The real cause of the tragedies in El Paso and Dayton
This is about the fact that in recent hours two crazy people from opposite ends of the political spectrum shot a significant number of innocent citizens going about their daily lives. In El Paso, it was a shooter whose online manifesto was loaded with catchphrases popularized by President Trump. In Dayton, the murderer was a registered Democrat and a socialist supporter of Elizabeth Warren who believed in gun control!
While there remains a great deal that we do not know about the motivations of the Dayton shooter, Connor Betts, there is no reason to believe that they were political. There is no doubt that the El Paso shooter, Patrick Crucius, was politically motivated, and the degree to which President Trump's rhetoric is responsible for the El Paso incident is perhaps judged by reading the shooter's manifesto, linked to above- and to the telling fact that the killer found it necessary in that manifesto to attempt to exonerate Mr. Trump in advance!
The left will talk about gun control and blame Mr. Trump. The right will talk about the responsibility of the individual criminal and deny that Mr. Trump bears any responsibility at all for the El Paso shooting. The better-informed of the president's defenders will point out the manifesto's statement that Crucius held his racist, anti-Hispanic beliefs and paranoia about a "Hispanic invasion" before Mr. Trump made political capital of that fear, and ignore the question of why Crucius would have thought it necessary to point that out.
But I think there's an aspect of all of this that neither side will discuss because both are complicit in it right up to their necks. We live in a political climate which is not only polarized but tribalized. More and more, we seek our information only from sources which will reinforce our own prejudices and both stereotype and scapegoat those on the other side.
If Betts shows us anything, it's that leftist Democrats can be crazy mass murderers, too. But then. we've known that since the days of the Weathermen and the SLA. Antifa and other extremist groups on that side of the fence have left no doubt that for some, violence remains very much on the table. We will hear much in the coming days- and rightly so- about how the dehumanization and scapegoating of Hispanics encouraged Crucius, and the matter of whether El Paso was simply another example of the president's racism (I personally see it as more a matter of culpable ignorance and disinterest than of malice) enables and encourages such things.
The degree to which Mr. Trump's rhetoric and agenda invited the dehumanization and scapegoating of minorities into the American political mainstream and gave it respectability and a home in the party of Abraham Lincoln, a party to which I previously belonged, is one of the chief reasons why I feel constrained to do what little I can to help deny Mr. Trump a second term.
But before the left gets too self-righteous about the president's rhetoric, I suggest that it consider the popularity in its midst of a book and TV movie like The Handmaid's Tale, and the degree to which it misrepresents, stereotypes, and scapegoats conservative Christians.
I suggest that it reconsider the ease with which any ethically-based negativity toward homosexual behavior rather than orientation- whether or not religiously based- is automatically labeled as "homophobia" and labeled as bigotry and assumed to be rooted in hatred.
I remind those all too eager to not so much forget as to ignore it that Chik-fil-A was refused permission to open restaurants in Chicago because its owner- whom no one had accused of mistreatment of gay employees or discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or on any other- had reservations about the complete redefinition of the most basic and stabilizing institutions of human society. Perhaps they should reflect that Brenden Eich, who similarly had never been accused of hateful behavior or attitudes toward gays, lost his job at Mozilla for the same reason, and that James Damore was fired by Google for circulating a memo which simply observed that. as science has clearly demonstrated, there are differences in the typical male and the typical female brains which might to an unspecified degree contribute to the numerical underrepresentation of women in certain jobs. Perhaps some thought might be given to the fact that bakers and wedding planners and photographers reluctant to participate in gay weddings not because they disapproved of them but because they believed- rightly or wrongly- that they would be sinning themselves by participating in them have not only been financially ruined but specifically and selectively sought out for financial ruination because their beliefs somehow made denying them their livelihoods even in the absence of any malice okay.
Okay because labeling them as "homophobes" made it easy to dehumanize them. The left has little human sympathy for those whose attitudes they see is blameworthy and thus unworthy of the concern one might have for real human beings.
I propose that the tactics used to prevent conservative voices from being heard on college campuses- tactics which sometimes include violence- might just possibly also suggest to a malignant tendency to scapegoat and demonize entire classes of people and sometimes to think of them as less than human.
I suggest that some thought be given to whether it is an unmixed blessing in today's society to be a member of that admittedly privileged but also increasingly demonized and hated of classes, the white American male.
For most of us, it would be hard to kill a human being. That's why the Nazis dehumanized the Jews. That's why the perpetrators of history's great genocides always dehumanized their victims. That's why in The Silence of the Lambs, Buffalo Bill goes out of his way to refer to his captive as "it," while the captive's mother, on the advice of psychologists, repeats over and over in her appeal for her release that "Her name is Kathrine."
Soldiers in war, it is said, carefully avoid thinking about the enemy they kill as people like themselves. If they did, how could they kill them? And whether it's blacks, or gays, or Christians, or Republicans, or the Irish, or women, or white American males, it's always easy to fear those unlike ourselves, to stereotype them, and to think of them in the abstract. The less contact we have with them, as a rule, the easier it becomes. And from there, it's only a short step to seeing them as less than human.
Lepers were commonly treated as less than human in biblical times. Jesus, of course, went out of His way to treat them as precisely human. And when the moment came for Him to choose a protagonist for His parable about love and compassion for one's neighbor, He chose a member of a class similarly seen by most of His hearers as something less than human: a Samaritan.
Who is my neighbor? The African-American. The undocumented alien. The gay man and the lesbian. The transgendered. The Christian. The Republican. The conservative. The Democrat.
And yes, Donald Trump.
One can disapprove of certain aspects of the behavior of one's neighbor. But we're obligated to distinguish between that behavior and the neighbor himself. But we've forgotten how to do that.
And that's the underlying cause of the tragedies in El Paso and Dayton that nobody is going to talk about. We find it increasingly easy to see him or her as other, and therefore as less than human- and as a consequence someone to whom we do not owe the obligations of a neighbor, but rather are justified in thinking of and treating as an abstraction- as less than human.
The question, really, isn't so much the degree to which the president is responsible for the weekend's tragedies, but the degree to which we all are. But of course, it's easier to blame the other guy.
It makes it easier to treat him as less than human- and for some sick few of us, to shoot him.
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