Senseless?
“Oh no!” “Not again!” “What is happening to us?”
How often have these words exploded from our lips upon hearing the latest news of an American carnage? Shootings and bombings, in shopping malls, underground subways, and neighborhood schools--the news is now so frequent as to make it seem normal--another day in the jungle. Violence is directed by one or more armed persons towards one or more others, sometimes known to their assailants, but just as often strangers and innocent bystanders. Their only fault? Being in the wrong place at the wrong moment.
The cover of Time from August, 1993, now 29 years ago, was meant to provoke local and national politicians to write laws that would quell our appetite for the blood of our own species. Nearly two million violent crimes were reported in that one forgettable year, and 24,526 men, women and children were laid to rest, their families’ stories rewritten in words dripping with bitterness and grief. While crime rates have decreased in the ensuing years, they still run higher than our law enforcers would choose. One could argue that things are improving, given the decrease in death rates from the early 1990s until today. Now each of us has a two people per 100,000 better chance of not suffering a murderous death than we did three decades ago. Small comfort, unless you are counting beans rather than lives
Yet even with 72 million more of us now than when Time’s disfigured cover caught our attention, we still have a one in 23,000 chance of being murdered in our country this year. Pretty good odds, but not good enough to heal the wounds of the families and friends of the 19,600 people whose lives were violently taken in the land of the free and the home of the brave last year.
Perhaps we Americans have just gotten too used to it. Our nation’s legacy of gang shootings, bank robberies, bombings and murders is such that not hearing of a killing seems more the anomaly than reports of another tragedy. Yet it is hard to remain unmoved when the news of massed killings in movie theaters and shopping malls, nightclubs and outdoor concert venues too frequently interrupts our favorite media broadcasts. And our horror and rage is hard to contain when violence invades those places we once considered sacred: churches and synagogues, schools and hospitals. But where we once received such reports with disbelief, it now strikes us as part of the landscape of modern life, whether we live in one of our 30 megalopoli (two million or more in population), or in any of the thousands of small cities, towns, villages and hamlets in which people feel at home.
The timeline of my own American memory is littered with names such as Clutter, Whitman and Hinckley—all mass murderers—-along with killing places named Kent State, Columbine, Virginia Tech, Newtown, Aurora and Fort Hood. Three days ago a 21-year old known as Spencer and our venerable capital city were added to our long national catalogue of regrettables. Fortunately, all four of his victims will live to see more days, hopefully not in someone’s telescopic sight.
“Senseless” is a descriptor frequently invoked by journalists when trying to attach a meaning to these acts of violent aggression. To the extent that they defy easy linkage of effects to causes that make immediate sense, the term has its usefulness. But looking over the lengthy roster of killings that have burst into the consciousness of our communal life, it seems that “senseless” not only misses an important point, it distracts from both the causes of and remedies for our violent predilections.
The fact is, most if not all of these killings are anything but senseless. They are certainly unwelcomed, cruel, despicable, irreversible and often unforgiveable-—but senseless they are not. For to the person or persons pulling the trigger or detonating the bombs, they made sense, perfect sense. In fact, because violence seemed so sensible, so necessary, so justified to them, they felt compelled to carry out their plans, regardless of who was hurt, intentionally or collaterally.
For some, violence of any kind never makes sense. That sentiment, I suspect, plays better in public articulation than it does resting quietly in the depths of our hearts and minds. As long as we possess a karmic, lex talionis fixation on retribution, in which wrongs must be righted to square the ledger of justice, violence of some kind—the cutting remark, embarrassing tweet or image, or physical assault—will appear justified by any of us who intend to even some score. If there is any underlying mythic truth imbedded in the novels we read, TV shows and movies we watch, then violence is as sensible as it is normative in our culture.
To more of us than might want to admit, violence makes sense as a legitimate statement of rage. In case after case the motives of those who cross that line of self-control in taking another life involve the release of anger fueled by desperation. A helplessness to address our difficulties, be they economic, legal or relational, can so enshroud us in despair and hopelessness that acting out in a climactic, violent way seems our only recourse. Doing something, even something dramatic and irreversible, can make more sense than patience, endurance or good counsel can deliver in the heat of passion. In deeds that are akin to religious self-flagellation, perpetrators of violence find merit and meaning in actions that will show others how unfairly they were wronged, how deeply they have been hurt.
Even for those whose violence comes across as a misguided stab at securing fame and celebrity, there is a calculated sensibility in the attention and notoriety they are certain to attain. If garnering fifteen minutes of fame is the value above all others to be sought, as our entertainment culture seems to promote, then those lacking a spirit of moral connectivity to others will seek any expression, even a violent one, as both a sensible and proven opportunity for immortality.
I trust that neither of these last two paragraphs will convince you that I am condoning or excusing violent behavior—ever! They are meant, rather, to bring home one point: that those who perpetrate violence against anyone should never be dismissed as crazy by characterizing their issues and motives as “senseless.” For behind most of these killings lies a broken, enraged, or deeply deluded individual who has chosen a violent avenue to seek payback, make a statement or secure fame. To each shooter, stabber and bomber, these actions do make sense, even if to those who are felled, and those left to pick up the pieces, their deeds seem beyond explanation, justification, or exoneration.
What may be most troubling is that violence in our country is increasing in frequency and expanding in its toll on human life. And this trend is more than just the gut-level impressions of a middle-class white man now in the twilight of his years. The data disturbingly supports my perception:
· Between World War I and the ending of World War II there were 14 mass killings in America, in which 1206 people died and two or three times more suffered injury. The Tulsa Race massacre in the 1920s, one of the most shameful incidents of white on black violence our country has ever seen, alone took over 800 of those lives.
· Between the 1950s and the 1970s, the era when Baby Boomers moved from childhood into early adulthood, 39 mass killings made news in which 259 lives were lost. And this occurred during a period of unprecedented social conflict over race, the Vietnam War and political corruption.
· Violence escalated in the last two decades of the 20th Century, with 54 mass murders in which 371 people were killed and thousands more were hospitalized.
· Since 2000 we’ve seen 177 violent eruptions in which at least five people were killed or wounded—a 40% increase in violence in just two decades when compared to what we endured in the 80 years prior.
Viewed in the context of historical change, this dramatic upturn in violence, particularly in acts directed at groups of people rather than individuals, demands that we ask ourselves why. Why is this happening now? Are things worse today than they were when Prohibition-inspired gangsters ruled our cities? Are we not better off today than during the Great Depression or in those turbulent 1960 summers when racial discord set so many of our cities ablaze, when anti-war discontent spurred violent confrontations across our land?
Obviously the violence that now visits us on too regular a schedule is about more than race, more than class inequalities, more than political discord. I wish I understood all of the reasons that convince more and more people to violently attack their spouses, their families, their classmates, or their neighbors. And I wish I fathomed why some of us turn our rage, our helplessness, or our delusional ambitions into assaulting complete strangers in movie houses, businesses, on crowded streets or subway cars. My gut tells me that what we are now experiencing is evidence of the widespread loss of, and revocation of many of the social and religious mores which Americans once understood and gave their tacit consent in observing. Without those shared values and taken-for-granted social constraints that once governed the conduct of the vast majority in our country, all of our aspirations for unity and peace are as empty of meaning as a politician’s promises the day after the election. Thinking otherwise is proving to be more senseless than any slogan we may mistakenly attribute to those for whom violence seems their only way forward, or out.
