Thursday, January 29, 2009

What Does Happen?

"...Or does it explode?" ~Langston Hughes

What is this world coming to?

On Tuesday, a California man shot his wife and five children before turning the gun on himself. All of them died. Apparently, before he died, he faxed a letter to a local television station explaining the reason for his actions: both he and his wife had lost their jobs about a week earlier.

It's a shame.

The first thing I felt when I heard about this story was sadness. Not anger. Not disgust. Just sadness. I don't believe this man was evil. I don't believe he was a crazed sociopath. I don't believe he was a monster. What I believe he was, was desperate.

I also believe that in this time of economic crisis, many more are reaching that point. Rock bottom.

It's so easy for people to point fingers or place blame, because in a case like this, there has to be a culprit, a bad guy, a villain. Even though it seems pretty obvious that it was desperation probably mixed in with some depression that caused this man to make such a drastic, terrible decision, we can't leave it there. We have to cast this man as the bad guy, perhaps to distance ourselves from his repulsive humanity.

Financial security is a blessing. It's a blessing that so many of us take for granted and many more of us kill ourselves to have. How many families are out there, about to reach their last dime, not sure where the next meal is coming from, feeling like failures because they can't support the lives they created? How many families work themselves into an early grave of hypertension and anxiety and loneliness and isolation in order to prove to their family and friends that they are good and hardworking and worth love and support and expenive things? And how often does our society, with it's mantra of pulling one's self up by one's boot straps and it's model of the American dream and it's mandate that financial security and material possessions are a measure of one's worth, how often does this society say that the latter is worth more than the former? How often does it blame those very individuals for not carrying their share of the weight and demonize those who struggle to take care of their basic needs?

The reality of the situation is that this man and his wife had five mouths to feed in addition to their own. They had bills to pay and necessities to buy and they had no way to do that. In a day and age when thousands of people are losing jobs in a single day, the likelihood that they would quickly find alternative employment was slim.

Desperation.

We live in a carniverous, cannibalistic society that preys on the very lifeblood that keeps it going - the working class. We berate people with the idea that they're only worth as much as they can give. We beat little boys over the head with the idea that it's their ability to provide money and material things, not their ability to love that determines their worth. We tell the poor that they have no worth and treat them accordingly. We take out the mistakes of the greedy on the backs of the hungry. We do all this and then we turn and point our fingers when the very backs we've been walking on buckle under our weight.

When tragic situations like this occur, we rightly examine and critique the behavior responsible for it. But when we stop there, when we fail to go a step farther and look at the cause for such behavior - in this case a recession that's killing more families than this man did - then we continue to contribute to the problem. We continue to ignore it and thus we contribute to the ugly cycle that allows it to happen again and again and again.

In no way am I saying this man was right, to the contrary, it was sick, tragic and wrong. But in every way I am saying that there is more to this case than domestic violence. By denying this man that truth, we are denying his humanity and ours.

Is this what happens to a dream deferred?

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