A Bigger Tragedy
Still in shock by the horrific tragedy in Las Vegas yesterday. What is the world coming to today? What moves a man to do such a thing? Innocents. Children. The shooter wasn’t targeting anyone in the crowd. Indiscriminate killing, just for the sake of killing? Why? What’s the point? Even animals don’t kill without a reason. Has man descended even below the level of animals now?
From initial reports, nothing stands out about the murderer or why he would do such a thing — he was a millionaire, had family, had a life, wasn’t suffering from any mental illnesses. Nothing. Yet, he carried out one of the most inhumane acts imaginable. Why?
What must be going through that animal’s mind as he collected those guns in that room, as he looked through the window at those beautiful lives below? Actually, I shouldn’t even be calling him an animal. Animals are better than him.
I just can’t wrap my head around what the point was of all that? Utterly senseless. What are we coming to as a society? Why is there so much hate, even for those whom you’ve never even met? Where have we gone wrong?
The reason behind his actions is difficult to understand. The guy was rich. Nobody took over his job. He was white. He wasn’t subjected to racial discrimination. He was a man. He wasn’t the target of misogynistic attitudes. Even his targets weren’t of a particular community, nationality, gender. So, why?
My heart goes out to the family of those killed in this barbaric attack, and to the survivors. Both groups will probably suffer from trauma for a long time. I think they’ll be asking the same question too: WHY?
To be honest, there are those who know about this incident, and yet they are not affected by it, not really. They condemn the attack. They feel sorry for those affected. They’ll talk about the incident sadly. Yet, the incident doesn’t make them shiver. It doesn’t bite into their soul, doesn’t disturb them enough to reflect on the state of humanity. I wonder if we have seen so much tragedy in our own lives that an incident like this doesn’t affect us that deeply, that it doesn’t make us look inwards and wonder that question: Why?
You might think this has happened somewhere far away, that it doesn’t happen in the country that you live, in the city that you live, on the street that you live. But it can. Do you think the people who were out there had ever imagined that something like that could happen? I think it’s high time we stopped looking at things as happening to someone else, in some place else. Read the article about the murderer. Do you think that’s a kind of person who absolutely doesn’t live in your country, in your city? Is there something special about him, or the people he targeted, or the location he chose, that precludes such a thing from happening in your vicinity? I don’t think so. These are problems of humanity, of our future, that every human, young or old, in every corner of the world, needs to worry about.
And as unprecedented as this attack was, the thing is, it’s not a one-off thing. There have been other incidents too, perhaps of a lesser magnitude. But the thing is these things are happening more often now, and we simply don’t know how to stop them.
We don’t know what broke, and when. We don’t know who broke it. We don’t know how to fix it. Caught between apathy and helplessness, we can’t promise our kids that it will be all right, that tomorrow will be a better day than yesterday. And that, I think, is the biggest tragedy of all.
