Posted by
Dave Dentel on Tuesday, October 10, 2006 5:07:40 PM
Who could make sense of the carnage? We wish we could take the news of unrelenting violence -- in London and Madrid, Baghdad and Mumbai, and now in Pennsylvania Amish country -- and filter it into some sort of easily understood morality tale, like an old Twilight Zone episode that jolts us for half an hour, then frees us to focus on life’s lesser banalities.
Then it would be easy to read reports of spreading mayhem and lie to ourselves and say that it’s OK, that these dark scenes were already evoked and explained away by actors on a tiny black-and-white screen.
In “I Am The Night, Color Me Black,” written by Rod Serling, residents of a small American town are so obsessed with a local murder that their hate somehow forms a palpable haze, blotting out the sun. What’s more, they find their experience is being mimicked on a global scale, that the manifestation of a general hatred threatens to plunge all humanity into impenetrable darkness.
Yet art reflects life only so much, and hatred, black as it is, is too simple an explanation for the violence that increasingly surrounds us.
Sure, we can say we know that Shiites have hated Sunnis since Islam’s bloody seventh-century schism, or that Arabs have hated Jews since Israel gobbled part of Palestine in 1947, then congratulate ourselves on a perfunctory understanding of distant cultures and conflicts that mean little to us anyway. But what simple answer can we give for why an American milk truck driver would choose to hate Amish schoolgirls?
Authorities say Charles Carl Roberts IV, the man who shot 10 Amish girls in Lancaster County, Pa. -- killing five -- was motivated by grievances about his past. He supposedly was party to some kind of molestation 20 years ago, and felt cheated in his adult life by the death of an infant daughter. Based on this he apparently came to feel that mass murder was his due.
And so we have it -- the link between the suicide bomber who targets wedding guests in Jordan, the rebel who kills schoolchildren in Chechnya, and the American maniac who deals death in Amish country.
Because what motivates these killers is more than hate. It is a sickness bred of arrogance, an egotism that insists that their rage, their anguish, their frustration somehow counts for more than the sufferings of others -- that their own dissatisfaction with a corrupt world is so sharp that it justifies whatever violence they choose to do in exchange.
They make gods of their own vindictiveness, and in doing so foment an evil so dark that -- just as Serling warned -- its shadow touches all of us, and encroaches upon every sanctuary.
Just ask the Amish of Lancaster County. Like their persecuted ancestors, they too foreswear violence and do their best to live apart from the world -- only to be reminded by the blood of their daughters that even in a place called Paradise, the world remains too much with them.
Hate, and the violence it spawns, seems everywhere. But few can agree on how to restrain it.
Some, like Machiavelli, insist it can only be held in check by force -- through fear. Mystics like Tolstoy argue that true goodness can prevail only when it acquiesces fully to evil, a paradox that strikes romantic realists such as Charlotte Bronte as rather muddled. “If the good were always kind and obedient,” her heroine Jane Eyre declares, “the wicked would have it all their own way. They would never feel afraid, but would grow worse and worse.”
But if defiance and unkindness are the only tools for keeping the wicked at bay, how does one employ these without succumbing to wickedness itself?
The answer is hard to bear. It can be found in some of the worst places and worst circumstances ever inflicted by humans on their fellow beings. It was found, for instance, on a Japanese prisoner of war “hellship” during World War II.
On one particular vessel, writes historian John Toland, the filth and stench of a cramped cargo hold combined with hunger and general neglect to drive American prisoners into a homicidal lunacy. They fought over scraps of food. Some stole mats from the dying, others used corpses as stools.
Amid this hysteria, a few men failed to succumb. A trio of chaplains showed they were unwilling to abandon civility, self-restraint and a general regard for humanity no matter the cost. Their defiance cost them their lives.
But it purchased so much more. These chaplains -- and other like them -- prove in the most dramatic way that virtue can indeed be valued more than raw power or even mere survival. Even when the dark night of hate make such things seem hopeless, charity, humility and hope can endure.