Drowing in the Aftermath of the Washington Navy Yard Shooting

This week Aaron Alexis went on a shooting spree at the Washington Navy Yard, killing 12 people before being killed himself in a gunfight.  The incident was a tragedy by any measure. But I’ve been disappointed at the race by both the left and right to capitalize on the carnage. 

The gun control crowd was predictable; being rational has never been a prerequisite for joining that parade.  Even Dr. Janice Orlowski, chief medical officer at MedStar Hospital where many of the victims were taken, took time out from reporting on the medical conditions to exposit on the politics of the event.

“There is something evil in our society that we as Americans have to work to try to eradicate. There is something wrong here when we have these multiple mass shootings, these multiple injuries.”

Good thing we had someone with 20+ years of college to point that out for us. 

The media, of course, gladly filled in the blanks by reminding us that 26 were shot at Sandy Hook elementary, 6 at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, 12 in Aurora, 6 in Tucson, 13 at Fort Hood, and 32 at Virginia Tech.  The obvious implication is that since all of these people died from gunshot wounds, this is clearly the most significant problem in our society today.

Eric Bolling of Fox News “The Five” pointed out that

“11,000 guns last year caused murders, 11,000 people died at the hands of gun that wasn't a suicide. Four hundred forty-four thousand cigarettes. Car accidents accounted for about 40,000. Alcohol, 80,000.

But they blame the person in every single example with the exception of guns and now they want to blame the guns."

As effective as it is to surf an emotional tidal wave in the aftermath of a tragedy, clearly gun control advocates aren’t really concerned about the loss of life or they would take on a long list of issues responsible for more deaths in America before they got to mass shootings. 

But I was even more disappointed in the way the right pounced on the issue of mental illness as the obvious problem.  It pretty much goes without saying that anyone who takes a gun into a school, mall, public event or workplace and starts randomly killing people is not mentally stable.  This act is the very definition of being a danger to society.  Again, we don’t need someone with 4 degrees and 20+ years of medical practice to make this diagnosis in hindsight.  In the case of Aaron Alexis, they point to some strange comments he made about people talking to him through the walls and ceiling of his hotel room and sending microwaves into his body to deprive him of sleep.   

Well, obviously he should have wrapped in a straight jacket, been locked in a padded room and fed oatmeal through a slot in the door for the rest of his life.  With some reservation I have to admit, sometimes people talk to me through the walls at my house. It’s because they are too lazy to get up and walk to the doorway where they can see me.  And lord knows, if you ever have problems sleeping it means you are just one hair's breadth away from going on a shooting rampage at the nearest public building. 

Really, what are we proposing should have been done?  Are we going to start declaring people sane or mentally ill based on whether they say or do anything we find strange?  How many family members could you have committed before the weekend?  And who is to say what ‘strange’ means? 

Violent video games was also mentioned as a contributing factor.  I actually missed the video game era, but my kids play them.  Does that make them the next Aaron Alexis?  

An ounce of reasoned analysis reveals that we wouldn’t want to live in a society in which we could be denied constitutional rights simply because a neighbor thought we were strange.  So why the mad rush to declare a cause after these kinds of incidents?

As described above, we see some who are simply opportunists who can’t let a good tragedy go to waste.  But this doesn’t explain all the behavior.  The reality is that nobody wants to think this could happen where they live, work, worship or play.  They want to believe that the kind of person who could do this is easy to spot, and someone was grossly negligent in their duty to lock them away from the rest of us.  The suggestion that someone can ‘just snap without warning’ makes us panic like a swimmer too far from the dock, so we gladly cling to anything disguised as a life preserver even if it turns out to be a brick. 

Perhaps we can take a page from the gun control activists and agree to a 30-day waiting period before advocating any serious policy initiatives in the wake of a tragedy.   That would give us some time to separate logic from fear, anger, heartache and panic. 

How Much I Don't Care about Miley Cyrus

I became reminded this week of the limitations of the English language.  I searched for a word or term to express the extent to which I don’t care about Miley Cyrus or what she might have done at the Video Music Awards.  I didn’t watch the show, and I didn’t even watch any of the billion or so clips that have been posted by anyone who knows how.  But I’ve been bombarded with commentary, headlines, photos and quotes at every turn.  I searched my lexicon for appropriate adjectives to describe my feelings, but the only ones that seemed to be in the neighborhood were ‘apathy’, ‘indifference’ and maybe ‘ambivalence’.   None of them seemed to fit.  That’s when I realized there are different levels of “don’t care”. 

The words listed above invoke the image of a puffball dandelion in my lawn. It lacks sufficient structure or definition to stand against external forces; it could lean to the left or the right, depending on which way the breeze blows.  And if it rains or you step on it, it might lose its definition altogether.

This is completely appropriate to describe many situations we face in life, although men and women see them quite differently.  For example, it perfectly describes the feeling men have when asked “should I wear the black hoops or the silver stud earrings with these shoes”?   Just tell us which way you want us to lean, and we’ll support your decision.  We just don’t care.

Women, on the other hand, experience this same feeling when asked which teams they want to see play in the Super Bowl, World Series, or Stanley Cup.  Maybe some have one favorite home team, but most aren’t willing to give up a day at the spa, go a year with no car, or lose a few teeth in a brawl over it.  They are apathetic, indifferent, or ambivalent. 

But this is not my Miley Cyrus level of “don’t care”.  My “don’t care” is not a puffball dandelion swayed by the breeze.  My “don’t care” is more like a granite boulder the size of New Jersey.  Maybe we could introduce ‘grantipathy’ as a new word to capture the essence.  You can blast wind at it, drown it in torrential rain, fire bomb it, even detonate multiple nuclear devices on it and you won’t substantially change the shape, form or substance of my “don’t care”.  It’s not fragile and subject to the whims of the elements or my environment.  You can’t intimidate my “don’t care” through appeals, whining, or intellectual sophistry about the declining morality of our culture.  We all know by now that people will use shock as a substitute for talent or intellectual stimulus to get attention.  Yes, I have morals and standards. But I resent the expectation that I should muster organized outrage in response to each lame attempt to assault my conscience, much like I resent the suggestion that I should stand outside a bar on Saturday night and agree to be provoked to fight every drunk who wants to test his manhood by assaulting mine. I just don't owe anybody that.

  

I’m not angry at Miley Cyrus.  I’m not shocked, outraged, amused, intrigued or disgusted.  I just don’t care. 

The Syria Mess

I listened in today on Secretary of State John Kerry’s congressional testimony regarding US intervention in Syria.  Am I the only one who feels a sense of déjà vu hearing John Kerry talk about US military action involving a Middle Eastern dictator and WMDs?  Wasn’t it the same Democratic Presidential Candidate Kerry who denounced President Bush for ‘going it alone’ back in 2003?  Didn’t we hear (retrospectively, or course) about what a bad decision it was to get involved in a Middle Eastern crisis and how we had no business there? 

Irrespective of where you landed on the Iraq war, shouldn’t we all agree that we should be pretty darn sure about WMDs before launching US military action?   We do seem to have enough evidence to be sure that sarin gas was used, but we don’t know much else.  The idea that Syrian rebels used it themselves to draw the US into the conflict seemed like a fringe conspiracy theory at first glance. I mean, who would do something like that?  Let’s go to the archives:

In August 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait.  On October 10, 1990, a Kuwaiti nurse appeared before the US Congressional Human Rights Caucus.  This quotation was reported on 60 minutes:

“Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, my name is Nayirah, and I just came out of Kuwait. While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the children to die on the cold floor. [crying] It was horrifying. “

American’s were outraged.  President Bush himself mentioned babies “thrown on the floor like firewood”.  On January 10, 1991, the US Senate voted to authorize war against Iraq.  The vote passed by 5 votes, and 7 senators cited Nayirah’s testimony as an influence in their decision to support the use of US military force.  After the US invasion, further investigation revealed no evidence to support her claims.  Instead, news reporters learned that Nayirah was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US. The Washington Post also reported that the story, including presentations to the UN and Congress, was promoted by a Washington PR firm who was paid $11 Million by “Citizens for a Free Kuwait”.  Never underestimate the influence of skilled marketing.

In today’s Congressional testimony, Secretary Kerry painted a grim picture of 1426 dead in Syria, including 426 children.

"Instead of being tucked safely in their beds at home," he said, "we saw rows of children lying side by side, sprawled on a hospital floor, all of them dead from Assad's gas and surrounded by parents and grandparents who had suffered the same fate."

I heard Senator after Senator jump on the bandwagon with terms like “Syrian atrocities”, “shock the conscience of the world”, and “crimes against humanity”.  Nobody seemed to recall Nayirah, at least not when the cameras were rolling.

Syria has been ‘comms dark’, as dictatorships can be.  Syrian Dictator Assad has flatly denied using chemical weapons, which is to be expected.  We don’t have the benefit of a free press and streaming video to expose the facts and let us decide for ourselves.  But we should at least consider that we have precedent for Middle East organizations exaggerating facts to win sympathy of hearts and minds in the US.  Maybe some conspiracy theories aren’t as wild as they sound.

Besides that, we need to understand that not every conflict has ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’.  Some have ‘bad guys’ and ‘worse guys’.   But politicians have become adept at condensing every major issue into a 20-30 second synopsis, which is the attention span of the average voter.  In March of 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Bashar Assad a “reformer”.  Our current Secretary of State, John Kerry, called him a thug and compared him to Adolf Hitler.  Hey, people change.   But more importantly, we need to graduate from the simplistic notion that if one side in an atrocity is horribly evil, the other side must represent truth and light.  Bombing Assad into the Stone Age would leave a power gap that could quite possibly be filled with the kind of Muslim extremists who would love to get their hands on the weapons Assad has stockpiled over the years.  Of course a more limited attack would avoid that outcome, but… remind me the point of the attack if not to inflict significant damage?

I sort of understand the argument that a strong response is needed to send a message to others in the world who are watching.  But it’s a stretch to claim that US vital interests are at stake at any time, any place in the world, any time a chemical weapon is used, but not when thousands are slaughtered in tribal violence in Rwanda, Darfur, or even in Syria when citizens were killed in more conventional ways. 

Syria is a complex problem for which we have no easy answers. We should have seen this coming and done something to head if off years ago.  But that would have required more than 20-30 seconds to analyze and explain to voters.