What to say to the primary suspect of the Aurora shootings, James Holmes?
Guilty? Innocent? Nevermind his apartment was rigged with booby traps and
explosives designed to kill.
Who was he? A doctoral student. A smart person with ambition. But why is it that we can now abrogate his intelligence? In other words, what makes smart people want to kill? (In news articles, Holmes kept talking about how he was the ‘Joker’ to the police.)
Let’s qualify intelligence. Hitler was a smart dude. He knew
how to speak in public, how to use propaganda, and how to get people to obey
his orders—in other words, he was powerful. But power is imagined. It’s not
actually real. It’s a word we’ve made up! There’s no such thing as power OVER
others—or, there should be no such thing. I’m advocating democracy and not
anarchy here: there being a concrete difference between the two. Power does not
exist. It does not.
Any person who thinks he or she is powerful is delusional in
my opinion. We hear of them: tyrants. Qaddafi, Stalin, Mao, bin Laden, and the
German dude I mentioned in the last paragraph. On the other hand, we hear and
read about figures who commanded audiences but realized personal sacrifice was
the only way to enact change; I’m talking here about Gandhi and Jesus and
Buddha and the Hindu gods and Mohammed pbuh. I’ve never met these people! But
the things I’ve read of and heard about them are incredible; they’re quite
literally fantastic and UNbelievable and transcendent and holy.
God, this is to you. Teach us what justice is. Justice is
not revenge; justice is an empathetic and comprehensive understanding of what
happened and a commensurate punishment according to that understanding. We wait for justice, because we want to believe that whoever
perpetrated the atrocities in Aurora will not have the power to do it again.
Of course, ‘personal sacrifice’ is tricky. To whom do you sacrifice? To the God of Christianity, to your parents and/or family, to your friends, or to yourself? And what do you sacrifice? Time? Money? What if a man accidentally kills another (one who has been diagnosed with a terminal disease) not out of malicious intent but simply out of desperation to feed his children in his monetary poverty? These tricky situations will pop up in your everyday life. Your life will be a series of never-ending gray moral situations that threaten to stress you mentally.
Of course, ‘personal sacrifice’ is tricky. To whom do you sacrifice? To the God of Christianity, to your parents and/or family, to your friends, or to yourself? And what do you sacrifice? Time? Money? What if a man accidentally kills another (one who has been diagnosed with a terminal disease) not out of malicious intent but simply out of desperation to feed his children in his monetary poverty? These tricky situations will pop up in your everyday life. Your life will be a series of never-ending gray moral situations that threaten to stress you mentally.
And perhaps the perpetrator of the Aurora shootings knew
this: he wanted to rail against moral relativism or moral absolutism—or,
perhaps he was just plain crazy. Chris Rock: “What ever happened to crazy? What, you can’t be crazy no mo’
[sic]?” (Video source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOmb3Rp1pcU)
But here’s what the Aurora shooter (perhaps Holmes, though he is innocent until proven guilty) didn’t know: personal philosophy and, correspondingly, personal sacrifice means little. In the scheme of things, human beings are globules of moving water that copulate with other proto-plasms of moving water that live maybe 80 years(if you happen to be so lucky)—a unit of time that is not even a thousandth of a millisecond in the geology of the planet that has been around for billions of years and the universe that has been around for trillions. We are nothing—just moving units of water (bodies being 70% H20). The shooter forgot that in this universe, only action matters. Screw rationalization and justification and confirmation bias and attitude polarization: pay attention to action. The human mind, characterized by countless digressions, equivocations, and extenuations, is unreliable. This mass murderer proved that.
Now we learn from his mistakes. Do not kill. Do not lie. That is your life’s purpose. Your dreams do not matter. Save life, create, and be honest. Create, and have second thoughts about destroying anything others have invested a good deal of time into doing: living. Do not murder. The Sixth Commandment commands you not to.
But here’s what the Aurora shooter (perhaps Holmes, though he is innocent until proven guilty) didn’t know: personal philosophy and, correspondingly, personal sacrifice means little. In the scheme of things, human beings are globules of moving water that copulate with other proto-plasms of moving water that live maybe 80 years(if you happen to be so lucky)—a unit of time that is not even a thousandth of a millisecond in the geology of the planet that has been around for billions of years and the universe that has been around for trillions. We are nothing—just moving units of water (bodies being 70% H20). The shooter forgot that in this universe, only action matters. Screw rationalization and justification and confirmation bias and attitude polarization: pay attention to action. The human mind, characterized by countless digressions, equivocations, and extenuations, is unreliable. This mass murderer proved that.
Now we learn from his mistakes. Do not kill. Do not lie. That is your life’s purpose. Your dreams do not matter. Save life, create, and be honest. Create, and have second thoughts about destroying anything others have invested a good deal of time into doing: living. Do not murder. The Sixth Commandment commands you not to.
