The Senselessness of Orlando

All week I have been turning over in my mind so many why and how questions. Random, incomplete thought without order or pattern.

Until today when I asked myself why it was so important for me to find answers for what happened in Orlando?  Did my unconscious mistakenly believe that if I found answers, I could somehow put this horrific slaughter behind me and return to the predictable patterns of my daily life?

Naming that I might have personal motives for the need to understand led me in a more coherent direction. Perhaps this search for understanding is a futile attempt to find some peace with one man’s abhorrent act. Believing that somehow our knowing will prevent another similar event.

The media has been filled with speculation. The FBI is meticulously investigating.  Necessary to do, but probably not preventative. Like any disease, a cure for violence depends more on the meta-reasons angry individuals take up guns.

Yes, this man was likely conflicted about his sexual preferences. Yes, he was an increasingly angry man who abused his first wife. Was he mentally ill? Depends on how mental illness is defined. One can be utterly sane and still be violent. And mental illness is not predictive of acts of violence.  Was he a truly devout Muslim? It looks like he was not. Was he really radicalized by ISIS or was it just a ruse he used to justify to himself the slaughter of so many people?

He was not an immigrant but a US citizen. Barring immigrants would solve nothing. Nor would preventing people who are Muslim from entering this country prevent acts of terrorism. In this country, terroristic acts have been have been committed by people who “belong here” by virtue of their citizenship.

Yes, there are too many guns in this country – and loose rules allow their easy purchase.  But in recent terrorist attacks, guns used were legally obtained.

The truth is that we live in a culture of violence. Just watch commercials advertising TV shows. Listen to the vicious slander of this presidential campaign. And lest we think this violence is an American problem, we need only to listen to the news from elsewhere. Today Belgium is on high alert. And a UK MP died because a man used a gun to shoot her down.

Answers to all these questions would not satisfy our deephunger to really know what happened in Orlando and elsewhere.

Precious lives lost, many of them young adults with so much left to give to the world and their community. Friendships ended in their deaths and families grieve.  Their lives will never be the same..

However, it is not jst people directly affected by what happened. No matter what we eventually come to know about why all this senseless slaughter happened –neither will our lives be the same