The Why and How of Tragedies

In the aftermath of a tragedy, there are supposed to be five stages of grief- denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance- but I'm starting to wonder if we've missed one. After a deranged dipshit murders people in a gay nightclub, or when a short tempered police officer murders an unarmed man, or when a psychopath shoots a dozen police officers at a rally against police violence, the first or second reaction is usually the question “why?”

I have to work hard not to conflate the question “why” with “how.” They're different, and I know that. But sometimes, if you look from only one angle, you can only see the how.

Bear with me a minute. If you look at the “how” of any given circumstance, what you're looking at is strictly logistical. The details of the tragedy that occurred at 10 pm last night in Dallas are still coming in, but what we know is that there was at least one person using a high powered rifle from an elevated location to specifically target police officers. As I type this, that's all anyone really knows right now.

That's how this thing happened.

The why, though, is a tricky bastard. Why doesn't come along nicely; to ask why something exists is to combine the tangible and intangible aspects of possibility. There's two ways to look at it: there's one right answer, or there isn't. So here's how I have to understand the difference: if there was something we could do, in the real, actual world, that would have prevented something from being, then it's a how. If we we know the how, but can't do anything about it, then it's a why.

It sounds confusing, because I'm struggling to describe the abstractions I create in the wake of tragedy and because there are a bunch of factors that contribute to the violence we experienced last night.

First of all, we need to be absolutely certain that there is a political aspect to this. Over 500 people have been killed by the police this year. Some of those people were unarmed, and most of the unarmed were black. This might be retaliatory, but it might not be. The shooter, whoever he or she is, might have been opportunistic after realizing that there would be a large amount of police in a protest of police violence. It's possible, but highly unlikely.

But if it was politically motivated, then is there some action we could have taken that would have made the murder of five human beings and the serious injury of 9 others emotionally unreasonable, even by the standards of a sociopath, or logistically impossible by eliminating the means to accomplish it?

Why, and how. How did somebody do this? Why did somebody do this?

I'm going to tell you something awful. The why is all of us. We made this happen. You and me and everyone else, we let tragedies happen through complacency and silence. When a police officer kills an innocent person, and nobody holds him accountable, it's because nobody (including us) holds them accountable. We've put people in charge of investigating tragedy and punishing people responsible. If they don't do their jobs, then it's our job to find somebody who does.

You might be wondering if “doing our jobs” includes shooting innocent people. No. Violence is a reaction from weakness. To resort to violence is to acknowledge that you are so powerless that you need to gain some via the suffering of someone else. Those who gain power through violence never retain it. When the US (mostly Russia) defeated a tyrannical government in 1945, we gained power over Germany. We couldn't sustain that power. Germany now controls itself. In another scenario, we've been trying to assert power in the Middle East for decades, and all we've done is empowered one of the worst collections of pseudo-religious human garbage the world has ever seen.

Police officers depend on the power of the law to do their jobs. But sometimes the law doesn't protect them, or protect people from them. That's when bad things happen. There's a constant power struggle between people, and when we only provide violence to settle it, we are the ones to blame.

Power comes from the people, and right now, the people are fucking up.

That's why these things happen.

 We could change things. Maybe we will. But one thing is certain- it's going to be too late to save a lot of people, and that is on all of us.

My name is Sam.  I'm on Twitter.  swellbo@gmail.com is my email address.