This year, I have tried as best possible to uphold a strict no violence diet of the things I consume. It mostly applies to the things I watch and read — I have steered clear of books, movies and TV shows that feature acts of violence — but it also literally applies to my diet. This summer I maintained a pesceterian diet, which might be fudging it a bit considering the fate of the fish, but it still feels more humane to me than eating slaughtered animals.

This weekend, I have to take a brief digression from this course to see the new film “One Battle After Another.” I watched previews for this film a couple times and thought to myself that this is exactly the thing I’m trying to avoid. But then the rave reviews for the Paul Thomas Anderson film started to roll in and I learned that it is at least a partial adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel “Vineland.”

I’m a huge Pynchon fan and like everything he’s written, with two small exceptions — the novels “Inherent Vice” and “Vineland.” These just happen to be the two novels Anderson has adapted into films and while “Inherent Vice” turned out to be the mess the novel suggested it might be, “Vineland” is such a crazy novel that I can’t possibly miss an attempt to bring it to life.

I’ll see how this brief return to violent escapism turns out for me this weekend.

But back to the idea of a violence diet, I am convinced that our country desperately needs one, even if that doesn’t mean giving up meat consumption. The violence in the art we consume is overwhelming and while I’m not arguing that they directly cause violent acts — other countries consume similar art without mass shootings — something has to be done.

This morning we get the news of another sniper shooting three people at an ICE facility in Dallas. This is terrible news on two levels, first because of the human toll, but secondly because it reinforces the right wing trope that the left has become violent, which supports a Trump crackdown on groups that bear no responsibility for what has happened.

We clearly seem to have entered a new era in lone-gunman violence, where political messaging has overtaken random shootings. This violence will not lessen with the focus on the politics of the shootings — it will only encourage more disturbed people to follow this path to global infamy. Given the right wing obsession with Rene Girard right now, they should recognize the shootings as examples of mimetic desire.

The root problem in America right now is two fold — an insane amount of weaponry available to the average person at obtainable costs and an untreated mental health crisis. By the way, this is the one area of broad agreement among American voters, Republican and Democrat, young and old, that we have a mental health crisis and the country needs to do more to address it.

I’ll close with a couple gentle suggestion, in addition to violence diets. There is a form of mental health treatment for PTSD and other types of trauma called EMDR. The clinical research overwhelmingly backs the efficacy of this method. Studies show that patients need only a few sessions of EMDR to completely wipe out the negative effects of trauma, permanently. I know, it sounds like some kind of voodoo, but the research is clear and consistent on this.

I believe there need to be pilots and tests of EMDR not just as a chosen treatment for known trauma, but as a routine treatment provided to young people at a certain age (16 sounds reasonable to me.) If we could create a generation of trauma free young adults, how many cultural pathologies might we wipe out?

My other public policy suggestion, which I alluded to in an essay a few days ago, is to explore putting microdoses of lithium into drinking water. Given the ridiculous removal of fluoride in water these days, it might be difficult to accomplish, but the clinical research again backs the effectiveness of small daily doses of lithium in decreasing suicide rates.

Mass shootings, by the way, are almost always desperate suicidal acts as well.