August 31, 2023
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I was hesitant to write this article and thinking whether it would serve the intended purpose, or rather any purpose. My intention as a peace scholar and activist has been to create an enabling atmosphere in which peace is no more an academic word or conference fad but a living credo for every individual living in the community. Every individual means every individual, irrespective of race, religion, color and other markers of human-made distinction. I doubt whether this article would help serve that purpose. I am kind of losing hope though I still have a tinge of optimism.
After the Buffalo shooting last year I wrote an article in a Florida newspaper, exploring the root causes of the shooting, and how a young man of 18 drove hundreds of miles to shoot and kill people only because they have a different skin color. I do not see many differences between that incident and the Jacksonville shooting that happened last week, except geography and time and individuals being different. It seems we do not live in the best of times in human history, and the shooting last week was just a tip of the iceberg, and many such incidents are in the making or waiting to explode.
The young man of 21 killed three people in a store in a racially motivated shooting, and killed himself. Police swung into action and seized his hateful diary. Politicians spoke nice words and tried to grieve with the suffering people. But that does not end the story – that does not ensure that such incidents would not happen again.
I argued in my research on protracted social conflict that unless the root causes of conflicts are addressed conflict and violence would continue. Occasional meetings, promises, road shows can work as placebos but not as permanent solution. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his famous speech at Washington DC in 1963 exhorted, ‘now is the time’. His message resonates so deeply today that one could say the same thing, and make the same appeal, even today!
It seems fear, insecurity and violence are normal, and peaceful coexistence is abnormal. We have more guns, but also more fear! We do not trust each other. We love to exclude others morally from our world because they do not look like us or profess same values as we do, and do not mind to commit atrocious crimes as they are morally excluded from our conceptions of humanity. We are afraid to confront the unpleasant truth – we live in a very sickening society, and our leaders, opinion makers, social media entrepreneurs have not helped much to address our social malady! Majoritarian vote bank politics have not helped us in any way. This makes me think the hatred of Greek thinkers of democracy as in not so well cultivated democracies demagogues and manipulators rule the roost!
True, fear is everywhere! Paradoxically, we have reaping advantages of science and technology and modern means of communication, but we are increasingly feeling insecure. I now fear to go to a shopping store as who knows there is a gunman targeting the shoppers including me. How come we descend to such a moral crisis? We are afraid of our lives, and also we make others afraid of their lives. There is a broken social-cultural structure, and a very few empathetic attempts are forthcoming to fix that broken structure.
The Jacksonville shooter a few years ago expressed his excitement in social media that he is joining business administration program in a Florida college. What happened in the last few years that the student instead of becoming a business administrator turned to be a killer? What are the factors that explain that sad development? And who are the persons responsible for this? And what are the factors that contributed to this killing? How does the prevailing atmosphere of distrust, ignorance, and overall degradation of social capital contribute to such a crisis?
Obviously by casting a larger canvas on the developments that led to the killing I am not undermining the immediate significance of the event, and why law enforcement agencies and community members must remain vigilant so that such events do not happen again, or at least minimized as much as possible. But the larger question is – what can we do as members of the community to stop these events? Or, to put it differently, how can we – I imply all members of the community – change ourselves so that we can be change agents and bringers of peace to our community. Or, when that moment – ‘now is the time’ – would be a reality, when we will not talk about racial amity and peace but also walk the talk, and live in a world when there is no violence on the basis of race, color, religion, and other such distinctions.
One argument is that racial violence is not something new, it has historical precedents. It was happening for hundreds of years, and it would continue. But for how many years? We are already celebrating anniversaries of that massacre, this massacre, or this lynching or that lynching, and are we adding to the list so that we could have more such gory anniversaries. Or, to the argument that racial hatred has gone down as they are not as severe in the past and what we are witnessing are residue of the past, my rejoinder would be, please wear the shoe of the near and dear ones of those killed? The killed are gone forever, but the lives of their near and dear ones are also changed forever. Who would bring back the dad, killed in the shooting, to the four-year-old girl?
Violence is no solution. Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. Fear begets fear. Then what is the solution, are we destined to witness more killings, and even be part of one such incident? What role should our political leaders, social media influencers, opinion makers play to address this seemingly endless macabre dance of death and destruction? Nonviolence and empathy are the solutions. I agree – ‘there is no path to peace, peace is the path.’ It must start here and now, and we must walk our talk, and bring that empathy to our immediate neighborhood and community.
