Man kills. And he seems to be good at making it seem sensible. It is uncomfortable to feel that it is part of our nature, but we have been killing for as long as we have drawn breath. From fist to club to arrow to gun to bomb to surgeon's knife, man has become an accomplished killer. If you believe that we are accidents of biology, then your explanation may be that it is a residual but natural product of our evolution from a reptilian brain to a languaged one. If you believe also that there is a corresponding spiritual evolution that is part of a religious philosophy or tradition that makes you answerable to a God, then you must believe that murder is ultimately consequential. Some believe that the escalation is a condition, a circumstance, of being in a Fallen world. We do not know, but none of it makes sense. I do not understand how it can be sensible for us to ask doctors to kill. Has Hippocrates been dismissed? Do they no longer have to pledge "to do no harm?" It makes no sense that an Eric Rudolph would think that it is okay to kill to stop killing. He said that he was willing to die to stop abortion, but after he was caught, he chose to plead guilty to murder to avoid the death penalty.
We live "in a time of great good and evil," said Walker Percy, "which nobody understands, where there are many kinds of discourse each of which makes a kind of sense to its own community, but where the communities don't make sense to each other.... " (Signposts in a Strange Land, 159). Sense-making is one of those things that I, a worrier and neither philosopher nor writer, tend to notice. Who decided that it was sensible for us to kill disabled babies? When did we decide that it makes sense for us to do what Hitler decreed was the sensible thing for Germany to do in 1939? Some think that it is sensible to have doctors just go ahead and kill them, but I did not notice that we were even doing that, and now in ever greater numbers. And who decided that it was sensible to let the Terry Shiavos of the world starve to death while doctors and her parents are forced to stand by and just watch? There is a disturbing precedent for this sentimental, murderous phenomenon, but it makes no sense that we could possibly be compared to them. The Nazis also killed the disabled children, mentally ill people, and the old and sick (Laurence Rees, Auschwitz:A New History, 42). They were what we have become, sentimental, and sentimentalism and murder certainly reflect what Percy referred to as "signs of the general derangement of the times" (159). Now we are killing babies, the disabled, and the sick old. We are already subject to it, and it has happened "without anybody seeming to notice anything strange" (Percy, 282) about it.
Tony Blair, after the bombings in July in London, said, "there is no justification" for killing civilians. It doesn't seem justifiable for Islamists to fly planes into the World Trade Center or blow up civilian busses and trains. It doesn't make sense that we would use our young men and women to rid Iraq of a tyrant but ignore the tyranny in drought-stricken Africa. It makes sense to some because there is oil in Iraq but just starving children in Africa. Does it make sense that the insurgents who are fighting the new Iraqi regime would employ such tactics as the one reported on by Lt. Colonel Robert Kelley on an MSNBC Hardball special (27 July 2005) called "Boots on the Ground?" He told of a jihadist who threw a stuffed bear full of liquid explosives into the yard of an Iraqi police recruit knowing that his young daughter would go for it. She was burned over sixty per cent of her body. The jihadist believes he is fighting a "holy war," but how could anyone think they are justified in targeting a child playing in her yard? And this perpetrator may even have small children of his own. Volunteers in the fledgling democracy have to risk their own children to be free? Is that sensible? Who would not capitulate to the threat that their own children may be killed over a democratic ideal? Is that courageous or foolish?
Some think it is sensible to kill to preserve a predetermined quality of life, to preserve an abstract at the expense of actual life. Some agree that America's youth should be sent to the Middle East to kill and to spill blood for that ideal. Meanwhile, Americans back home spill only beer at tailgate parties and football games while patting themselves on the back for their role as the world's policeman. I cannot make sense of it. I am surely not competent to decide what "we" should do or not do. But someone did decide for us that we should kill disabled babies? Who? A trusted Andy in a doctor's uniform? A lawyer for the insurance industry? A sentimental politician? The painful truth is that we are all a bunch of Barneys who don't know enough about ourselves to decide what is right for someone else, but we capitulate to whatever or whomever makes sense at the time. The German people were subject to a madman's decree. To whom or what have we been subjected? To whom or what do we point?
I certainly do not know what is right for someone in a dramatically different culture half a world away, but killing or maiming or raping children is never justified. In any context, that is just plain wrong. I remember being Opie in a world where we were safe to ride our bikes up the street. But the Opies and Beavers of our time can't even do that without worrying that some child molester, offenders with the highest rate of recidivism of any other, might abduct, rape, and kill them. I do not know how to make sense of the fact that a convicted child molester, John David Couey, could rape and kill a little girl in his closet in a small house full of relatives, and no one in the house knew she was there. They allegedly told the police that the most likely suspect was the murdered child's father even though Couey had raped some of their own children in the past.
It doesn't make sense that Dean Schwartzmiller, who has allegedly molested thousands of children, could be convicted nine times since 1970 for child sexual abuse but still be free to abuse more children in California today. A man who wears a sheet instead of clothes was stealthy enough to sneak into Elizabeth Smart's home, abduct her from her bedroom, and keep her for his wife within miles of her house while eluding thousands of police officers and searchers. Yet, now he has been determined to be too incompetent to stand trial. David Westerfield sneaked into a neighbor's home and abducted a little girl whom he tortured and raped before killing. That alone is inconceivable. But how do we make sense of the fact that his defense attorney, after his client rejected a plea agreement, could, even knowing his client was guilty, attack the murdered child's parents and blame the abduction on nefarious people who shared their partying, but not unusual or high-risk, lifestyle?
I do not know how to make sense of the fact that Ted Bundy, one of our most infamous serial killers, worked a suicide hot line. John Wayne Gacy tortured, raped, and murdered teen-aged boys and then buried them in a crawl space under his house, yet he was a popular local politician and devoted dog owner. I am not going to promise that subsequent columns will answer any questions about who and what we have become, but I will try to make it a point to examine any attempts to make sense of what, to me, is inexplicable. I will try to make it a point to examine the language we use to conceal the reality of what we are doing to one another in this demented, savage culture which so readily kills.
TWO
It seemed to make perfect sense to Hitler's minions in the last century to kill millions of civilians. Feeding and caring for them would have been an unreasonable use of resources because the Nazis believed that it was their destiny to rule over a German Empire that would ultimately dominate all of Europe and Asia. Many middle-class Germans were outraged to learn of the crematoriums at Auschwitz. If some knew and did not dissent, it can fairly be argued that being silent was an assent of sorts, but it is probably more fair to call it a capitulation than an assent. They capitulated to a madman who was driven by an insane theory about racial purity and national destiny. The Nazis objectified the Jews, and the population of Germany either did not understand the potential consequences of making objects out of an entire race of people, or they failed to confront the madness because they were afraid to be thought of as traitors. The Jews were what Himmler called