of motive. Americans continue to arm themselves as if the apocalypse is coming in a matter of months, and as if the police have gone on permanent sabbatical. Recently, a relative of mine in New England went to a local bank branch to get documents notarized for her concealed-carry permit. The nice man at the counter, who also offered her favorable intro rates on a new checking account, told her that he was on intimate terms with the application process. “Since the pandemic, everyone’s been coming in to get their gun permits,” he said. Then he confided, probably in contravention of some Bank of America customer-service policy, that he was licensed to carry his Glock in 37 states.

Ideological killers will find guns, one way or another. They’re hard to stop, because they never stop thinking about killing. And as guns become more ubiquitous, the motiveless and impulsive spree killers will be more likely to have one nearby when the impulse strikes—and so they will make up a growing share of these awful incidents. We need to be ready to evaluate both types of mayhem with caution and restraint. And as a matter of policy, the government should try to ensure that the embittered psychos who live among us are armed with nothing more dangerous than a pillow.

• Live updates: Stocks rise after America's economy grew more than expected • McDonald's, In-N-Out Burger and KFC-owner spend millions to block raises for workers • Video: Why small business owners may not feel inflation ease

New Year’s resolutions had barely been resolved before parents across the nation started thinking ahead to summer. The scramble to sign kids up for summer camp begins in January, because limited slots and huge demand have led to a highly competitive environment that verges on absurd. Case in point: Rachael Deane, a mother in Richmond, Virginia, has a summer-camp spreadsheet. She joked to me that it is “more sophisticated than a bill tracker” she uses to follow legislation in her work at a children’s-advocacy nonprofit; the spreadsheet is color-coded, and registration dates are cross-posted onto her work calendar so she can jump into action as soon as slots open.

Deane’s intense approach reflects the state of modern parenthood. The lack of universal child care is a pain point for parents throughout the year, but the summer is a unique headache. As with after-school care, parents have to navigate a confusing patchwork of options, but in the summer, they need a plan for all day, every day, for three months. And society leaves them largely on their own to figure it out: A 2019 survey from the Center for American Progress found that for three-quarters of parents, securing summer care was at least a little bit difficult. The system is essentially a competition that has winners and losers, and rests upon a willful ignorance of the reality of most American families—only one-fifth of all parents are stay-at-home. Change is long overdue.

I believe part of the problem is that in the U.S., education is a right for kids, and a responsibility for the state, while care outside schools, despite being just as vital for child development, is seen as solely the parents’ responsibility. So when the academic calendar ends, the government bows out. As Amanda Lenhart, a researcher who has studied summer care, told me, “We’ve made a decision culturally to push the burden of caring for kids during the summer fully onto parents, and forcing them to manage. It’s in some ways a throwback to an idealized family setup and work setup that never existed for most people anyway.” Indeed, the system’s assumption that one parent (read: the mother) should be available to watch the kids is a prime example of what the historian Stephanie Coontz calls “the way we never were.”

[Read: America’s child-care equilibrium has shattered]

Although some people wax nostalgic about lightly supervised summers spent mainly by themselves or with friends, the landscape has shifted since the 1980s, and this is no longer a viable option for many families. The sociologist Jessica Calarco explained in an interview with the writer Anne Helen Petersen that several factors led to the change. These included new laws about the minimum age at which children can be home alone, and a desire among certain parents for specialty camps to give their kids a leg up in college admissions. In parallel, the economic challenges of running camps drove a decline in options and an increase in prices.

The lack of affordable summer care leads to very different choice sets for parents in different income brackets. The mid-winter dash for summer-camp spots occurs mostly, though not exclusively, among wealthier, more educated parents. Lenhart’s research found that about one-third of parents in 2018 were sending their kids to camp; another study concluded that the kids of college graduates had an attendance rate seven times higher than that of kids whose parents had only a high-school diploma or less.

Parents who go this route face a logistical puzzle: Few summer programs run for multiple weeks, cover the hours when parents are working, and are reasonably affordable. Although many municipal parks-and-recreation departments valiantly try to provide inclusive low-cost options, there simply aren’t enough slots to go around. Making matters worse, camp sign-ups tend to be first come, first served, provoking a page-refreshing scrum more appropriate to acquiring Taylor Swift tickets than securing care for one’s children. I was discussing this topic with my literary agent, Laura Usselman, and she told me that in her small Georgia city, camp registration opens at 9 a.m. on one day in January, and “many of the camps are full by 9:03.”

Lower-income parents, for whom camps are often entirely out of reach, sometimes have to shape their entire work lives around the need for summer care. The Center for American Progress survey found that, to accommodate summer-care needs, more than half of families had “at least one parent [plan] to make a job change that will result in reduced income.” Calarco explained that in her research interviews with mothers, “quite a few have talked about how they made their own career decisions around the fact that their kids would be home in the summers and after school”—choosing a lower-paying job because it was closer to family who could help, for example, or taking part-time gig jobs.

The most obvious solution to this problem—year-round school—has never really gained traction in the United States. A mere 4 percent of U.S. schools have year-round schedules, and these still have substantial breaks. Summer vacation’s place in the American cultural mindset is deeply entrenched; there is also a fair case that children need opportunities for open play and creativity through an extended summer break to complement academic study.

Other countries have different approaches that preserve summer vacation without leaving parents scrambling every year. Municipalities in Sweden, for instance, are required by law to offer parents slots in programs known as fritidshem, or “leisure-time centers,” until their children turn 13. These centers provide both before- and after-school supervision and care during school breaks. In Germany, children have a legal right to day care; although there isn’t a corresponding policy for school breaks, some towns and cities organize comprehensive holiday programming, often in partnership with local schools. It’s not free, but the costs are moderate and financial aid is generally available.

Approaches like these in the U.S. would, of course, require funding, and maybe even legislation. Sadly, this country has shown time and again that it is unwilling to commit major resources to child care, laying the problem at parents’ feet instead. A cultural shift is needed to smooth the path for potential policy shifts. The summer scramble seems unlikely to end unless U.S. society moves its philosophy away from “every family for itself” and toward an understanding that school, work, and child care are all interconnected.

[Read: Why child care is so ridiculously expensive]

There have been recent glimmers of possibility. Although it was interrupted by the pandemic, two New York City council members introduced legislation in early 2020 to offer free summer camp for all youths in the city. Last year, several school districts across the country used pandemic-relief funding to temporarily provide free summer programming. Yet the fact that such policies are new and notable underlines the absurdity of America’s inconsistent ideas about when and where families deserve support. As Lenhart told me, “We’ve decided culturally and politically that the care of very young children, and the care of children in one season [of the year], is a burden to be borne by the family as opposed to spread across the community.”

Child care shouldn’t be a luxury good that the wealthy fight over, the middle class squeezes to acquire, and low-income folks do without. But that’s what it becomes every summer when parents’ options are shelling out for expensive camps, fighting for limited slots in affordable programs, or nothing. Until action is taken, forcing parents to sprint to sign up for summer camp in the dead of winter is a not-so-subtle message about how the nation really feels about them.

Memes rarely endure. Most explode and recede at nearly the same moment: the same month or week or day. But the meme best known as “This Is Fine”—the one with the dog sipping from a mug as a fire rages around him—has lasted. It is now 10 years old, and it is somehow more relevant than ever. Memes are typically associated with creative adaptability, the image and text editable into nearly endless iterations. “This Is Fine,” though, is a work of near-endless interpretability: It says so much, so economically. That elasticity has contributed to its persistence. The flame-licked dog, that avatar of learned helplessness, speaks not only to individual people—but also, it turns out, to the country.

The meme comes from KC Green’s six-panel comic “On Fire.” In the first, the dog, wearing a small bowler hat, sits at a table, surrounded by flames. In the second, the dog smiles brightly and says, “This is fine.” In the third, as the flames get closer, the still-grinning hound takes a drink of what looks to be coffee and says, “I’m okay with the events that are unfolding currently.” In the fourth, he takes another swig. Here, the panels that have so far maintained a consistent color scheme—yellow, brown, orange—introduce a new color: red. As the dog drinks, his left leg catches fire. “That’s okay, things are going to be okay,” the dog says, his leg now stripped of flesh. The final panel brings the obvious conclusion: Things are not going to be okay. The dog, consumed by the fire, melts away.

Green created “On Fire”—an entry in his comic series Gunshow—in January 2013. For him, the comic represented a kind of reassurance in the face of instability: He had begun taking antidepressants, he’s said in interviews, and was worried about whether the medications would be a good fit for him. (The dog’s full name, appropriately: Question Hound.) Green, in creating “On Fire,” was trying to reassure himself. “It kind of feels like you just have to ignore all the insanity around you like a burning house,” he recently told NPR. “And the comic just ended up writing itself after that.”

When “On Fire” went viral a year later—after users posted the comic’s first two panels to Reddit and the image-sharing site Imgur—many of those who amplified it focused on its potential for self-deprecation: It stood in for the small acts of avoidance and complacency and denial that are familiar features of people’s lives. In the dog surrounded by fire, they saw themselves. Students used the meme to describe feeling unprepared for upcoming tests. Workers used it to describe the stresses of their job. This was the “that feeling when” era of the social web—a moment when people were mining their daily experiences for insights that might be turned into shareable media. And “This Is Fine” applied to many of the situations people found themselves in as they navigated the world. The meme was personal. It was relatable. It could shape-shift for any situation. Its three ironized words—this is fine—were a useful stand-in, The Verge’s Chris Plante put it, “for when a situation becomes so terrible our brains refuse to grapple with its severity.”

[Read: The SNL sketch that perfectly mocks our upside-down reality]

Green has compared “This Is Fine” to a “good piece of art,” and the comparison is apt: He made the comic intentionally vague so that it could support very different interpretations. “This Is Fine,” for all its quirky internet-iness, also has a Mona Lisa quality. Question Dog, merrily facing his preventable demise, is effectively smiling and grimacing at once.

By 2016, that flexibility had brought a shift; audiences began to see in the dog not only themselves but their fellow Americans. As many people contended with the fact that Donald Trump might become president—as they watched him announce to the Republican National Convention that “I alone can fix it,” as they reread Orwell, as they wondered what it really might mean to “make America great again”—the dog’s denial broadened to something more national, cultural, collective. Question Hound’s cheerful inertia began to read as a proxy for a shared sense of helplessness: flames everywhere, and nowhere to go.

Once, “the house burning may have just been your final exams,” Green recently told The Washington Post. “Now, it’s feeling like it’s the world, it’s your country.”

Politicians inevitably tried to turn the meme into a message. The GOP’s official Twitter account, reacting to the proceedings of 2016’s Democratic National Convention, invoked “This Is Fine” in an attempt to mock their rivals. Typically, when brands and institutions adopt a meme for their ends, its death will quickly ensue; “This Is Fine,” though, survived. And it has taken on a new sensibility in the process. Question Hound, after years of upheaval and loss—much of it either created or permitted by leaders who, like him, could have put out the fires—doesn’t read merely as a victim. In his willful inaction, he now looks a bit like a villain. He could do something. He chooses not to. He acts out an absurdist version of what so many national politicians have done, essentially, in recent years: He sips his coffee while the world burns. COVID, climate change, fascism, bigotry, mass shootings, book bans, curtailed rights—this is fine, many leaders have said. This is fine, many people have agreed. The flames encroach. Nothing changes.

[Read: The great fracturing of American attention]

But memes are ever malleable. And comics can be rewritten. In 2016, Green created an updated version of “On Fire” with an alternative ending. The new comic is titled “This Is Not Fine.” It begins as the classic comic does: Question Hound, seated by the table, surrounded by the flames. “Th—” he begins. And then he wakes from his stupor. “THIS IS NOT FINE!!” he screams, in panic. And then: “Oh my God everything’s on fire,” he says, as his hat falls off and his eyes bug out of his head. He grabs a fire extinguisher. “There was no reason to let it last this long and get this bad,” he says. And then he douses the flames.