This is user content written following the Charleston Church Massacre.
I know that this issue is on the back burner given the recent Supreme Court decisions (marriage equality) but I have wanted to speak on this issue. And I am going to make what I feel is a critical plea. The boy who committed this atrocity SHOULD NOT BE KILLED. I am going to plead with you all to please have compassion and understand that our desire for revenge or "justice" will not cure the ills that caused this tragedy, it will likely make them worse. And please, before you rush to judgment, read the rest of this post.
In the wake of the Charleston shooting I find myself frustrated again with the dialogue that pervades. This post was sparked by commentary of a man in the mainstream media (MSM) that I have huge respect for his willingness to be truthful and his ability to both recognize and present the complexity of issues. But Jon Stewart failed me on this occasion, calling the national tragedy a "black and white" issue. He wasn't, although the pun was clear, referring to race but rather the motivation for the actions. The dialogue that has followed has been rather simplistic and in my opinion, completely skates the larger issues here. This is not about a flag, the Confederacy, guns, or even racism for that matter.
Time and time again, facing national tragedies, we have missed an opportunity to speak that truth. We get caught up in simple, emotional, and sometimes partisan critiques of individual behavior and we remain poised to defend our position, rather than listen. What doesn't happen on a large scale is reflection. Reflection of a sickness, much more prevalent than racism, that we all share and contribute to, it is a disease of American culture. It is a kind of moral rot.
A sickness, founded in resistance to change, aimed at simple answers to serious questions, easy "fixes" to complex and profound problems facing us. The great and all too appropriate metaphor of American society flashes before my eyes. I see an ostrich, with an American flag wrapped around its body, with its head buried in the sand.
"The truth is hard to come by because most nations are deceived about themselves. Rationalizations and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our sins." - Martin Luther King, 1967
From our birth, our parents birth, and well beyond, we were taught that retribution through violence is the appropriate means to reconcile our grievances. While I will be the first to admit that this cultural mindset does not always manifest itself through violence, it still pervades. The examples are endless. Police capturing and locking away the bad guy. The death penalty for somebody who kills another person. The response by our government to a "hostile" leader in another country. Drone strikes of "enemy combatants." Dropping an atomic bomb on the people of a country who attacked Pearl Harbor. Rambo taking aim at a drug lord, piercing his forehead with an arrow (of course made by his own hands). How can we sit on our pedestal, given our practices and history, and say that violence to address one's grievances is worthy of the highest punishment, the death penalty?
From that same speech, Martin Luther King Jr reflects on this conflict. "As I have walked among the desperate, reject, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action; but they ask me and write me, 'So what about Vietnam?' They ask if our nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems to bring about the changes it wanted, why shouldn't we? I knew then that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed without first haven spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world: my own government."
This kid, who is obviously sick and deranged, learned to address his grievances with retributive violence from somewhere. And how can we, in good conscience, kill him when our government is bombing innocent human beings as an acceptable means of addressing its grievances (which I could argue are sick and deranged, but that is not the point).
I am going to go on a little tangent then come back to this original point because I think these two components are extremely critical and cannot be overlooked. First, the burden of making money in order to survive in our Country. Not too long ago, one income could support a family. Today, one income sometimes cannot even support one person. This phenomenon is recent and we, as a culture, have had no opportunity to reconcile it, to integrate the vast advances in technology and human ingenuity to reverse this trend. It is contributing to the destruction of the American family and we have had no opportunity to sit down and ask why. Parents working 60 hours a week, spending no time with their children cannot be overlooked as a contributing factor. The need to work more and more hours while having less and less time to provide a supportive and loving environment for children is a compounding, powerful problem. This has become commonplace and is statistically proven to be more prevalent among those of the lowest incomes. And the strife for money to survive or to have nice things has changed from a means to a purpose of many lives. Often children are left confused, angry, sick, and in search of support systems which are not always good.
Second, is the way we approach the results these circumstances, what we call "health care." Another manifestation of this easy and quick-fix attitude. This attitude in our health care system is applied to children as well. You are having trouble paying attention, here's a drug. You are feeling depressed, here's a drug. You are hyper, here's a drug. These drugs have neurological and biological effects on children who are crying out for help or maybe just attention. They do nothing, literally zero, to address any of the problems causing the illness. Yes, they may quell the bad feelings but they do not address what is causing the feelings. And even with the statistics pointing to these facts, our normally incompetent federal agencies calling prescription drug abuse in the US an "endemic," we still can't slow down and ask why. This kid, in particular, was given a narcotic (pharmaceutical drug prescribed by a doctor) which has been shown to have a direct correlation to violent behavior in young men and has also been shown to have connections to other drug dependencies.
Why are we so resistant to understand? Is it because it requires introspection? Is it because it forces us to reflect on the parts of ourselves that we don't like? Or is it because we simply don't know how to?
So, who was this kid? What was his life experience? What drove him to commit such an awful act? I can assure you, though the simple answer may be convenient for your political agenda or helping you come to terms with what happened, it will not do a damn thing to prevent this from happening again.
I am telling everybody who has made it this far, it is not because he was "crazy" and it was not because he was racist. Yes, he was "crazy." Yes, he was racist. But there are a lot of racist and a lot of "crazy" people who do not shoot up churches.
This, like racism, are a symptom of a greater problem. They are symptoms of a sickness. We have become a culture that is in constant conflict with what we know is "right" and how we act. Would we want to give a drug to a friend who is feeling depressed? No, we would want to understand what ails them. Would we want to punish a family member because he used illegal drugs or stole something? No. Would we want to drone strike our friend because his reality of constant war and death drove him to pick up a gun and fight back against the forces he perceived as responsible for those conditions? No. So why do we remain silent when it is done to others? And worse, why do we encourage it and defend it? Why are we content with such simple explanations and simple answers? Is it just the compounding affect of an elementary psychological term, the fundamental attribution error?
Martin Luther King Jr said we need a "revolution of values." I am sorry Jon Stewart but that will not come from changing street names and taking down flags. That will come from changing how we approach our problems. That will not come from government mandates and more laws but will come from changing our own personal choices. That will come from slowing down, analyzing not only the behavior but also how we, individually and collectively contribute to that behavior. Everything we do changes our worldview, it ever so slightly alters our perception and the future. Whether that be watching Rambo or reacting emotionally to a terrorist attack or the greater implications of our everyday purchases. It changes us, it helps define our understanding of and our course in life. The more and more we are resistant to changing our perception of the world, the more and more we close the door on the endless possibilities of change presented to us.
"We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism, and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered."
