We all heard about the story yesterday of the American Muslim who went on a shooting spree and hollered Allah Akbar as he killed his fellow soldiers. That man was born in the United States. He joined the Army right out of high school. The Army paid for his college, medical school, and license to become a psychiatrist. His family, who live in Maryland, just a few miles from the hotel where I am staying right now, say they have no idea what happened, or what he was thinking. The mosque where he attended religious services is right over here a few miles away. The people in the mosque are not extremists. He studied here in Bethesda, right down the street from where I am using the wireless in this Internet café.
It seems, people can just go nuts. You wonder, is there a “why” for something like that? We look for a reason, because if we cannot find the reason, it makes us vulnerable to randomness. The forces of chaos, the undirected acts of an amoral nature, are highly uncomfortable. If there is no meaning to life, it makes life hard to bear. We take comfort in our religious faith, because it gives us a measure of safety. We think: if we just follow the rules, and obey our God, we will be protected. It’s a relief, to be protected by God.
But then we have a man whose concept of God is also strong. He believes he must follow his religious rules, to be protected, too. He believes in his faith, and it gives him comfort. He goes to Texas. His safety is tested, when he feels he is being taunted and humiliated by the people around him, who are persecuting him for his religious beliefs. He feels conflict, because he is about to be sent to war, a war which he is hearing the worst about, from his patients who are telling him their stories. He feels torn inside because he believes this war is against others who are like him, who share his belief system, his ethnic background and culture. He knows the stories of atrocity, told to him by his patients. The pressure breaks him. He cannot reconcile his concept of God with his experience of persecution, and the Army to which he has made his career and risen in rank. He feels disconnected and separated.
The man who was the psychiatrist, a Major in the United States Army, a natural born U. S. citizen, and a devout member of a religious faith deteriorates so quickly that no one knew it was happening. Everyone who knows him is shocked. No one suspected he was in emotional trouble. He becomes a killer.
Do we need to find out “why”? Will we investigate and learn that he was having a bad reaction to a prescription drug, and then give the drug companies a pass, failing to hold them accountable, like we did with the Columbine boys? Or will we be satisfied to say, “Oh, he did it because he was a Muslim” and hold all Muslims in suspicion? Will we pressure all other Muslims, too, in our attempts to convert them from their deeply held beliefs? Will we pressure others beyond their breaking points, and attribute their breaking to flaws in them, giving a free pass to pressures of social sanctioning?
Will we find the reason, so that we can prevent these things from happening in the future?
Or will we say, “it was just that person’s fault”, and refuse to fix the societal problems which contribute the pressure that causes these breaks?
We worry about health care, and yet we fail to see that we must fix the causes of health problems before we have cared for health.
