To Those Who Think Death is the Answer

Sometimes I know that something is true even as I find myself incapable of understanding how.

I know there are those who think about causing death, imagine ways to do it, formulate plans, carry them out. Human beings die because they set out to make it so. And they had reasons, reasons which made it seem to them as something to be done. 

My wife ran her first endurance event--a marathon--at the Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon, a race founded to remember and honor all those who died when Timothy McVeigh drove a Ryder Truck up to the Murrah Building and detonated the explosives inside. When it happened my wife was a student at the University of Central Oklahoma, some 30 miles away. When she and those around her felt the concussive force of the blast, they knew something terrible had happened, something to shatter their world.

In a couple of weeks my wife will run that course again--this time the half-marathon. But that event will carry with it the specter of another shattering. Earlier today a friend of mine, someone I've known for more than twenty years, crossed the finish line at the Boston Marathon. For about half an hour she and her friends and family were celebrating her accomplishment. Then came the explosions. 

She was shaken up, her achievement overshadowed by the bloody aftermath of violence. Had she been a slower runner--about half an hour slower--the effects for her might have been far worse.

And I sit here and I think about those who find their answers in death, sometimes their own and sometimes the deaths of others. They find their answers in making living people dead. 

I know that it's true. And I've devoted many scholarly hours researching the ideologies of violence, the patterns of thinking that motivate the commission of horror. I can describe their structure---bifurcation, moral disqualification, sacred mission, zero-sum struggle death death death and the good will rise from the ruins if only we destroy the right things make the right people dead it will all be better the hidden good that has been held back by life will rise blooming free by the creation of corpses.

I think it helps me understand, but it's like putting a grid over chaos and saying, "Hey, look! A grid!"

Yes, there are patterns of thinking that culminate in a spray of blood. But they are, for those who follow those patterns, nothing but a grid. There's no substance. Just the illusion of it. That's the only thing to be said, in the end, to those who think death is the answer. And I suppose it can be summed up even more simply than that. 

No. 

Shattered

It is hard to think of other things. It hovered over my journey home--which, because of flight delays upon flight delays, took two exhausting days. As I started to become irate after the fourth gate change in as many hours of delays (this after missing my connection in Detroit and spending a night in a hotel), I thought about my cousin's niece, bleeding from a bullet wound in the leg, surrounded by the corpses of her friends, and listening to the killer stalking around the island, letting out whoops of glee between the crack of firing bullets.

On the phone with my mother, listening to her sympathizing about my travel troubles, I found myself thinking about the profiles I'd been reading of Norway's homegrown terrorist. I felt strangely claustrophobic as I imagined myself into his head, into the ideology and rage and paranoia that defines the violent extremist.

It is hard to feel sorry for yourself, or to feel indignant at flight delays, when there are things so much more terrible pressing in with such vividness.

It is hard to think of other things. And so I think about this, about shattered windows, about a peaceful country's shattered innocence, and the shattered innocence of kids attending summer camp. But to know what to say, how to organize one's thoughts about something so terrible--it almost feels like a kind of exploitation to reflect on the significance of Anders Breivik's crimes. And yet there are things I want to say, things which I think are important--about xenophobia, about mislabeling motivations, misdiagnosing the causes of terrorist violence, about the difference between a spirituality that years for the transcendent and an ideology of division that use religion as the basis for hate.

Thankfully, many of the things I want to say have already been said beautifully by others. Arni Zachariassen offers a powerful reflection on the connections between the recent terrorist act and issues in theology, especially as they relate to Christian-Muslim relations.  Øyvind Strømmen offers an excellent portrait of what motivated Anders Breivik.  Over at Religion Dispatches, while Mark Juergensmeyer offers a striking comparison between Breivik and Timothy McVeigh, his desire to call both "Christian terrorists" is helpfully qualified by Julie Ingersoll, who offers insight into the character of Breivik's idenitity as a Christian--without in any way undermining the force of Juergensmeyer's point that Breivik has as much of a claim on the "Christian terrorist" label as Osama bin Laden has on the "Muslim terrorist" one. James McGrath makes a similar point.

And yet there are still things to be said. Some of these are things I need to say. But not right now.