Sandy Hook and Pakistan

Yesterday was a pretty sucky day.

I woke up late, quickly got into an obnoxious argument, and then at the end of breakfast... J told me that 18 kids got shot in Connecticut.

I went to campus because I needed to sell back books and decided to walk through the canyon.  It was a sunny morning and the beauty of the trees made me think, look at this, look at all the people out enjoying it. For each of the 27 victims of the school shooting yesterday there are thousands of people whose life goes on as usual. For a moment I felt like the world was more okay - and then my perspective went another layer larger. I thought about how for every thousand people in the U.S. whose lives are mostly unchanged - except for the trauma of hearing that such a thing happened, which ripples in various degrees out to all of us - there are ten thousand throughout the world whose lives are constantly racked with poverty, hunger, and other horrors.

Like in Pakistan, or in Gaza. Someone on my Facebook feed said "who the fuck kills kids?" I didn't have the heart to respond "world leaders." Because they do. They don't take a gun to a school and shoot six-year-olds while looking at them, but they sign off on orders that they know will result in children just as dead. And today, by coincidence (or maybe someone else was thinking of a similar connection) I see this fairly old article posted today. The U.S. kills not just possible civilian bystanders, but obviously non-threatening first responders and investigators.

We decry terrorism and express outrage at its barbarism, when young men of another color, nationality, and religion perpetrate it. We are shocked and horrified and search for evidence of mental illness when a white boy from a nice community goes on a shooting spree in a school. But this is the normal mode of operations in international politics. That person who asked who kills kids, said they normally can understand why people do horrible things, if only from the perspective of studying psychology. Well, it's easy to see why Obama can sign the drone orders. He doesn't have to see who dies, he don't even have to press the button, he just makes a "tactical decision" from the comfort of his office. And it's easy to see why socially, he doesn't get called out. Authority is powerful. Even if a lot of people got pissed, money is powerful too and people with a lot of money are people who see everything as a game and profit even off of misery - they won't do anything. That's not hard to psychologically understand. But we need to be trying harder, because it's not all that different than shooting up a school. The fact that they're doing it to accomplish something, that it's all part of a plan, that those people live in a wartorn country anyway and "can expect it" rather than the shock after expecting your kid to be safe at school... doesn't make it okay to kill innocent people.

Oscar Wilde said the only thing we know for sure about human nature is that it changes. Just because psychologists have found explanations for why people do awful things - especially collectively - doesn't mean we can't do our best to provide a cultural overlay that counteracts that potentiality. We can't expect the senseless killing to stop until we refuse to justify senseless killing - by anyone.