Conception

NPR interviewed Miami Times columnist Carl Hiaasen about his decision to write about the killings of five women in a SunTrust bank in Sebring Florida. Mr. Hiaasen's brother, Robert, was one of those killed in the shootings at the Capital Gazette.

At one point, Mr. Hiaasen notes:

And what Rob would have wanted - and I knew he felt because we talked about it after Parkland. We talked about it after Sandy Hook. We talked about it after the Pulse shootings - was that every one of these is a tragedy on almost an inconceivable scale. And you can't rate them or put them in order.

To borrow a line from Star Wars, I don't know... I can conceive quite a bit worse.

And my point isn't to be flippant. I can conceive of tragedies much larger in scale than any given mass shooting in the United States that you care to name. Like the Rwandan Genocide. The estimates of the death toll range from 500,000 to over a million people. And this is in a nation that only had a population of a little over 7 million people in 1990 (and it was steadily declining by the time the genocide actually took place in 1994). So even at the lowest number, the death toll was about 1 in 14 residents of the nation. At the upper end, it's one in seven. That's well above the percentage of Black or White Hispanic people in the United States. So imagine that in the space of now, until the end of May, every Latin person in the United States with a White racial background was murdered. It's a horrific thought. But I, at least can conceive of it. After all, it's happened before.

Now, for the record, this isn't to say that President Trump is likely to ever play the role that Théoneste Bagosora did in Rwanda, or that anti-immigrant sentiment will boil over in a level of bloodshed that would dwarf the Holocaust. Only that a population determined to wipe out a significant portion of itself can do so, and rather quickly. When one considers what the carnage that was inflicted in significant part with "machetes, clubs, blunt objects, and other weapons" it doesn't take much to imagine how much worse things could be in the United States, where guns would likely be a much larger part of the equation. And the United States has had genocides in the past, even if we've largely forgotten about them.

For any of Parland, Sandy Hook, the Pulse nightclub, Thousand Oaks or even Las Vegas to be "a tragedy on almost an inconceivable scale" means not thinking about what people have shown themselves capable of time and again. It's one thing for "another angry, white, male loser who had access to a weapon" to vent their frustrations on even hundreds of people at a time. And yes, those instances are tragic. But are they tragedies on a scale with the willingness of a population to stand by, or even participate, when entire families of their fellow citizens are wiped out for the crime of not having the correct distant ancestors? Maybe they are. Maybe the difference between 5 dead, 50 dead or 500,000 dead is simply some number of zeroes. After all, there are plenty more where those came from, no matter how many die violently. Maybe the deaths of 12 people should lie as far outside of our imaginations as the deaths of 12 million. Maybe the fact that I can so easily picture a large segment of people of United States setting out to murder people they see as unlike themselves is evidence of a darkness that has overtaken me.

Mr. Hiaasen calls on the media to "shine a light on it and write about it and react with some humanity and horror every time it happens." This is, in his view the only way for us to "get better as a society." I don't know that I agree with him on that. In part, because I look askance at the implied questioning of the "humanity" of people who don't respond in the way that he would like. As many times as dehumanizing others, questioning their "humanity" has lead to the very worst of human tragedy, giving people reasons to judge seems counterproductive. And I'm sure of the helpfulness of constantly staring into the abyss, either. There's already a certain normative quality to violence (whether guns are involved or not) in the United States. The news needing to make room for some thirty or so stories of people who have died violently every day would eventually become simply a grim background hum.

Creating a world where a man executing five women in a bank would be universally, genuinely shocking to people is going to take something other than constantly reminding them that violence is part of our everyday lives. It's going to take removing much of the violence from our everyday lives. That's not going to be a function of the media. It's going to take all of us deciding that we have better choices, and choosing to reward one another when people avail themselves of those better choices.