Daily Herald opinion: Staying positive, determined: We’ll be ‘in a really bad place’ if we accept mass violence as an unavoidable fact of life
Yes, we have to fight terrorism. Yes, we have to protect ourselves from the indoctrinated and the unstable. Yes, we have to be on guard — even in the midst of a holiday celebration at three o’clock in the morning — for dangers that are supposed to happen only in other places, only to someone else.
And there is one other danger we must not forget. In some ways it overrides all the others. It is numbness.
Among all the sad and depressing lines written in the wake of the terrorism in New Orleans that claimed at least 15 lives and injured dozens of others, this one in the New York Times struck us with particular force: “The attack is one of the deadliest in the country in more than a year.”
“More than a year?” Not more than a decade? More than a quarter century?
“One of the deadliest”? Not THE deadliest? We have come to the point where killing 15 people in a swipe is just one of the greatest outrages in a year?
In such a climate it is easy to succumb to indifference. We must not.
In the midst of troubled times in Jules Feiffer’s darkly prophetic 1970 play “Little Murders,” an optimistic character named Patsy rails against her fiancé’s nihilistic view of the world. “Because for every bad thing there are two good things,” she cries. “No, four good things! There are friends … and a wonderful job … and tennis … and skiing … and traveling … and musicals … and driving in the country … and flying your own airplane … and staying up all night to see the sun rise.”
Yes, we must remember such things. But we also must fear the desperation in Patsy’s father’s diatribe after she is murdered later in the play: “We need honest cops! People just aren’t being protected anymore! We need a revival of honor. And trust! We need the Army! We need a giant fence around every block in the city. An electrically charged fence. And everyone who wants to leave the block has to have a pass.”
It is not inevitable that, faced with ominous and difficult circumstances, we must slide into the cruel detachment that comes to afflict Feiffer’s characters. But the temptations are great in an era when random mass slaughter seems to have become a common outlet for the deranged and the fanatical.
We can, we must, avoid them. We must maintain our own individual sanity and come together as members of a reasonable society to improve the conditions causing our predicament. Does that mean more thoughtful planning where pedestrians gather? Surely. Better gun control? Yes. Better access to mental health treatment? Of course.
It will require all these things and more. We may not be able to prevent every horror. “Evil people do evil things,” said Christian Pendleton, a former New Orleans official reflecting Wednesday on the difficulty of stopping someone intent on unleashing mayhem.
But we must stay positive and be determined.
Waukesha, Wisconsin, Mayor Shawn N. Reilly, told the New York Times his city has implemented numerous changes after a vehicular case that killed six, but emphasized constant awareness and review is necessary.
“I still think that people want to be part of their community, go to parades, go to events, have a good time,” Reilly said. “We’re going to be in a really bad place if the end result is that we have no gatherings of lots of people.”