So it has happened again.
32 shot dead in Virginia, the media streaming into a small town like hyperactive ant-eaters. Understandable, but…you know they’ll forget the story next month. “If it bleeds it leads.”
The talk shows will feature their usual line of pundits, some of them religious, after they did in Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath. The debate will probably begin anew for a while over the question of access to semi-automatic weapons.
Sadly, the reactions have almost become ritualistic.
On the other hand a little ritual is good. It helps to process pain and grief to know others have been there before us and that others are grieving as President Bush stated. James Alan Fox in the LA Times outlined the causes of the tragedy in terms that may not be improved upon amid the avalanche of analysis certain to be unleashed.
There was, first, the perpetrator’s long history of frustration and failure, the externalizing of blame, the lack of emotional support from friends or family, the inciting event that sets the killer “off,” and another factor, perhaps something new. Fox mentions the intensification of the dog-eat-dog attitude in American life incarnated in “Survivor” or “American Idol’s” winner-take-all focus. “It seems that we have less compassion for those who fail.” Along with this he cites the eclipse of traditional community – higher rates of divorce, the decline in church-going, isolation and alienation in the big cities (most American now live in urban areas of over 1,000,000 people). “I a stranger and afraid/In a world I never made.”
Fox took his readers back to Charles Whitman who climbed into a University of Texas tower in Austin in 1966 and killed 14 people and wounded 31 others before being shot dead. The string of mass murders almost began here if one excludes lynchings in the decade of the 1890’s. The chain includes Oklahoma City in 1994 and Colombine High School in 1997 and Montreal’s 14 female engineering students massacred at Ecole Polytechnique just over a year ago.
Says Fox: “Seven of the eight largest mass shootings in modern U.S. history have occurred in the last 25 years.”
Presiding after the Oklahoma City massacre, evangelist Billy Graham pointed out to a mixed faith audience that the cross in evidence from the rostrum where he stood reminds Christians that God does not stand back immune from our suffering, rather, he became one of us to participate in our sufferings. Christ, God in the flesh, came to suffer death in order to remove death of its sting.
Those were profound thoughts and need to be factored into the inevitable discussion of “why.”
Still, it seems to this pastor/history teacher that the most fitting words on this occasion came from a politician, a not unsurprising event in American public life. In April, 1968 Robert Kennedy was on his way to a political rally in Indianapolis when he got the news that Martin Luther King had been shot in Memphis. Against the advice of his advisors, Bobby Kennedy decided to address a black audience that had not yet heard the bad news. It was his finest hour. Here is what he said:
“For those of you who are black, you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization, black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love.
“For those of you who…are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust…against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.
“But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond these rather difficult times.
“My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: ‘Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our won despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us through the awful grace of God.”
“What we need in the United States is not division, what we need in the United States is not hatred, what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.
“So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love – a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke. We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We’ve had difficult times in the past. And we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness, and it’s not the end of disorder.
“But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.
“Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people. Thank you very much.”
Almost two months to the day, Robert Kennedy himself was gunned down by an assassin’s bullet but his words live on as words of hope and healing.