Now, Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Outrage

A few days ago four Marines and one Navy officer were killed in Chattanooga Tennessee by Mohammed Abdulazeez.  The latest in a litany of all too frequent acts of mass violence, several of which have been directed at Military bases and personnel. Make no mistake, this tragedy is no less heartbreaking than any of the others, but as a nation we know how to deal with this.  They were soldiers, we lower our flags, we honor their memories and add their names to the list of the honored dead... oh and we start looking for the revenge.
This time too, the killer's name was Mohammed, not Dylan or James, we know what that's about right?  Like Osama and Saddam, he's the same sort of problem, a terrorist that got's to be got.  The only problem is that he's not part of some huge conspiracy, he was essentially the same as Dylan Roof (Charleston), James Holmes (Aurora), or Aaron Alexis (DC Navy Yard), he was, according to what we're finding out now, a man battling depression and possibly other forms of mental illness.  He was, in fact, Muslim, but he was also American.  He was a bit perturbed by the fact that his own government treated him as a criminal because of his name and his heritage, but it is unclear whether or not he ever actually became a terrorist by the definition most of us have in our heads.
It would make sorting out this whole tragedy that much simpler if he were found to have had some connection or even coaching from some middle eastern "death to America" types.  It would be great if, for a change, he wasn't just another case of our own disturbed, violence obsessed, psyche running amok and turning an unstable and disaffected young man into a killer.  It would be "easier" for us to handle a foreign threat, than to find out once again that "the killer is calling from inside the house."
Shooting sprees have been a thing in this country for quite a while.  You had Charles Whitman in the clock tower at the university of Texas in 1966, Sylvia Seegrist at the Springfield (PA) mall in 1985, Jillian Robbins (who I was actually acquainted with) at Penn State in 1996, Ryan Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine High School, Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary, James Holmes at a movie theater in Aurora Colorado, Aaron Alexis at the DC Navy Yard, Dylan Roof at the Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, and now Mohammed Abdulazeez in Chattanooga Tennessee.
And of course there are more, those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head (though I did have to Google some of the names). With the exception of Harris and Klebold, who worked together and planned rather extensively, it was more of a psychotic break than an evil conspiracy.  You'll notice there are a lot of white men (though women do get on the list), also Alexis was black, and now we have an Arab.
The core problem is still mental illness, it can be glossed over with white supremacy, rage at the government, anger at bullies, Muslim extremism, bad break-ups, but at the end of the day it's a lot more complicated than any of those things.  It is extreme disassociation, it is a combination of hatred of others and profound self-loathing.
We can fight the war on terror from now until Jesus returns, we're not going to stop this problem.  We can eliminate Al Quaida, ISIS, and whatever pops up to replace them, but unless we come up for an absolute cure for mental illness (or at least the stew of them that lead to this sort of thing) we will never be safe.  Our best defense is not security, locking all of our doors and windows doesn't help when the killer is in the house.  Our best defense is community.  Community that cares and pays enough attention to notice when someone is going off the rails.  Community that doesn't stigmatize people who actually try to get help.  Community that holds people strongly enough so that these sorts of explosions don't happen (at least not as frequently).
I mentioned that I knew one of the people on the list: Jillian Robbins, now I don't mean I was close with her, but she did sort of move in the same crowd as me and State College is a relatively small world.  She was a waitress at the Ye Olde College Diner where you could get cheap food and bad coffee.  When I say I knew her, I mean I knew her name before she made the news and became infamous.  She seemed pretty normal, and by normal, I mean not that much more disturbed than any of my other acquaintances.
So many of "my people" had been diagnosed with some sort of mood disorder.  I'm not talking like loony bin crazy, I'm just talking counseling and prescription meds crazy.  SSRI's (Selective Seratonin Re-uptake Inhibitors) were the new thing for treating everything from severe bipolarity to the Monday blues.  And for a minute, people thought they had found the magic bullet in treating various sorts of mental illness.  Once there was a cure other than bomb-out tranquilizers like Lithium and Thorazine, or electroshock therapy, it seemed like mood disorders became sort of trendy. Depression was kind of ubiquitous, everybody was depressed, it was kind of our thing.
In the movie Reality Bites, which is so Gen-Xish that it really ought to come with a prescription for Prozac, the main characters leave the following message on their answering machine: "Hello, you have reached the winter of our discontent." It was literary (quoting Shakespeare and Steinbeck), and nihilistic and it pretty much summed up the feeling of a bunch of over-privileged and under-employed "slackers." The world we grew up in was defined by television and broken families and conspicuous consumption and Reaganomics, in other words it was like a plastic utopia that covered a really broken set of assumptions.  Kids and young people tend to see through that sort of facade, even if they can't quite sort out what is actually going on, they know that things just seem false. Our community extended only as far as the people we spent our days and nights with, and the rest of the world, including most adults, and a good number of "normal" people, just didn't understand what we were going through.
At that time, it felt like there would never be an end to the adolescent and post-adolescent malaise that gripped us.  Sometimes tragedy was the only thing that broke the monotony, we cried when Kurt Cobain committed suicide, we were wide eyed when Columbine happened or when we heard about the Rwandan Genocide, but for the most part our lives were lived in between media circuses.  The world seemed un-real and un-friendly, and what was probably worst of all it seemed like there was no hope.
This is as close as I ever got to the sort of dysphoria that can eventually lead to deciding that shooting a bunch of folks is a good idea.  I had a family and a few friends that always kept me away from that ledge.  Jillian did not, at least she didn't the day she climbed under a bush with a rifle and started picking people off.  She had disconnected and alienated most of the people who knew her, and when she broke no one knew it until it was too late.
I just don't know how you can fix that.  I know community is the answer, but it's not fool proof.  I know that, somehow or other, love is the only thing that can beat it once and for all, but most of us don't even know how to apply it or even when it's needed.  And no, as we saw with Dylan Roof, sometimes love doesn't always stop the violence.  It breaks my heart to think that there were so many chances for him to feel the love and acceptance of the people who he was about to kill, and yet... it never broke through. I think a state of being where love and community always win is actually what Jesus was talking about when he talked about the Kingdom of Heaven.  We ain't there yet.
But we can take small victories as we sit in the wake of tragedies like this, in other words, the Kingdom of Heaven can draw near to us.  Refuse to accept easy answers, repent, repent of our personal sins and of the sins of our society.  Instead of feeling righteous outrage, allow your heart to break for those who were killed.  If you are a Jesus-follower, that has to include the ones who did the killing, you know, the ones you like to name your enemy, you're supposed to forgive them.
I know, it seems crazy, but it's crazy in a way that sets you free.  It's crazy in a way that breaks this cycle of violence all to pieces.
The fact of the matter is that you may very well know someone who is inches away from being the next name on the list of mass shooters.  You can either live in fear of that, or you can do what Jesus suggested: Love them.  You don't know who they are, or what's going to break them, so you have to practice love towards everyone. Be kind, compassionate and understanding.  You don't have to fix them, you probably can't anyway, but you can be the Body of Christ.
It's not easy, but it's the way.