…but I don’t get senseless murders.
I know, I know, if there were anything to be understood, then it wouldn’t be senseless. I get that. Don’t you have better things to be doing with your time than planning and executing a plan to execute people? Be it one person on the street or fifty people in a nightclub, I just want to know why. Generally, I find that the usual “why” culprits are noted to be mental health issues and extremism; the executioners are branded as either fifty shades of crazy or some kind of zealot.
Over the course of history, people have always tried to justify senseless killings with some sort of belief.
“I believe that your lifestyle choices are wrong.”
“Something you do/believe is in direct conflict with my religious beliefs.”
“I believe my skin color is superior to yours.”
“I believe in life and your abortion clinic is wrong.”
“I believe this land belongs to me, not you.”
“I believe that authority and government are a threat to me.”
“I believe that you are treating me poorly.”
“I believe that everyone is against me.”
“I believe that I am superior to you in some way.”
“I believe that I should have the power.”
When you add up what they believe in, how strong their conviction, their mental state combined with the fact that somewhere in this person’s garbled mind, any deviation from their beliefs is punishable by death, you get a whole lot of senselessness.
I don’t have much to say about this because I don’t know how you fix it, nor am I offering up any sort of fixes. You can’t get rid of the media, the Internet, or quick-fix any of the failed mental health systems in the world.
The way I see it, the only way to get rid of hate is to teach love in its place. The only way to get rid of fear is to be courageous and try to understand each other’s position by listening and having an open mind.
Carl Sagan said it all right here:
“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1997
I wish that everyone would come to realize this and believe in it as much as they believe in everything else.
Much love to you all.
