The headlines have been shocking, demoralising and saddening. Perhaps the eve of destruction has definitively arrived. With Jiverly Voong's cold hearted and strategic slaughter of 13 at an immigration education center in Binghamton, NY on April 3rd - the first quarter ended in a lopsided score for the very angry in our culture. Voong's taking himself out of the game, as do many of the mass killers, is regrettably the only positive aspect of this horrifying scene.
It seems just yesterday that America was reeling from series of youthful student shooters, dressed in black, evoking Goth, hating their parents and feeling alone, disaffected and disassociated. The last three months have seen an angry older man emerge from the slime of his wreckage to play executioner. Voong was 42. Robert Stewart was 45 when he became enraged with the woman who had finally left his seething abuse and decided to shoot up the elderly patients in a nursing home where his ex wife worked. 7 helpless and vulnerable patients and one employee were killed and four injured on March 29th. Stewart, the bully, was arrested.
'He had a rage' his former mother in law said, 'he would explode over everything'. In Voong's case a former co-worked said 'he was the kind of guy who would come in mad one day and shoot people'. Really? What 'kind of guy' is that?
Maybe the kind of guy who dresses in a Santa outfit on Christmas Eve, 2008, in Covina, California carrying a gift wrapped pressurized tank which he used to firebomb the house where he killed 10 family and friends with 4 semi automatic weapons. Perhaps it was because Bruce Pardo, 45, recently divorced and jobless, lived 22 miles from Hollywood that he had 17,000 dollars and a plane ticket strapped to his body under his Santa suit. Perhaps he thought his escape would be simple, just shed the red suit and jump on a freeway to the local airport with his ticket to Canada. Trouble is, the costume melted to his body while he tried to burn the house down, and he felt he had no other option than to shoot himself. Best idea he had all day.
Just last week, Devan Kalathat, 42 murdered five members of his family - his wife survived - and himself over what appears to be 'family dynamics'. He killed his 11 year old son and 4 year old daughter, his brother in law and his wife and their 11 month old daughter. he killed them with two legally purchased 45 caliber semi automatic weapons. Exactly what one needs in a good middle class neighborhood in Santa Clara. People keep asking 'why'? He can't answer. He's dead. That's good enough for me. What are we going to find out about why (mostly) men commit these terrifying acts against people who trust them, depend on them, love them or don't even freakin' know them.
These aren't even all of the recent killings - Michael McLendon in Alabama - who was a mere 28, burned down his mother's house. Oh yeah, his mothers dead body was inside. But that wasn't enough for Mike. He drove to his grandparents and shot them and his aunt and uncle and a woman and her 18 month old child who just happened to be visiting a neighbor and then three more as he drove around shooting randomly. He ended up at the Reliable Metal Products factory where he once worked, had a shoot out with the police and then shot himself. Oh - as a sidebar - one of the first police officers on the scene found that it was his wife and child that McLendon shot in cold blooded nastiness. How's that for a work day?
Then there's Kerby Revelus, 23, who decapitated his 5 year old sister Bianca on her birthday on March 28th in a suburb of Boston, after knifing another sister, Samantha, to death and trying to kill yet another, Serafina, as she frantically dialed 911. Police shot him to death. A fourth sister, Jessica, had moved from the home because of her brother's temper.
And let's not forget 22 year old Richard Poplawski, the Pittsburgh resident who on April 4th this year, killed three police officers responding to a domestic dispute between Richard and his mother, including one who lived nearby and who had just got off duty. Poplawski finally surrendered when he realised that even with his AK 47, .22 rifle, pistol and bullet proof vest, that he might just be outnumbered and could get hurt.
Why, you may ask, am I writing about this? It's because as with all things - if we forget what came before - we will continue to ask the wrong questions. There is no answer to the question 'Why?'
Between 1963 and 1965 Ian Brady and Myra Hindley abducted, tortured and killed small children and buried them on the moors in the north of England. They also tape recorded the screams of the children.
On July 18th, 1966, Richard Speck walked into a nurses hostel in Chicago and systematically murdered 8 of the young women. One survived to tell the tale by rolling under a bed and hoping that he lost count of how many victims he still had waiting for death.
On August 1st 1966 Charles Whitman, 23 committed what is seen by many as the first of these rampages against the innocent by a disaffected troubled loner. He climbed the observation tower at the University of Texas and in 96 brutal minutes killed 15 innocents and injured 31 more. He had first killed his own wife and child to save them 'from embarrassment', he wrote in his self aggrandizing death note. He was finally stopped by a police officer who managed to climb the tower and shoot Whitman while he was re-loading. Charles came from a family where the father admitted that he had often beaten his wife - 'she was awful stubborn' the senior Whitman said. As an ex Marine, Whitman's coffin was draped in an American flag.
There is no why. There is no 'why did someone abduct 8 year old Sandra Cantu from the parking area near her home 10 days ago, and kill her and stuff her body into a bag and dump it into a pond in Tracy?' There is no why. There is only a sense that the eve of destruction sits, ominously looming over every one of us and our children every day. And that life is the joy of watching the sunrise and set each day.
Perhaps I am alone in this, but I don't think it behooves us to constantly remember our 'history' aka our 'tragedies' or else we're doomed to repeat it/them.
I think just the opposite. Forget about it. Don't dwell. Move on. Live a happy life, right here, right now, in this present moment.
Bad shit happens to good people all the time. No amount of organizing, picketing and general outrage will erase all of this behavior.
There is no 'why'. That is quite correct. Move along. Nothing to see here.
There is 'aberrant' behavior at the molecular levels. This is often referred to as 'evolution'.
The only thing we can control is us; the way we choose to think and therefore feel about any given thing.
Posted by: Deborah Wolfe | April 07, 2009 at 12:10 PM
I just want to clarify I do not advocate disregarding the very real tragedy of these families. They have sustained a truly horrendous thing. I am speaking more in a 'global' sense. My heart goes out to the families of all the victims.
Posted by: Deborah Wolfe | April 07, 2009 at 12:22 PM
Deborah - do you really believe that 'living a happy life' comes to those who simply forget the past? It isn't about erasing the behaviour - the behaviour is as human as forcible sex in prisons, driving fast cars too fast and killing for sport. But if my piece says anything, it is that the outrage exhibited by police, politicians and bystanders to a terrible crime is mostly posturing. When they say ' we must make sure nothing like this happens again' you sorta shake your head and go 'what charm school did you learn that one at?'
And paying some sort of homage to the slaughtered is not a waste of time. It is a way to stay awake to the beauties and the glories of living. Otherwise why bother? Don't care about anything? Why bother?
And yeah, even knowing our past - humans will repeat it. 'We Are The World' was the great 1980's anthem to stop hunger in the future. And now - now there's Darfur. I believe what we do when we remember is to remind ourselves that every generation believed the world was ending - and it did not.
Posted by: JP | April 07, 2009 at 12:32 PM
I dont' watch the news. Rarely read the news. I made a decision several decades ago to unplug. I have to admit I have no idea who most of the people you're writing about are. I had to look up the Kerby Revelus case. Horrifying. Didn't make me feel good reading it. Can't imagine being that family.
As to homage to the slaughtered; of course. We humans want, need and crave our rituals, ceremonies and rites of passage. They sooth, comfort, and provide a sense of structure and coherence.
I have the feeling you and I have some staggering differences to our world view and basic philosophy. I am prepared to accept that we feel differently. I believe it is an attraction based universe, and whatever we give our attention to will attract more of the same. What you resist, persists. I believe the best thing any of us can do, LITERALLY, is FEEL GOOD. The better we feel, the happier we are, the more good 'vibes' (for a totally corny and lack of a better way to put it) we send out into the matrix, the better the world is, all the way around.
If we all sit around feeling bad for places like Darfur, then we just keep the 'bad' mojo flowing to it.
Now, that doesn't mean there is no place for the 'action' part of the journey either. But acting from an 'inspired' place, rather than a 'motivated' place will yield higher results. In other words, take no action until you are properly lined up with the outcome, energetically speaking.
And there is always the issue of answering a question that hasn't been asked, but I won't elaborate on that at this time.
Clearly, Kerby Revelus was a young man severely out of alignment with his own stream of well being. His sisters? That falls under the catagory of 'bad things happening to good people'. Why do these things happen? I can only say what I believe, and many people won't agree or like it. NOTHING can EVER happen to ANY of us, that we are not, on some level, in alignment with it. Every death is a suicide, on some level. We all choose when we go. Circumstances line up for us, different paths align....the number of people who would usually have been in the World Trade Center was so much larger than the number who actually showed up that day. For those who weren't ready to exit this life, they over slept, they just missed their train, they got caught in traffic, they called in sick....
Death is not the worst thing that can happen to a person. I believe we all return to pure, positive energy. Nothing created can ever be un-created.
Of course, we are all human, and each one of us is entitled to the full range of human emotions. When someone dies a violent death, especially, it can reverberate deeply with us. It shakes us. We have our feelings about it. But ultimately, it's only life and none of us is getting out alive.
"Life is eternal, and love is immortal,
and death is only a horizon;
and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight."
~Rossiter Worthington Raymond
Good night Jill. Hope we're still friends.
Posted by: Deborah Wolfe | April 07, 2009 at 06:51 PM
Jill, the only thing I know for sure is that human beings have a great capacity for bad and for good. And I hope that it is the good that wins.
To DW, I'm not sure I understand what you are trying to say about "every death is a suicide" but my instinct is to say, "no."
Posted by: Deb in Minnesota | April 08, 2009 at 07:18 AM