Surprise!?

"You see, Doctor, God didn't kill that little girl. Fate didn't butcher her and destiny didn't feed her to those dogs...God doesn't make the world this way. We do."

Rorschach in Watchmen by David Gibbons and Alan Moore

Let's get one thing out of the way first: gun violence, violence in general, mass homicide, mass murder, any murder, and especially the murder of children, all of these things are damn near unequivocally awful, evil, terrible, horrific, repugnant and reprehensible.  The execution of violence upon undeserving parties is understandably one of the most unilaterally condemned categories of immoral acts for damn good reason.  The shootings that have taken place over the last several weeks and months are awful, tragic events.

They are not, however, surprising.  At least, not if you're familiar with the greater part of human history.

Colonial Americans essentially destroyed the Native Americans in what is now New England.  The Spanish essentially exterminated almost all of the native inhabitants of the areas of South America that they conquered.  So did the Portuguese.  The Romans obliterated so many different ethnic groups that there is simply not enough room in this post to enumerate them.  Whites in the south dehumanized and murdered untold scores of Africans and African Americans.  Let's not forget the Nazis either.  Or the famine that Joseph Stalin forced upon the Ukrainian people.

Then there are the serial killers.

Don't forget political movements that killed untold scores of people (i.e. China's Cultural Revolution, Stalin's Great Purge, etc.).

Deserving special mention are all the captains of industry who constructed or perpetuated the often unjust labor system that dominates the world.

People are shitty.  Really shitty.

Big surprise: people do awful, malicious, evil things.  All the time.

Not everyone, and I would bet that even the worst people aren't always doing something evil at every moment.  Nonetheless, with more than 7 billion of us on this terrestrial ball, I'd wager that at any given moment, someone somewhere is doing something truly awful.

The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes said that the natural state of human beings was fundamentally anarchic, barbaric and ignoble.  I would say that he goes too far, but we as a species have an undeniable collective addiction to doing awful, evil things.

So then, what do we do?  What is the answer to the tireless problem of human evil, and how should we respond?

We must hate it.  Events like the shootings of the last few months cannot be allowed to repeat themselves.  Genocide, murder, assault, slavery and all other horrendously immoral actions must be hated and scorned.  Let us never, at any time, accept in ourselves even the smallest thought that tends toward unjustified violence against others.  More than that, let us hate those thoughts.  We must indefatigably strive to rid ourselves of whatever element of human nature it is that lets these things happen.

But we must never let ourselves be surprised.  We know that people do evil things.  If we allow ourselves to be surprised, that must mean on some level that we have let ourselves forget just how awful we are capable of being.  Let us maintain always an awareness that we are fundamentally flawed, that we have a seemingly irrevocable tendency towards these reprehensible acts.  This awareness must be utilized to hate that barbaric element.

Any other response: to forget it or to allow it to fester, is nothing less than an invitation for the worst part of our nature to genuinely become a part of who we are.

It's been wonderful,

J.R.M.C.