El Paso

El Paso and Dayton this time. My heart is breaking for those mourning today, for those whose lives will never, not ever be the same. It breaks along with yours for those who met their deaths incomprehensibly whilst out on simple shopping errands, whilst out for a fun evening.  As I struggle, again, to work my head around the incomprehensible, I’m ever so slightly comforted in knowing that as surely as hatred won the day the overwhelming presence of compassion and courage is also evident in the reports from many of the survivors of these tragic horrors.

A news report about this devil of a man who perpetrated the slaughter in El Paso spoke of the manifesto he had recently posted. Details are sketchy but apparently he had written that everything he was raised to believe he could have in life is not, in fact, available to him.  As a white American male he had been raised to believe that his education would guarantee him a job that with hard work would in turn provide a decent living, a home in which he would be able to nurture an eventual wife and family. At the ripe old age of 21…sitting at the cusp of everything, he was consumed with a blinding rage that had seemingly blotted out his horizon. He believed the steady march of high tech jobs combined with the inflow of immigrants had irretrievably dashed all his dreams. You can practically hear the crunching of the white patriarchal industrial age in those misguided sentiments.  You can also witness the utter failure of his education to instill in him what I believe to be the American spirit. One with grit that charges the individual with the responsibility that comes with freedom to make your own life. He is correct that high tech is steam rolling all of us but where was his “Then what” thought? Where was the imagination to adjust? Where was even the glimmer of rationality that there was a way forward other than all consuming hatred? Are we still America if we, as a nation, loose this essence?

The world moves at a lightening pace now but even the world I was raised to negotiate was not the world I entered into. I was taught how to curtsy, how to polish silver, how to write a thank you note on good stationary with a fountain pen, make a square meal, organize a kitchen. These were the crucial survival tools carefully placed by my loving parents in my sister’s and my life tool belts. My sister and I both entered a world at the boil of the women’s movement where those tools were sorely inadequate.  I mean, a curtsy?  We were launched out of the nest into a world where we were to burn our bras, not get married, not get “saddled with kids”, certainly not be beholding or indeed strapped to any man but rather we were to make our own way.  I suppose this is a cross for every generation: The world changes and people adjust in order to thrive.

What was the twisted seed that got planted in his psyche that grew to make rage his response? What irrational demon caught hold of his spirit to conclude that mass slaughter was a solution? What could have been done to pull him into our 21^st century in the gorgeous global reality and healthy diversity we are privileged to live in? These questions pound in my head because the hatred with which this man erupted is not his alone. Education conquers ignorance, rationality conquers irrationality, laws should control guns, knowing dissolves prejudice, love conquers hate. There are solutions and they must be vigorously sought if we are to stem this unbearable tide.