The Binghamton Shootings

I haven't tried writing on the Binghamton shootings yet to anybody, so I feel like I'm going to be fumbling to find the right words at times. Maybe a few more attempts and I'll get it right. We have been inundated in the Press for a month now with coverage of the various funerals and prayer services. A lot of peoples' reactions, especially in the first few days, were pious platitudes. In fact, the night it happened, when we came out of the first prayer service, news media were looking to anybody who was willing to talk, and I did a few camera interviews where I found myself mouthing platitudes and realizing afterwards that coherency and helpfulness would only come with a little distance.

My thoughts about the Civic Association massacre of 13 innocents and the suicide of the shooter revolve around two themes. Mental illness and easy access to weapons. Jiverly Wong was clearly a deeply disturbed man. He had come to the US as a 22 or 23 year old from Vietnam. He was a refugee from a land that had suffered under several generations of war. He had trouble learning English and was clearly defensive about it. Thus he was alienated from his origins and couldn't fit into his new environment. His murder/suicide letter that he sent to Channel 10 in Syracuse showed him to be illogical and paranoid. He did time in jail in California for cashing an "empty check". When he applied for a pistol permit, his father said in a letter to the sheriff's office that he didn't want his son to hold a gun. There are other questions that arose when he applied for US citizenship. There were enough indications that he had trouble adjusting to life in the US all along, but none of them were so strong or consistent that either police or mental health professionals started focusing on him as any more dangerous than a lot of other people. He hid his problems well. When he took up shooting guns and rifles it looked like a normal hobby. His family says that they were unaware of his fascination with guns. So when he finally snapped, it seemed to come out of nowhere and make no sense. It fact it still makes no sense to anybody why he did his killings at an immigration center where he had received help.

I think we have all seen enough mental illness in people around us to know that faulty thought processes and strong emotions feed on each other in ways that we can't even begin to comprehend. I can surmise that a person who has spent his whole adult life struggling not only with language difficulties, but also with unresolved issues of war, culture shock, unemployment, marital difficulties, and who knows what else would feel more and more enraged at and isolated from those around him.

Do I feel anger towards him? Of course I do. We all do. His response was outside the pale of any civilized human being. It was a response of suicide combined with a rage that said that he was going to take as many people with him as he could.

When I say that we need to find compassion for him it is not to say that what he did was right. No one will ever say that. What I do want people to understand is that the human mind is a fragile thing, that no one is at all times perfectly sane, and that each of us has our limits of how much stress and isolation and other trauma we can endure.

What is galling to me is how much our culture creates and nurtures and justifies violence as the bottom line. It is absurdly easy and normal for anybody to get a gun. The sophistication of the weaponry that is available is appalling. And the very thought of violence creeps into all of our very thought patterns almost immediately. And that we want to make a quick judgment on those who kill without seeing the whole picture betrays the reality of human frailty and the flooding of our social environment with weapons. We want, by force of habit, to approve of violence when any thin veneer of authority is thrown over it. We must question how warped our culture's view of what it means to be a human being is when so many people feel incomplete without a gun. I believe that a human being is more of a human being without a gun than with one--just as one is more articulate without obscene language than with it.

We need to do a reality check here. Our government spends over 500 billion dollars per year on weaponry, uses it all over the world, and routinely breaks its own and international laws especially in regards to torture and interventions and invasion in so many countries over the years. It is no wonder that private citizens think in terms of so called justified violence more and more with such an example. We tried to name and address the culture of violence the very next day after the massacre at our vigil at Peace Park. This culture starts from the top down, and has the blessing of those in charge of our civic religion of perpetual war making. Human beings are treated as other and disposable, possible enemies, therefore killable. The fragile individual mirrors the flawed and warped collective. Until all weapons, official and individual are done away with, or we are at least headed in that direction, the storm of violence will continue. There are so many weapons made only for killing other human beings. Those with homicidal rage--or war making intentions-- will have less to hurt others with when these weapons are eliminated. This won't remove the rage--or the orders of the war makers--but it will make the killing of innocents much less likely and life for all of us a little less precarious. Hurricanes lose their power over dry land--just so this storm. One final note--one of the gun advocates, amid all his other arguments which I don't have space to deal with here, spoke of "the Binghamton incident". It was not an incident!! It was a massacre carried out by a flawed, deranged individual with weapons he should not have had. Real people died. Using trivializing terms makes the suffering and deaths of real people into abstractions. The misuses of abstractions distance us from the human condition in ways that make it harder for us to learn or change anything, making life and death meaningless. Life and death are not meaningless.

Reflection on 6th anniv of invasion of Iraq

This first post is from March 19, 2009 at a prayer service. Its not outdated yet.

So, lets start this reflection and prayer with gratitude, as prayer should always start. It gives us a ground to stand on, especially if we've got some heavy lifting to do. We share gratitude for life, for each other, for all our interactions, for the love that we have and the hopes that we share. I do not believe in a God of thunderbolts and vengeance and fear. I believe in a God who is a loving parent--full of compassion and forgiveness, and sternness sometimes, but above all one who shares our struggles.
Prayer in the context of injustice, violence, and death-dealing requires looking at reality, reflecting on how we have contributed to that reality, making basic choices about life and death, and designing tools to say no to death dealing and yes to the building of life. This process is not for the faint hearted and can be very emotionally wrenching. The bottom line, however, is how we humans deal with each other.
Pope John Paul II said war is always a failure.
The invasion of Iraq was an act of aggression. Acts of aggression are against international law, in fact, according to Nuremberg, they constitute the supreme international crime, encompassing all the other crimes of war. The Saint Patrick's Four tried to testify to this in court and were denied. Iraq did not threaten our territory, only our interests. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/ll. They had no weapons of mass destruction--the UN and the Peace Movement tried to tell America that, but we went unheeded. The US, in 1990 and 1991 in Desert Watch and Desert Storm had already bombed Iraqi electrical generation and transmission systems, water treatment plants and systems, telephone and radio systems, food processing, storage and distribution systems and markets, infant formula and beverage plants, animal vaccination and irrigation sites, railroads, bus depots, bridges, highways and highway overpasses, and repair stations, trains, buses, public and private vehicles, oil wells, and pumps, pipelines, refineries, oil storage tanks, sewage plants, civilian factories, historical markers and sites, commercial and business districts, schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, shelters, civilian government offices, and residential areas. The most draconian set of sanctions ever imposed up until that time continued throughout the nineties, resulting in deaths of at least half a million children and others because of lack of adequate medical supplies, or supplies to repair the infrastructure such as water filtration plants, and the collapse of the Iraqi economy. In the invasion of 2003, the US did the bombing all over again, under the name of "shock and awe". The invasion and occupation has since resulted in over 1.2 million dead, 2.6 million made homeless inside the country, and another 2.5 or so made to flee elsewhere. 60% of the population has no access to clean water, 70% have no sewage treatment, electricity is only sporadic and violence is down mainly because one major faction declared a cease fire and others have been enlisted, by bribery, to fight Al-Queda in Iraq. Al-Queda in Iraq was not there before 2003. In reality, the war has been almost twenty years of the US warring against the people of Iraq. And of course, the US has lost over 4259 service people, thousands injured, and many with post traumatic stress syndrome and traumatic brain injury. In January, 2009, there were between 128 and 143 suicides among service people and veterans, more than were killed on the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan that month. We are spending our sons and daughters. We are paying the price too
As John Paul II said, war is always a failure. And now we have to look forward to another nineteen months of US occupation, with no guarantees even then. The US offers no apologies to the Iraqi people, we offer no reparations, and we move on to Afghanistan and Pakistan to blunder and bludgeon our way in there again. What is wrong with us?
Robert Fisk, a noted British journalist and war correspondent, told the following story on Alternative Radio a few weeks back--- He tells of being in Baghdad in April 2003 doing his reporting when an Al Jazeera crew arrived in BBC headquarters. They had videotaped the results of the British artillery bombardment in Basra. The victims were mostly civilians, with some soldiers of course, but mostly civilians. They had appalling scenes of dead children and women with terrible wounds, body parts hanging out, people screaming, etc. They were there to relay the tape under a syndication system. I'll quote from Fisk's talk here---
"I knew the crew. There were two Lebanese and one Syrian, and they were feeding their tape of the Basra horrors to London, to Reuters. After about a minute, I heard this voice come down the satellite from London: “You know, there is not much point in showing any more of this. People are going to be having tea and dinner tonight. They can’t watch this.” And the poor old crew said, “Please, please. We’ve been in great danger today. We’ve got this film. Just watch a bit more. This is what is happening,” by which time my notebook had come out, because this was going to be my report for the next day’s copy of The Independent. They went on showing this appalling film. And a voice came down then: “This is the obscenity of war, this is pornography. We can’t show
this.” They said, “But please, please, just watch a little bit more. This is the reality of what we’ve just seen.” And the film went on. Blood was all over the floor of this hospital. And then the voice came back—this time my pen was skidding over the page—and it said, “You know, we can’t show this because we’ve got to respect the dead.” We didn’t respect them when they were alive, we didn’t respect them when we blew them to pieces, but when they’re dead, by God, we respect them so much."
Thus far Robert Fisk. BBC did not show the tape.

Back in 1967, when I was a Jesuit novice, I undertook, under direction, the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius--The Long Retreat. The First Principle and Foundation might be helpful here. The language lacks feminist and ecological sensitivities, so we were taught to translate the language as needed, so bear with me. The first meditation was on the nature of God, whether vengeful or loving. Then we contemplated the following--"Man was created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul. The other things on the face of the earth were created for man's sake, and in order to aid him in the prosecution of the end for which he was created. Consequently, man ought to make use of them just so far as they help him to attain his end; he ought to withdraw from them just so far as they hinder him."
My point here is the "just so far as." This implies conscience. This implies judgment. Each of us and all of us together has the responsibility, and the freedom, to use our best judgment at all times. In all matters. This is something that applies to many facets of human life, of course. When it comes to the political, military, and legal aspects of life, it says that all systems, all policies, all human actions must come under judgment, continual unremitting human judgment. And what is the standard of judgment?--How do we treat the poor, the vulnerable, the voiceless, those perceived as enemy, those whom we don't understand, those who are different?
Rabbi Abraham Heschel, in his study of the Prophets of Israel, tells us they were about using words and action to engage in a "ceaseless shattering of indifference." Heschel went on to say that--"To us a single act of injustice--cheating in business, exploitation of the poor--is slight, to the prophets, a disaster. To us injustice is injurious to the welfare of the people; to the prophets it is a deathblow to existence; to us an episode; to them a catastrophe, a threat to the world."
We know that Jesus went out to heal those around him, and to engage those who harmed those around them, whether by design or neglect. He and his followers made real a future where we all embraced each other in love and dignity by doing so We know that this threatened the authorities. And their response was deadly. And here's the good news-- the response was, in the end, a failure.
As Christians, we know that Jesus is the nonviolent one. And we know that we compromise with this all the time. We live under the myth of justified violence. It is our civil religion. As Archbishop Romero said, the twin idols of our culture are private property and national security. I'm no expert on Oscar Romero, but if I understand this correctly, it means that when we pursue private property and national security to the detriment of other human values and relationships, reality gets skewed. Warped. Our neighbors become our enemies, we become selfish, paranoid, and violent, and God becomes a creature of thunderbolts, vengeance, and fear.
No! People of conscience and sensitivity need to go in a different direction, with the assumption that Christians do not kill, because every human being is a potential temple of the divine. If the just war theory has any use at all, it is to lay out very stringent conditions which leave the burden of proof for using violence entirely with those who would use it. So, we should never apologize for refusing to kill. As one of my Jesuit teachers said, good does not need to be justified, evil does. I submit that justifying war today an impossible task. We've had enough experience of wholesale slaughters in the past few centuries, and it is only getting worse, for all of us to rise up to reject war entirely. War is the ultimate naiveté. War is the ultimate injustice. War is the ultimate lie. War is always a failure. And we need to BE the alternative.
How? We make it up as we go along. We create a language of nonviolence, grammar and vocabulary, in the public arena, based on the nonviolence we already practice or try to practice in our homes, schools, workplaces and churches. We experiment with ways of telling the truth. We do civil disobedience when appropriate. Getting arrested and going to jail on occasion is good for the soul. Believe me. We build human relationships. We teach our children that GI Joe, Batman, and especially Jack Bauer are not heroes. We reclaim the concept of service, and duty and honor for that matter, from the warrior culture and send waves and waves of people to, for example, rebuild New Orleans. We sacrifice our luxuries and get out of our comfort zones. We are a people of peace. We need to become more so.
Actually, these tools have been our heritage all along. We just need to use them. Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers have had as their organizing slogan for a long time--"Si, se puedes!" The young man who now sits in the Oval Office says it now too--"Yes, we can."