Why do we rush to judgment after shootings?
I woke up Monday morning to the horrifying news that a gunman had opened fire on concert goers on the Las Vegas Strip, and that at least 50 people had died with hundreds of other casualties. It was a story in progress, and only the name of the shooter was known: Stephen Paddock.
And then I did something I shouldn’t have but of course, could not have resisted, this being the social media age: I logged onto Facebook. There, amid the photos of hands folded in prayer and the usual expressions of shock was the indefensible, interminable but inescapable attempt to lay blame.
I get it. I get that desire to hold someone or some group accountable, and I know that we are programmed to graft our own ideas of fault upon a developing situation. After 9/11, every time that I hear of a large-scale attack involving firearms (or now trucks and knives.) I think immediately of Islamic terrorists. I could lie and say that I don’t, that my mind races immediately to rogue nuns from some renegade retreat house.
But I don’t. There is too much Islamic terror in the world to treat that variation on horror as a one-off, an exception.
And yet too many of these recent attacks have diverged from the 9/11 model for us to simply jump immediately to the conclusion that Allah’s aberrant acolytes are responsible for the carnage of the moment. There are other situations, including the newly visible white supremacists and their Antifa stepbrothers, sowing the seeds of change through violence.
My problem with what happened Monday morning is not the search for reasons, but the way that speculation takes over when sympathy should be the only immediate response. People are dead, and frankly, while it might matter to the FBI how and why they died, we in the social media peanut galleries should only be concerned with the fact that they are dead, and that families are grieving.
And then I started widening my perspective, and realized that Monday morning was just another in a long line of situations where we use the pain and suffering of others to advance our sordid little political agendas.
When Puerto Rico started finally garnering the attention it deserved, I saw some people begin to point the finger at the Trump administration for deliberately depriving the island of necessary resources and care because (you saw this coming) the citizens are “brown people” and we all know how the president feels about “them.” Amazingly, I saw Facebook posts where people wrote about “genocide,” never mind the fact that a genocide is a deliberate attempt to wipe out a race, not inefficient government efforts to get aid to a part of the world that is thousands upon thousands of miles away with an already rotting infrastructure.
I’m not saying that the White House has done a good job getting aid to our protectorate. I’m saying that racism is not the reason that the island is suffering the catastrophic aftermath of a catastrophic, one-in-a-century storm.
That same attempt to point fingers happened during Katrina, so I know it is something hard-wired into us and not simply an incident of the Trump presidency. I remember the screams of Ray Nagin, then mayor of New Orleans, all but stating that President Bush hated black people. I also remember Kim Kardashian’s husband coming out to say the exact same thing from the stage. It was as if George W. hated black people, and was just waiting for a major natural disaster to hit an area where they were concentrated.
And then the attacks in Charlottesville between clashing ideologies was all about white racism, as were the attempts to keep Colin Kaepernick from getting a backup job as an NFL quarterback.
And, horrifically, a legal executive at CBS posts that she’s not sorry some of the victims in Las Vegas died because they were probably Trump supporting “Rethuglicans.”
We need to find reasons for things, and the reasons we look for are rarely the ones that fit the facts. They do, however, fit the evolving narrative that makes our wine and cheese soirees exciting, we who only congregate with
And one of those narratives also deals with guns, and whether we should restrict ownership or whether the NRA is being persecuted. It’s horrific the way that the story never changes, and the lobbyists pro and con get their pound of flesh with each successive tragedy.
As of this writing, we do not know why Stephen Paddock opened fire on innocent country music concert goers. If I were conspiratorial, I would say that he might have been a liberal who so hated Trump that he decided to take out his anger on people who attended a concert with a high concentration of good ol’ boy country music like-minded partisans. fans. But that would make me just as bad as that now fired CBS executive, and she is the very last human being I would want to resemble.
I reject the race to blame tragedies on our own personal bogeymen: Wealth, skin color, political persuasion, guns. People in pain do not need to have their tragedy wrapped up in some nice, partisan and political package.
This is the time a knee for a good Prayer. Leave your comments online Use hashtag to take reason: at