Dylann Roof, I have known you all my life.
I know where you boys come from, your disordered families and thwarted expectations. I've heard you sneering, playing your music loud and drinking your cheap beer. I've been in your rooms, heard your complaints and tall stories and desperate assertions of self-worth. I've seen you with your handguns and your nunchaku, your tattoos and rented sofas.
I was related to boys like you; still am, I guess, though most of them are dead. They wrecked a lot of cars in their time, bounced a lot of checks, maybe punched a woman or two. I'm not any prouder of them than they were of themselves but I don't think we can afford to be afraid of facts anymore. Just because you can have empathy for a monster doesn't mean it's not a monster--the abyss looking into you doesn't care about the tenderness you proffer.
I'm not saying I'm like you. I've been luckier. But I know the culture of grievance. I've heard it expressed in unlikely places, places where you might think people would feel blessed to be.
Some folks feel they've been cheated. I agree that they've been cheated. Most of them never had much of a chance. Even if they did exactly what they were supposed to do, the best they might hope for--some wild strike of luck or talent--was the sort of head-down job for which a land grant education might be useful. Do everything the right way and maybe, just maybe, a sort of middle-class suburban decency might be available to you.
And good on them; lots of them make it. Some of them overcome their raising and get to put on coats and ties. They graduate to another sort of struggle. Ain't that America?
They deserve credit for that, because it is difficult to overcome your upbringing, to transcend whatever culture gets established in your first home. No doubt if you have a father you are better off; if you have loving parents willing to sacrifice and defer their own aspirations you have a head start. But there are many forms of impoverishment. You might grow up in a house without love, without books, without any sort of ordered structure. You might be indoctrinated into a selfish worldview, taught that kindness is weakness. You might be told that you are a prince whose kingdom has been stolen. You might be raised on hate.
You can find people who will tell you who to blame for your problems. They will, for their own purposes, direct your attention to the Other. This happens so regularly it's easy to think that it is a natural way of our kind, and maybe this sort of tribalism is a vestige of some long-ago time when we wielded rocks and sticks against those we didn't recognize as being of our clan.
Maybe there is something that flashes through our heads like lightning on the wall of the cave whenever we encounter a face that registers as strange. Maybe we don't have to go out of our way to learn to fear and despise that which we perceive as alien.
Yet we aren't monkeys. We can screw it together long enough to intellectually understand that people are more alike than different no matter what their ethnic or cultural heritage. That's the whole point of the American experiment, even if the founding fathers didn't exactly contemplate the full citizenship of people much different than themselves. Slavery was this nation's original sin, and if you want to whip out your grievance and measure it, son, it's going to come up way short of your typical black citizen's. No matter how held back you are--and no one says you weren't held back--you still enjoy this thing that you deny exists. This privilege that accrues to your white skin.
I've been trying to come up with a good reason that they shouldn't kill you, and I have to admit it's not been easy. The only reasons I can come up with have very little to do with you, because I don't really think you'll ever amount to much. I wouldn't expect you to ever understand exactly why your crimes are not only horrible but a pathetic expression of weakness and caprice.
You're a failed creature, and what's best for you might be the extermination that almost surely awaits you after the obligatory legal gantlet is run.
But what is best for you is not what is best for us; what we need more than anything in this country is to exercise our capacity for mercy, for restraint and for respect for every spark of life, no matter how enfeebled or dim. We know you, however hard it is to face. You are of our kind.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
www.blooddirtangels.com
Editorial on 01/08/2017