Nonsense and Hatred

People are trying to make sense of yesterday's events and failing. In many ways, it seems like something that makes no sense at all. But maybe this is because such events can make no sense in our view of the world- our world as we wish to see it.

I think that the truth might make more sense- and might be more terrible- than we'd like to think. News reports draw from what is suspected to have been the gunman's blog (which, I admit, I've no desire to see for myself), depicting someone who hated almost everyone and who found an identity in being "the angel of death", for whom guns were part of his identity.

Seventeen years ago, another gunman shot and killed fourteen women at the Ecole Polytechnique. In a way, his motive was much clearer. His misogyny was at a violent extreme of the spectrum of those men who've felt threatened by women overcoming male supremacy, and whose fear has translated into hatred.

As far as we know, yesterday's gunman did not discriminate- he hated almost everyone. So his acts seem more "random". But actually, the two killers seem to share something in common- overriding, poisonous, corrosive hatred.

So I think it isn't true to say that this makes no sense. There's a powerful lesson in this for all of us- when someone allows grudges, layers of resentment and rage, and legacies of bitterness to pile up inside of them, all reinforcing each other, they turn into a poisonous cesspool of hatred that becomes all that person ever sees. Why some people let this happen to themselves and others don't isn't clear, but people who do let this happen can become very disturbed and very dangerous like this guy obviously was.

Just goes to show that it's not worth holding onto those things- it takes a person in the wrong direction. But the good news is that most people are not like this. And there is something to bring healing to the pain that hatred has wrought. It's love. At the risk of sounding trite, the song is right- what the world needs is love.