SENSELESS?

In the wake of the Charleston massacre perhaps the frequently heard word is “senseless.” I beg to differ.

Sadly to me it makes all the sense in the world.

I would stop short of calling the shooting “inevitable” and instead call it “an event of the highest probability.” The conflation of ingredients – socially awkward, isolated, strung out kid raised on the narrative of racial hatred and paranoia; the fetishization of personal firearms; the proliferation of protected albeit disgusting extremist commentary in social media; a long-abandoned internal inhibition against homicide; tribal divides in our population that are perhaps smaller but more intensely felt and concentrated than ever before – make a cocktail of violence that goes down hard.

Make no mistake. There are those this morning – more than a few isolated nuts here and there – who are celebrating Dylann Roof as a Race Hero. And unsurprisingly Fox News and its protégées within seconds of the news breaking from Mother Emmanuel jammed it into its worn-shiny narrative of the attack on religious liberty, absurd near laughable anti-Obamaism, and the guardianship of an unassailed Second Amendment. The appetite for this narrative is greater than it’s ever been.

We shine a dim light in a large room in which the corners are dark. Our prayers, outrage and commentary will not shine much light into these dark corners. Perhaps in our restlessness to thunder proclamations and find quick solutions we avoid the only real solution – to shine the light into our own dark corners, each of us, to see and name what is there, and to make slow and steady progress toward daylight.