I find the lazy semantics that couch the media coverage of these sorts of atrocities quite telling in relation to our seeming inability or stubborn reluctance to look for potential solutions via the most obvious starting point – the cause.
‘Random and senseless’ acts, I heard again this morning.
How, by any gauge or measure, can these events be deemed to be random?
Targets are stealth-selected for maximum resonance and emotive impact. “You bomb our kids, we’ll bomb yours”. Nothing random about that. Huge symbolic statement.
To call them ‘senseless’, again suggests some sort of spontaneous, indiscriminate ‘lashing out’ perpetrated by brain-washed, despotic robots. It denies them an intelligence, in the literal sense of the word of course. We label these people as ‘mad’ or ‘evil’ (as by some definitions they very well might be) because then we don’t have to think about what drives them. And let’s face it, we do have to be quite driven to strap explosives to our own body, stand next to a group of children in a public place and commit suicide and mass murder simultaneously. That isn’t random and it’s not senseless. It’s planned and it’s executed for a very specific reason.
Our rightful revulsion then tends to obfuscate rather than illuminate. It also hinders rounded, considered appraisal of what we need to do to move towards a solution.
If we drop bigger bombs more frequently we feed the martyr machine and their legions swell further.
Negotiation, diplomacy or any attempt to locate potentially fertile common ground is impossible. The ideological gap is unbreachable.
We have to look beyond the horror and think in the longer term about how this ‘world view’ can be evolved, if you like, out of the thinking that lies behind the acts.
We can do this. We are intelligent enough. We just need some political, cerebral muscle behind it and a few major players to be brave enough to depolarise the issue and treat it as you would an apolitical threat to world order or humanity.
That doesn't mean we abandon our efforts to contain the problem, pursue those responsible and seek justice for their victims.
We just can't continue to do this at the expense of some 'big thinking'.
Anyone who takes any element of this as being in any way sympathetic or apologist in relation to the perpetrators of this terrible crime are badly missing my point.
But this isn’t going to go away any time soon. And all the Trumpist tub-thumping in the world, the eyes for eyes, the teeth for teeth, won’t move us one centimetre further down the track.
