When Will It Stop?

We live in a world where fear of terrorism has resulted in ritual unclothing at airport check-ins, the confiscation of my sunscreen at a recent European Championship soccer game as a potentially dangerous incendiary item, while dozens of flares escaped detection, and where a supposedly serious candidate for President has proposed banning, at least temporarily, all Muslims from entering the country.

While I am not denigrating legitimate alarm over these threats to our safety, recent events have made clear that our focus on foreign or religiously-derived terror has preyed on a xenophobia the has blinded us to the fact that there is plenty of home-grown violence that threatens our safety, but is not as easy to address as blaming our vulnerability on Koran-quoting aliens who are intent on destroying our democratic ideals, not to mention our right to a peaceful existence.

Just in the past few weeks, we have experienced:

• A self-hating home-grown Muslim, who seemed to be motivated more by having his young son witness two men kissing than in engaging in jihad, gunned down 49 gay persons in an Orlando, FL nightclub.
• Two more black men killed by overbearing policemen once again using lethal force in Louisiana and Minnesota.
• A white-hating former soldier using a peaceful protest in Dallas over the police killing of the black men as a cover to gun down five white police officers in cold blood.

We continue to dither over whether the absurd availability of guns in this country, particularly those that serve no purpose other than to kill a lot of people in a short amount of time, is a cause or effect, while open carry laws complicate police attempts to maintain order by requiring them to make instantaneous decisions on whether it is a good guy or a bad guy carrying the weapon. But the bigger issue now is not over the means of killing, but the why.

One thing is certain. These almost once a day tragic killings are driven by pure and simple hatred. Hatred of blacks, hatred of whites, hatred of gays, hatred of The Other. We can blame the political climate, the rise of Trumpism, the bigoted views of religious extremists, and on and on. But all of these forces are not creating this trend, they are merely reflecting and encouraging attitudes that we supposedly left behind when the country was founded. Two hundred and forty years later, we are still groping for a way to do live up to those ideals in a nation all too prone to settle its grievances with a gun.