Sending Love to The Las Vegas Shooter
We love to love things we understand. We love things that are similar to whom we are, what we believe in. And we hate everything else.
Dear Steven Paddock,
This is not a fan letter, or a letter of misplaced worship. It isn’t a letter of forgiveness. It’s certainly not a letter of understanding. I can say with certainty that I will never understand how you woke up one day and decided that that was the day you were going to murder innocent people, people you did not even know, who were simply living out loud in their joy.
This is not a letter of like. I never knew you, and I am glad that I will never know you, as I can’t believe that I would have liked you. I will certainly never like what you became, what you did.
But… This is a letter of love.
Love is so often confused with all those other things above. It’s commonly defined as liking who someone is as a person, and the actions that person takes. We love many of the people in our lives, but we also profess love for people we have only heard of, people we don’t even know but can be fans of to the point of worship. In general, it’s safe to say that we love people we admire. People who do great things. People who are good humans. People, we like to think, who are like us.
As a society, we love to love things we understand. We love things that are similar to whom we are, what we believe in.
And we hate everything else.
We hate things that aren’t like us. Things we don’t understand. Things that are different, or scary, or confusing. Things that we judge as wrong.
We are being sorted into factions, camps of humans alike, set like dogs upon everyone not like us, to judge them, to find them wanting, to despise them, to dehumanize them. We are being trained to hate.
I want to hate you.
It would be so easy to hate you, the man who showered bullets into a crowd until over fifty people were dead, and hundreds injured. It would be so easy to hate you, a quiet white man filled with rage to the point where he decided to spread destruction upon the world, as if that were your God-given right as an angry white man who thought he deserved more. More happiness, or power, or… ?
I won’t pretend to understand what could motivate you, but we’ve seen it before, and it’s everything I dislike, don’t understand, and want to eradicate from this world. It would be so incredibly easy to let my heart simmer in hate, to stand in righteousness of just how wrong you were. Hating you would feel so good.
But I refuse.
Hate is what brought us here.
Hate is what continues to bring us here, again and again and again.
We can hate the people who commit these atrocious acts, but they are gone from this world with a blaze of destruction, and that hate, it lives on. It seeks a place to land. It spills out onto everything else. It’s poisoning us.
It’s this exact same hate that is causing us to argue incessantly about all the things that really matter, instead of working together to find solutions. It’s at the root of our inability to get reasonable gun restrictions and legislation on the books that might help to curb these never-ending mass murder tragedies. It’s at the root of our inability to listen to each other, to find compassion for each other, to bond with anyone who we determine to be unlike us. This hate is what feeds the divisiveness of our country.
Hate is killing us.
Hate killed those people.
Hate will keep killing innocent people, every single day, until we stop.
But, love… Love is what will deliver us.
This is not some bullshit bumper sticker catch phrase, nor is it a place to aspire to end up. It’s not what happens when we finally reach a place of cohesion, or peace. It’s the path to getting there.
Love is where we have to start.
Each of us feels so powerless when things like this happen. But we are not powerless. Every single action matters. They add up. Like dominoes falling, 1+1 doesn’t equal 2, but instead equals a ripple effect that is felt much further out, in ways we can’t and won’t ever know.
So today, I will start. And I will start in a tough place, because that’s where it’s going to matter the most. Today, I will choose to love every single person who you murdered that horrible day in Las Vegas, but I will also choose to love you, Steven Paddock.
I will avoid looking for a reason that I can point to and say, “That’s why this man decided to do this horrible thing.” I’ll avoid looking for all the flaws in your character and in your life. I’ll stop myself from painting you as an evil person in my head. Instead, I will send you love. I will wonder what could have happened to you to wound you in such a way that you would need to hurt so many others. I will wonder how badly you must have been hurting yourself. There’s no excusing your actions, but I will search to the depths of my soul for some compassion for the man who walked the path that was your life, right up until you took the lives of so many others.
Because, the thing is, loving you is so much bigger than you. In so many ways, it really has nothing to do with you. I will love you because to hate you is a dangerous path.
Hating you shifts the blame and creates a narrative that there isn’t anything I can do to keep things like this from happening again, and again, and again. Hating you makes it easy to hate everything and everyone I deem to be like you… not just every mass murderer, but also every person who disagrees with me on politics, on policy, on what we need to do to start to heal this country, or on if there is even any healing that can or should be done.
Hating you is a step away from dehumanizing you completely, creating a story that you’re a monster, that you’re a beast, that you’re some unique character that tortured thousands of people on his way out of the world. It’s to create a separation of you as different, as broken, as not a part of the human race, as not a part of this country… as not a part of me.
But you are! You are a part of me, and a part of this country, and a part of the human race. And until we look at that with love and compassion, we cannot seek to listen. We cannot seek to understand. And we cannot seek to solve the problems that bring us to this place, once again, of mourning another shooting rampage.
I will choose to listen.
I can’t listen to you, but I can listen to those that are suffering. I can listen to my own heart. I can listen to my pain, and my sadness. And I can listen to my deepest instincts, which tell me that now is the time to love… even you. Maybe, especially you.
Hating you guarantees that another you will pop up in a month, in a week… maybe tomorrow, killing even more people.
Loving you may not stop that, but it’s a step in the right direction.
So I will love you. Even you. I will sit in silence and think of the victims, and I will think of you, as well. When I notice the impulse to hate you, I will choose to sit with the pain and the sadness right underneath that hate, instead.
The cycle of violence has to stop. But it won’t ever stop until we all manage to find it in our hearts to turn to love, to seek understanding, and listen to each other, rather than turn to hate, and pass judgment.
It won’t stop until we can love each other and come together… even those of us that are the toughest to love.
Sincerely, with Love,
From My Broken Heart.
