They are evil. They are monsters. They are the devil incarnate. How
could this happen. We scream that we will destroy you. We flail, we
gnash our teeth, we writhe in anger, angst, bewilderment, pain and
grief. We can’t work, we can’t play, we can’t find meaning in life
again. It’s just so senseless, so meaningless. How could someone do
such a thing. They must not be human. They can’t be from the human
race. We must wipe them out, we must stop them from doing this again.
Let’s call on all our might, military might, wash them from existence,
our existence. They are not fit to live. Why oh why are they doing
this?!!
We fall back heaving, uncomfortable with our own skin, clawing at
ourselves looking for answers, possibly even the right questions to
define what has happened. We roll from side to side as if in a feverish
nightmare from which we cannot awaken. Everything we took for granted
means nothing. We aren’t buying anymore, we aren’t going out. We have
no grasp on the reality that someone destroyed in a matter of minutes
the lives of 6000 Americans and their families in a tragic and horrific
manner. How could…?! why?!!
We have NO concept of what has happened to us.
But more quietly… it’s happened before, recently and going back
some time. We’ve dealt with this before. We’ve seen it, touched it,
pulled it apart with the apathetic spirit of a child pulling the legs
off an insect. We think we understand it, but we are just going through
the motions, and when we close the book we are satisfied that we GET
it. We executed the proper judgment, analysis, and action required and
moved on. News media wraps up the event faster than anyone, before the
blood is dry, we’re back to Hollywood scandals, infidelity in Congress,
the Pennant race… World events that are so far away… so very very
very far away. We listfully drift into a pleasant slumber, a collective
shrug of our shoulders as we press our hands together and rest our head
upon them. So profound is our lack of understanding that the only
course of action is the return to folly and sleep.
We know of no desperation in America.
We’ve seen its results… Columbine, Oklahoma, various other mass
murders or acts of senseless violence designed to take the maximum
amount of lives in what amounts to a suicide. It is an act of such
desperation that neither the quantity nor the quality of lives
destroyed matters at all. I don’t care, I don’t care, I DON’T CARE!!!
My life is meaningless, I have nothing to which to look forward, my
life, this thing called existence is pain, emptiness, misery, anger,
fear…
Fear. There’s the thing. Let me get in there. Can you shine that
light over here? I need to get a grasp on it. Let me wiggle it a bit.
Hmm, need to brace…, nughgh, won’t budge… Are you sure that’s it?
Let me get the manual.
Americans live a life of plenty, generally. We are affluent,
powerful, motivated, caring, loving, kind-hearted, full of life and we
know no desperation. We have so little despair in this great nation of
ours, we don’t have tools with which to combat it either here when it
rears up nor abroad where it is more plentiful. We punish it. We
execute it. We launch cruise missiles at it. We sanction it. These
futile actions only serve to demonstrate how ill-equipped we are to
combat despair.
We call them evil. We call them war like, hateful… dogs. Kill them
all, let God sort them out. Recycle their karma. We call those among
us, evil, deviants, mentally unbalanced. We lock them up or execute
them. We hide or bury them. Was I the only one in the country that
wanted Timothy McVeigh around for another 50 years… I wanted to see
what kind of adult he’d turn into. Would he leave his despair behind
eventually or not? Would he find a reason to live? Would he repent
someday? I at least wanted to get to know him better, learn how a human
could have so little empathy, so little hope, so little understanding.
I want to understand.
But we trudge on, we good hearted, well-meaning Americans, oblivious
to the one true cause. It’s that thing that binds us as humans…
perhaps the only true commonality among us. Why are we here? We fear
what comes after, tomorrow. We fear rejection, failure, pain, others,
and life. We fear life because we don’t understand it. It’s the fear of
life that leads to despair and eventually great suffering.
We Americans need to take a deep breath, think of all the horrific
characters of history, those terrorists, murders, and criminals as
infants newborn in their mother’s arms with so much potential for
greatness and life, and we should cry for them. We should never look
for excuses to explain how their lives turned out. But we should make
great effort to look for the reasons why they became so fearful and
lost themselves.