Hate had a banner week from Oct. 21-27.
The week began with reports of bombs sent through the mail to key figures from the Democratic party and other people from the left side of the aisle. And just when that seemed to be sorted out and solved, a man walked into a Pittsburgh synagogue during a ceremony Saturday morning and, before he could be subdued, killed 11 people in attendance.
We can all agree these are horrendous occurrences. In fact, if you do not think so, I neither want to know nor associate with you.
Revulsion, however, is not enough. Neither is the type of “outrage” that seems to greet all such incidents.
I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t be outraged when someone kills 11 Jews at a Saturday morning bris. Outrage is, or should be, a natural reaction for any civilized person. I’m talking about the “outrage” that leads people onto social media loaded with talking points that sound scripted from some sort of manifesto. You know. These people haven’t even been taken to the hospital, or worse, when it starts. Either we need to enact more gun control, or we shouldn’t have any gun control.
If there weren’t so many guns, and if they weren’t so easy to get, this wouldn’t have happened. Or, if people inside the temple had guns, maybe this killer wouldn’t have murdered as many people — or any at all.
There is a popular expression, used in a variety of settings, that speaks of “listening with your answer running.” It means that we don’t really listen, and we don’t analyze. Instead, we’re ready with the retorts before we’ve even listened to the problem. There’s a shooting. On one side the gun-control lobby springs to action. On the other side, the gun-rights lobby gears up. The crime, and the victims, often appear to be afterthoughts in the maelstrom of posturing and politicking. Much of the rest of us follow the bouncing ball, letting others do our thinking for us.
Making the problem worse, the “thinking” is often either biased (not taking sides here) or just, plain wrong. There’s an element of one-upmanship to it that is beyond corrosive, especially with the phony information that gets bandied about in the various memes and screeds that land on social media.
I guarantee you that none of this promotes love and brotherhood. Most, if not all, of it promotes hate.
Now throw this into the mix. There are people out there, unbalanced people, who lack the ability to filter bits of information and file them away properly. Their antennae are perhaps more sensitive. They may arrive at a different set of conclusions after listening to a fiery speech than perhaps you or me. They, by their inability to grasp concepts and their lack of impulse control, may be more prone to lash out and — if goaded enough — commit a heinous act such as Saturday’s.
So when we lament that the ever-presence of hate in our national dialogue today can easily spur people such as Robert Bowers into some dreadful action, this is what we mean. Nobody says Donald Trump or anyone else called the guy on the phone and told him to shoot up a synagogue.
But at the same time, when Trump, or you, or I, blithely say it’s not our fault that someone shot 11 people to death in a synagogue, that’s disingenuous too.
In some ways, we all bear some responsibility for this. We — as a society — have allowed hate to seep into the mainstream, either by condoning it or, at the very least, doing very little to stop it from rearing its ugly head.
We’re all too busy trying to prove our own points to spend much time worrying about anyone else’s. The tone of our national dialogue today is to scream over people, show no regard for their issues and concerns, and to label them as stupid when they don’t march with us in lockstep.
What has this earned us? You saw it last week — a banner one for hate.