When I heard about what happened in Orlando, I was shocked and saddened. It is numbing to see such violence unfold once again in the U.S. This event is likely to define what it meant to be alive in the U.S in 2016 and unfortunately seems to have cynically encapsulated all the modern-day tensions of the country. The event squeezed the issues posed by the remnants of bigotry, the vicious fight over our gun rights and security and of course the paranoia and real-life threats of terrorism, which now appear everywhere, into a single horrid night.
We again now find ourselves grappling to pull out any sort of lesson from this latest and deadliest massacre to stop ourselves from becoming jaded to such events in order to fight against it and keep this growing problem from becoming a horrifying new norm of American life and life in Democracies around the world. But as we grapple with ourselves, we must work to keep ourselves from tearing each other apart as well.
It can feel strange to politicize tragedy so soon after it has occurred, but yet there is the necessity for such debate. There needs to be a discussion because that is how Democracy works and to expect no argument and instead, hope for silence from the masses, unsure what to say in the wake of such destruction, is to hope for a society that has accepted such terrors as part of everyday life.
But during this moment, it is also critical to see the small message that comes out of this senseless idiocy of a man's need to kill so many dozens of people to make a point he doesn't have. It is the same message that has come out of countless events before it and it is that you cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that created it.
The man who shot those people did it because—in some twisted way—he believed that by expressing his intolerance and hatred in the most violent way, he would accomplish something. But it is only if we meet that hatred with total hatred of our own that he will have accomplished anything at all.
In the aftermath of such an event, there are of course those gearing up to use this moment as a way to point to immigrants and scream for them to get out, those gearing up to use this as a way to ban Islam and those who practice it from enjoying the religious freedoms of the U.S., and for a few incredibly despicable groups, there are those who are gearing up to use this as a divine example of punishment for gay culture. If we allow feelings like these to be the outcomes of these events, then such total tragedy becomes amplified as we let the terrorists turn our fear against one another by morphing it into hatred.
There was a time not too long in our past when many of the people in that club would have been treated much like a scourge. So to turn around and use a hate crime and act of terror like this to point at an entirely different group and paint them as the new scourge and plague upon our country is simply giving the terrorists more reasons to do what they do by fueling hate with hatred.
What happened at Orlando was a stupid, senseless, ignorant act of someone who clearly had lost his humanity. So please, let's not reciprocate the action by reacting to it with the same level of stupidity, senselessness, blind ignorance, and inhumanity.
