America is now in stunned mourning after being collectively assaulted by another mass shooting. The mayhem at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub is the latest marker along a bloody, seemingly endless path.
The dead now deserve our prayers; the living victims, their families and friends need support in every imaginable way. We should all remain watchful and vigilant, too; that’s part of the price of minimizing future risk in this violent age.
As that all occurs, the replay has also begun of a distressingly predictable pattern. Brave police confront a shooter, ending carnage. Their action comes too late for many innocents.
Next, people of good intention, as well as those with either cynical or merely misguided motives, will start trying to make sense of the nonsensical, using whatever snippets of information, frames of reference, context, blind spots or prejudices are available to them. Thus begins the speculation around the murderer’s motive.
At such times, it is vital for all of us to center on the best of American values — the ones that drive our enemies to strike again and again in an effort to get us to become more like them.
We must not let that happen.
Fear, however warranted, cannot gain the upper hand.
We must not become consumed with distrust, dislike or, worst of all, hatred of the “Other”; however we might each define that.
Americans should not coarsen further an already too-rough, uncooperative civil environment that’s hobbled our national discourse and kept us from achieving all that we rightly should.
To rise to the high calling of the land of the free, we should reverse our divisive course. We should draw nigh to each other — and to the values shared among all who love liberty. They are there, waiting to be seen, even among those with whom we vehemently disagree over politics, lifestyle or anything else.
Sunday morning, law enforcement was treating the Orlando crime as one of terror. President Barack Obama astutely added that it was a hate crime as well.
History shows that a toxic national environment can help ignite mere enmity into murderous flame. When that happens, political climate can prove as deadly as a bullet. That is no exaggeration in a time when thinly veiled disdain, prejudice and outright hatred move with such ease and speed through the widely separated corridors of a fiercely divided America.
We have erected sound barriers, one cynical utterance at a time, around the commons where we used to draw collective strength from our similarities. Instead, we focus on vilifying legitimately held differences.
As police seek to answer the “why” of what happened at Pulse, regardless of whether it proves to be ISIS-driven terror, anti-gay sentiment or both, we should all take a tough look at the sour, dangerous civic environment we have created. If nothing else, it hangs as an angry, cynical pall over the Pulse nightclub and a massacre that arose on what should have been a day of peaceful worship for many.
We are in an age exceptional as much for its unbridled, barely hidden anger as for anything else. We seek to pile blame onto people unlike us in some way large, or even small. We gleefully divide ourselves into “us” and “them.”
And, then, we are somehow shocked when people are murdered over ideology, either singly or in large groups. As Atlanta Constitution Editor Eugene Patterson wrote after a Birmingham church bombing in 1963, “We listened to the prologue unbestirred.”
It is time for Americans to do better.
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