Pedestrian

I am listening to Steve Kazmierczak’s girlfriend on CNN:

“He was a victim too” she says.

“I can’t believe he’s gone”

“There was no evil in Steven”

“He wanted to help people”

“People need to know who he really was. He can not be defined by his last action. There’s so much more to him than that last terrible action”

The reality in that last sentence hits me hard. I’ve often times pondered over the same dilemma: people are people. Even the most atrocious, even those who seem purely wicked, biologically, are human beings. Even those who commit the most vile, wicked acts need to be seen for who they really were. It is only in that light that we will realize why they ended the way they did and committed the crimes they committed. It is only through understanding that atrocities of this caliber can be prevented.

Understanding is far from being apologetic – it is only a preventive mechanism.

Some may disagree entirely. A monster deserves no remorse – nor understanding. Here’s a man who walks into a school and takes the life of the most innocent victims society has to offer: children. { Here’s a society that lets him. We don’t hear too much of that last narrative of course.} The only thing more evil than the act committed is us sitting down listening to how ‘gentle’ or ‘kind’ he was. He deserves no compensation, no excuses, no tears.

But I beg to differ

If for our own sake alone, we need to understand people in the entirety of what they are. If the killer doesn’t deserve that understanding, we certainly do. In the light of any horror, be it a tsunami or a school shooting or even World War II, we not only pick up what we’ve lost, but go back to analyze. We ask “why”? We ask “How come?” We look for facts, for clues, for evidence. We do not condemn men alone, just as we do not condemn the oceans. We try our best to see what the causes were and how they can be prevented. Historians and academics to date have tried to analyze and reanalyze even the likes of Adolf Hitler a thousand times over. In many of these analysis, they only try to decipher why and how such a being was brought to existence. They look at sociological factors, economical ones, familial reasons or historical causes.

But at the end of the day, I also wonder why we become so monstrously hypocritical at such concerns and with such analysis. I try to remember John Allen Muhammad or Seung-Hui Cho. I can’t recall anyone shedding tears for them. Or reminding us of their humanity. They certainly had loved ones and family. We weren’t even allowed to hear that.

They did not have “white” skin. Their names were more difficult to pronounce than “Steve” (albeit, this was indeed the post-9/11 era when “Muhammad” was easier to spot than a giant squid in the middle of your living room.) But that’s where the differences end and the similarities begin.

More importantly, why don’t we ever hear the “humanity” behind the gruesomeness that is a suicide bomber? Is their act any worse than the act committed by Kazmierczak? He used a gun and they use explosives, but the utter horror is one and the same: individuals who, out of desperation, loss, poverty, evil, wickedness, destruction, despair, … all of those things or none … not only take their own life, but that of an endless number of innocent victims.

Suicide bombers are making their way into the life – and death – of dozens of people everyday. But we never stop to ask: ‘why?’ No one ever stops to look clearly for answers.

In their case, the answers are simple: It’s Islam. It’s Osama Bin Laden. It’s a crazy, fucked up Palestinian refugee.

But in Steve Kazmierczak case, it’s still “very difficult and almost impossible” to assess – even after all the analysis. Maybe he stopped taking the pills, maybe it was his abusive parents, maybe he was a freak from day 1 but nobody knew it. Whatever it was, it’s not clear and we need to dwell much farther and deeper.

His actions defined the life of 6 individuals. Those suicide bombers are affecting an entirety of a geographical region.

More drastically, Kazmierczak has family, had life, education, a doctor who prescribed him pills which he decided to avoid, whereas many of these people have none of that.

Does that justify their actions?

Evil can never be justified. But for our own sake … it does deserve analysis.

But in many of these horrors and through many of these tragedies, we only heard condemnation, hate and anger.

Indeed, we should have. If this is a media who disagrees with me, that believes monsters deserve no remorse – they had every right not to give the perpetrators any of it.

But this was indeed the same media portraying Jessica Baty’s tears just a few nights ago.

And all through out the night, I hear her words: People can not be solely defined by their last action. There’s so much more to them than that.

Yes, I’m sure there is – but only some times, and in particular circumstance.