“When did we become like this?” my friend was referring to the mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas.
We had been reminiscing about college days, “way back when.” We couldn’t help but compare that era to where we are today, and recent events prompted the question.
We don’t need to rehearse the dates of mass shootings; there is simply not enough room for that here, for if by “mass shooting,” we use the most commonly accepted definition, that is, incidents involving several victims of firearm-related violence, then there have been, since Sandy Hook, on December 14, 2012, as many as 2,182 mass shootings with a death toll of at least 2, 458.
To say, “We have been here before,” sounds almost trite.
I am neither a social scientist nor a politician; an analysis of and recommendations for the pressing problem of gun violence in our nation is beyond the scope of this column.
But I can try and get at the question my friend asked.
We have to delve just a bit into an ancient document, The Book of Genesis. There we read the story of Cain murdering his brother Abel.
Okay, it wasn’t a mass shooting or Cain would have wiped out the entire human population. Maybe if Cain had a gun, he would have used that instead of his bare hands or a rock, but the point is, the desire to murder, to kill, is certainly not a recent anomaly in the development of our species.
There is a question behind the question of how we got to this place, and it goes back before even Cain’s murder of Abel. It’s the question of why this was allowed to happen in the first place? Why even the possibility of evil?
“Why did God let this happen?” That’s the question. Maybe Adam and Eve asked that as they buried their son, Abel.
The short answer to the question is, we humans are given choices, and we inevitably, at some point, choose evil over good. God created us as humans with that capability. Otherwise, we would not be humans; we would be something else, more like robots, I suppose.
The fact is, the world has been an imperfect place for a long, long time. Why does God allow innocent people to die at the hands of a deranged person wielding an AK-47? Sick people can do evil things.
When it happens, for example, when we have not provided adequate safeguards against the perpetrators of evil, we are prone to blame God, calling into question his existence, in light of these “recent” developments. This often happens whenever a portion of that evil lands near or on our doorstep. The question does not usually demand an answer as long as the problem is in Beirut, or Afghanistan, or Yemen.
I have yet to have someone ask me why, considering the less than perfect individuals we are, good things should happen to us. “It’s a beautiful day, the kids are doing well; I love my work. This leads me to question the existence of a God who would allow this kind of thing to happen to me and others.”
Perhaps the Serenity Prayer will help you, as it has me, with how to live in this imperfect world. You may recall the first lines, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” But, there is still more to that simple and profound prayer, a part of which includes the line: “Taking, as Christ did, this sinful as it is, not as I would have it.”
We might say, that’s taking life on its terms.
I, too, wish for a more perfect world —one where there are no mass shooters, no people with weapons of mass destruction, or people who enjoy hurting innocent people, and for that matter, a world where the weather patterns don’t result in personal injury to people, or cancers that take life.
There’s a name for a place like that: it’s called heaven.
And the longer I hang around this place, the more I long for it.