Postcard from the abyss

“Hate, pray, shoot. What next?”

I wrote that headline. Of course, it’s specifically about the madness in Charleston, but it carries the echoes of a long string of gut-knotting, heart-twisting assaults on our collective peace of mind, stretching back … who knows how far?

For me, at least, to Feb. 28, 1993, the day federal agents managed to bungle their way into what would become known as the Branch Davidian standoff. That day, I spent more than an hour and a half on the phone with cult leader David Koresh, feverishly trying to get some purchase on the baroque fantasies that drove his war with America.

Then there was Tim McVeigh, whose inscrutable monstrousness was the focus of most of my waking hours for a good three years.

And they were just the start. There were the East Texas social workers whose delusion of having discovered a satanic cult convulsed a town and ruined several lives. There was the Oklahoma preacher whose doctrine labeled African-Americans subhuman “mud people.” The Arkansas paramilitary leader. The sovereign citizens in West Texas. The white supremacist ex-cons who dragged a black man to death behind their pickup truck.

9/11. Columbine. Gabby Giffords. Sandy Hook. Aurora. The DC snipers. Atlanta’s own FedEx shooter. It’s hard to even remember them all. But as a nation, we’ve spent a lot of time these past few decades staring into the pit, the darkest reaches of the human heart.

And by accidents of place, time and vocation, I’ve looked longer and perhaps harder than most.

So what have I learned?

That it’s better to look than not to look, although looking assuredly takes a toll.

That psychology, sociology, political dogma and ultimately even religion are no match for the fathomless mystery of how a mother’s son can become a Tim McVeigh or a Dylann Roof.

That, at some point, all the theories, all the data, all the rhetoric simply peter out, and there is nothing to do but hurt, just sit with the imponderable pain and let it be. Because, at some level, that willingness to face being small and alone and hurt is what was lacking in the ones we call evil.

You know that saying about how depression is anger turned inward? Well, here is the biggest thing I have learned from far too many hours spent staring into the abyss, distilled into five words: Evil is fear turned outward.

Let me repeat: Evil is fear turned outward.

What kind of man bombs a building that, he has every reason to know, houses a daycare center? A man unable to tolerate the discomfort born of a lonely, disjointed childhood.

Because the deepest fear isn’t necessarily of pain or loneliness or even death. It’s that we’re not enough. Not smart enough, desirable enough, lovable enough. Not. Good. Enough.

When I look at the photo of Roof, scowling at the camera in his black jacket with the apartheid insignia, I see a pathetic figure, a human profoundly uneasy in his own skin – and looking for someone to blame.

How does this awkward kid with the cringe-worthy haircut come to talk to his victims about why they must die because black men rape “our women”? Whose women?