The face of Evil

On September 11, 9/11 as the Americans refer to it, four civilian jets were hijacked and flown toward selected targets with the intent of striking at symbolic targets, crippling strategic facilities and killing a lot of people. It’s unclear which, if any, of those aims was paramount in the terrorists thoughts.

History records that three of the planes hit their targets (two into the Twin Towers in New York, one into the Pentagon in Washington) while another, directed towards the Capitol Building, crashed before reaching its target due to the opposition posed by the passengers on that plane.A total of 2,996 people were killed, thousands of others injured – many of whom died later from injuries or trauma related conditions.

There were 19 hijackers.

That the United States could be struck so brazenly, that so many people could be killed so easily, shocked the world. If twitter had been around, the words surreal and disbelief would have been trending.

We saw the Face of Evil.

Just over a year later, a series of bombs were set off in Bali, with the purported aims of causing pain to western countries and allies of the US. The bombs took the lives of some 202 people – 88 of them Australians, many of those school leavers and young people.

A grieving parent is attributed as saying at the time, “these bastards figured out where our kids go on holidays, and they went and murdered them.”

We saw the Face of Evil.

But we’d seen it before.

Massacres and spree killings aren’t new. They’ve been common occurrences, and only growing moreso, for decades. For centuries, in fact.

We saw the Face of Evil in a cinema in America earlier this year.

In Australia, the Port Arthur Massacre in April 1996 became Australia’s worst spree killing with 35 people killed and another 21 injured, and as a nation we were gobsmacked and shocked and left in a state of disbelief.

And it wasn’t even Australia’s first massacre or spree-killing. Not by a long shot.

But for all of these horrible and horrific crimes, for the incredible pain and loss inflicted on people and the tragedies of lives lost and affected forever, can there be anything more blood-chilling or obscene than “the school shooting?”

Perhaps the greatest obscenity is that they happen so often that we’ve had to accommodate our language with a term to describe them – a special sub-category within the broader category of heinous ways we’ve found to kill innocents that refers specifically to the way we’ve found to kill large numbers of our young, beautiful children.

Growing up in the 70s and 80s many of us first became aware of the phenomenon with the Boomtown Rats song “I Don’t like Mondays” which referred to the events at Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, California on 29 January 1979 where a young girl killed two and wounded nine but school shootings had been around for a long time before that.

Even though few listeners probably knew much about the event that sparked the song, the song hit you like a brick. It could be any similar tragedy.

Sadly, tragically, there have been so many that we lose track of them all.

Dunblane, Columbine, Virginia Tech…

Sandy Hook Elementary School.

A city with almost exactly the same population as Goulburn.

We all woke up this morning to a brand new school shooting. It’s so fresh, the numbers are still changing, but at this stage it seems 28 people – 20 of them kids between the ages of 5-10 – are dead.

An early version of the story is that a person shot his father, then drove to the school where his mother worked and shot her and many other people, ultimately including himself. It’s early days so some of that might be wrong.

I haven’t used his name… I haven’t used any of the names of any spree killers or murderers in this piece. While history needs to record their names, I don’t.

Terrorists who believe they have divine purpose. Tortured souls and the mentally unstable who snap. These killers aren’t always the ones who were cruel to their pets and hurt others. Evil doesn’t always wear black.

People will offer reasons why mass-killers had the feelings they had, or what cause they believed in, or what set them off the edge, or why in some cases they had no control because they were mentally ill – and the points they make will have merit.

But evil is in the deed.

The killing and harming of innocents – that is the Face of Evil.

And the murder of our beautiful children? Does anyone have any words for that? I don’t. I want words, and reasons, and explanations, but I’ve got absolutely nothing.

Most languages in the world have a word for husbands and wives who’ve lost their partners, or children who’ve lost their parents, but no language in the world has a word for parents who’ve lost their kids because it’s just too painful and horrible a thought to contemplate.

These poor families…

So we send them our best thoughts, or prayers for those who pray, and I guess one miniscule positive from situations like this is the desire we see in the people around us to reach out and help, or the instinct to feel and share their pain.

Thank God we haven’t become so used to these sort of events that we are immune to their effects.

President Obama cried as he spoke to the media.

Priests, police and community leaders have broken down as they spoke.

And a reporter on CNN just said, with her voice breaking: “The bodies of 18 little children still lie in that building.”

Tell me you didn’t choke up as you read that.

Larry Emdur tweeted during the Sunrise Show that he was trying to be professional but wanted to walk out of the studio 100 times to cry.

And as I write this, my four year old son Bobby watching Pokemon and getting ready for his birthday party, I’ve been a mess. He’s sick of all the cuddles, I can tell you that.

We hug our kids. We pray for those who’ll never get to hug their kids again. And overwhelmingly we are left with a feeling of helplessness.

We can’t fix this. We can’t change this.

America can do a lot to diminish the problem and maybe one day, when they decide as a nation that protecting their kids and their people as a whole is more important than some antiquated, gung-ho and testosterone-driven need to own guns.

But even that won’t solve the “problem”.

After all, how do you solve evil? How do you eliminate it?

You can hate the bastards who kill innocents and wish them ill. Go right ahead. I know I’m meant to forgive and everything but I’m ok with hating them to hell and back just now as I think about the poor little kids leaving this world looking down the barrell of a gun – scared, confused and screaming for their parents.

But of course, that changes nothing.

Some things, like sadness, we just can’t change.

There are no answers at the end of this blog.

All we can do is muddle through as best we can, love those around us, and maybe reach out to the unloved. In the end, love is all we have.

(Originally published on the Goulburn Post website).