Nineteen in Uvale

Every day, American politics reaches a new low. I doubt my children would believe that there was once a time when it was possible have friends on the opposite side of the political spectrum without any threat to the friendship, or to keep on good terms with neighbors and relatives on without ever having to consciously avoid the subject of politics. But now, politics are so much about division and intolerance, about allies and enemies, that it is hard to have a respectful political discussion without distrust and anger creeping in, mostly because hate, extremism, power mongering, and lies are the basis of today’s politics. Politics are really not worth discussing.

But when nineteen children are murdered in their own classroom — second, third, and fourth graders, along with two teachers trying to save their lives — something has to be said. Not just because nineteen children were killed, although this should be terrible enough, but worse, because America seems helpless to prevent a recurring event that everyone agrees is unacceptable but nonetheless no one can do anything about.

There are people who say this is about a bad guy with a gun. There will be people who say we need better care for the mentally ill. People who say we need schools to be guarded by the marines, in body armor. On the other side the argument will be that guns need to be restricted. That there should be background checks. That side is my side, but right now, that’s not the most important thing.

The most important thing is that this mass shooting, and most of the mass shootings we have had in the last few years, such as the one in Buffalo, the one in the church in California, the several over the last few years in synagogues, the one in South Carolina in an African American church, the one in Parkland, Florida, the one in Las Vegas, and many others I forget, are all extensions of the left vs. right fights we are having among ourselves. The ugliness on cable TV, on Twitter, Facebook, and wherever else — mass murder is just an extension of that.

No, the Twitter influencers and the Facebookers didn’t murder children. But people who are deranged enough to murder children are often looking for a provocation to do what they want to do. They want permission. Indirectly, the shooter in Uvalde found his permission on the streaming platform Yubo, where he posted videos of animal cruelty and issued increasing threats directed at women using the app. The lack of negative response — in effect, the tolerance of his behavior — emboldened him to do more. Some people may have even egged him on. If not with their words, then with their eyes, by following him.

That is what violent people are looking for. Encouragement. Or at the least, attention. They want to hear from society at large that they will be noticed, and possibly even approved of. They start out small, expressing hatred in little ways, and looking for approval, and move along the chain to more serious acts of violence.

And you know what? From the anger in society, they find the approval they want. When a lunatic collects an arsenal of murder weapons that he will later use to kill 60 people from his hotel window in Las Vegas, society smiles on him and says he has the right to own firearms. When, after he has killed and the government does absolutely nothing to keep that from happening again, I’d call that, once again, approval. Approval to buy weapons of anger amounts to tacit approval to use them, doesn’t it? Why would society allow people free access to weapons like that, and not expect them to be used?

Private citizens routinely threaten the lives of public officials and celebrities online, using aliases and hiding behind the secrecy of online platforms. These acts of hate are not harmless. They egg on people deranged enough to act out these threats. Most people who make “jokes” about using guns against political leaders they don’t like aren’t just venting. They are creating an atmosphere that allows truly dangerous individuals to move closer and closer to making these jokes reality.

Let’s not blame this on the mainstream media. The mainstream media doesn’t make people post derogatory attacks online. And I think people would do it, even if the mainstream media didn’t exist. Hate speech, after all, wasn’t invented when the Internet went live in the 1990s. Media or no media, people will do what they are allowed to do, what other people give them permission to do.

But there is something different about our situation today: We live in a supernova of lies. Lies are everywhere in our world, and on the Internet they spread much faster. Consider that there is a completely anonymous person calling himself Q who alleged that the Democratic Party is raping children and eating them. That there was a secret plan by Barack Obama to take over the government in 2016 that was financed by George Soros. That the 2020 presidential election was stolen. And this doesn’t even touch upon the ridiculous conspiracies built around COVID spread by QAnon followers, including the charge the COVID is a plot to put chips into every American so we can all be controlled by the 5G cellphone system. All of these charges are not only without evidence but completely devoid of reason, and the people, Q and others, who made them won’t even reveal their real names. They, like the nameless people who give permission to bad behavior on the Internet, are looking to encourage bad actors to go further and further in the real world. Lacking the courage to harm others themselves, they lie to encourage others. Lies are a kind of permission, too. They are an excuse for extremism, gasoline on the fire.

Lies and violence go hand in hand. Lies undermine the individual’s ability to judge truth — it’s hard to go through life thinking everyone is lying to you. It forces you to doubt your own two eyes, and it is very disorienting. This disorientation leads to hostility, to anger, and eventually to hate. Lies lead people to suspect that others are taking advantage of them. Not knowing who, it becomes easy to place the blame on the other side of the political spectrum. Why blame yourself for your problems when you have so many enemies who can be tagged with the guilt? And once blame has been securely assigned, violence is just one more step.

I’ve seen this hate in the eyes of politicians, priests, pro-choice advocates, pro-gun advocates, neighbors, doctors, and extended family. These people form their thoughts not through debate, but by spending all their time with people they think they agree with, nodding their heads in approval. This is hardly a way to hone ideas. It is a way to make up a half-true story, which can be stuck together with other half-truths, and eventually spun into scorn for people who disagree with them.

There have been polls that have shown that as many as forty-five percent of Americans today expect and even want a civil war. Basically, this means there are citizens of this country who see what is going on in Ukraine and want that for their own country. That’s serious hate. If you think the time is right for a civil war, you are saying you like what Russia is doing in Ukraine, and find the bodies lying on the streets on cable TV an example of an acceptable solution to our current problems. That’s where you are.

In an environment with that much hate, is it really surprising that an 18 year-old would attempt to shoot his grandmother in the head during an argument over a phone bill and then go to an elementary school and murder 22 people and wound another 17? No, it isn’t.

And twenty-one dead people, nineteen of them children, is a drop in the bucket compared to what could happen if all the semi-automatic weapons owned by Americans are put to the use they were made for. People buy that kind of killing power because they are angry and afraid. So what makes them use it? The same anger and fear, which we are cultivating like corn from sea to shining sea.

If you want to stop giving mass murderers the green light, you need to do something to stop the cycle of hate, anger, and fear. I deleted Twitter because I couldn’t stand the hate. Even though I wasn’t spending it, I was an audience — one more eyeball moving from one ugly comment to another, each click promoting the ugly to viral status. And if I tried to argue with the liars, all that did was bring more heat and attention to the hate. The internet loves a car wreck, and the more bodies, the better.

I turned Facebook into a weekly thing instead of a several times daily for the same reason. I got tired of seeing the same trolls rolling out the same message of hate, day in, day out. And even more, I looked with concern at my compulsion to read what they had to say, even though I knew I didn’t want to. That’s the magic of hate. You have to look, even when you don’t mean to. You might look twice at a nun or a monk walking down the street, but someone in a Nazi uniform will rivet you.

But even cut off from the internet, the hate still comes. I didn’t know the Uvale shooting had happened until a friend of mine sent a cryptic text about guns that made no sense until I checked the news. Even if you make it a point to avoid hate, it finds you.

I’m not asking people to stop disagreeing or to stop following the news. I like disagreement, and find it quite interesting to debate people who reject ideas that are important to me. I can disagree with others without hating them, and I can even see their point without conceding they are right. But that kind of charity comes easier face-to-face than via the anonymous World Wide Web.

In the wake of a mass murder like this, there are, for sure, gun regulation laws to consider. Discussions about mental health. Consideration of ways to shore up the deteriorating family. Ways to open the path to prosperity to people in the lower economic classes so they do not have to resort to crime.

But the simplest and most important thing is for private citizens to make themselves dead ends for anger and hatred. When the ugliness reaches our doorstep, we have to make sure it dies there. No retweeting, no repeating talking points, no unverified accusations. And more listening to the other side. Tolerance isn’t the opposite of hate, but it’s still an excellent antidote.

Consider how many people on the other side are afraid to express their political views at school, work, or in social situations, for fear of triggering a fight. That’s the price of fear and hate. Not being able to live as yourself. Or, if you agree with the majority, the price is being an oppressor, not allowing others to live as themselves. While being the oppressor doesn’t carry the same limitation as being oppressed, there is harm done. People in the dominating group have no more freedom to express their true, deeply held views than those who live in fear.

That is a significant part of freedom, the ability to be who you are, to live as you like, without worry. We don’t have that in the United States, despite our claims to being a free country. Nineteen dead children in Texas could attest to that, if they were alive to be asked.