Truly heart-breaking, just gutting.
When I see newlywed Yusor Abu-Salha's radiant, life-affirming smile my heart just melts. Her husband Deah Barakat similarly had an recognizable buoyancy. They seemed to have a common spirit. Yusor once recorded a segment for StoryCorps, in which she brought along her 1st grade teacher, who has remarked of her that "she was the one student I wanted everyone to know." Her younger sister Razan, who was a 3D abstract model designer, lived with the just-married couple.
She was a biologist; he a second year dental student. Both were in involved with volunteering. Deah and Yusor provided free dental supplies and food to homeless people in downtown Durham, NC, and Barakat was planning on traveling to Turkey next summer along with ten dentists to provide urgent dental care to Syrian refugees.
Ironically, they really seemed in every sense of the description to be all-American kids. They played board games with their friends, and attended basketball and football games, of which Barakat was a big fan and would wear the jerseys. However, their shared ideal of being of service to people made them a little more unusually well-adjusted than the typical self-absorbed college kid. The young ladies felt they could wear the hijab, in the Land of the Free.
The Chancellor at University of North Carolina said of them, “These were students who wanted nothing more than to change the world, who basically thought the most important thing in life was helping people that were less fortunate than they were. And that is, of course, where we’re drawing our strength right now.”
An angry, small-minded, middle-aged, white guy thug of a small man named Craig Hicks snuffed out their lives with his 2nd Amendment Right. He lived next door to the three Muslim students, and was obsessed with the parking situation in his neighborhood. Sounds like the kind of self-appointed vigilante neighborhood watchdog we’ve come to see in Stand Your Ground NRA-possessed States.
When Hicks confronted them on a couple of occasions, the gutless executioner brandished his little weapons, one time a rifle and another a pistol in a holster (no doubt in his mind bobbing between white guy fantasies of the Wild West cowboy wannabe to the vigilante/enforcer Clint Eastwood tough guy). His ex-wife says he was bizarrely obsessed with a film about a down and out working class guy who gives in to his frustrations and goes on a mass murder spree. "That always freaked me out,” she said “He watched it incessantly. He thought it was hilarious. He had no compassion at all.” Has the stench to me of a loathsome he-man Libertarian, slightly educated but xenophobic and heavily propagandized.
The girls' father, a pyschiatrist, said, "The media here bombards the American citizen with Islamic, Islamic, Islamic terrorism and makes people here scared of us and hate us and want us out. So if somebody has any conflict with you, and they already hate you, you get a bullet in the head.”
It seems again it took a Twitter firestorm to envelop the pathetic American media, who fell over themselves to cover Charlie Hebdo but didn't seem to want to touch this. This writer Ben Nelson got it right:
"In spite of all of the uncertainty, one thing is clear: If the victims had been white Christians, the story would have been on every channel and every news site. And if they had been white Christians murdered by a Muslim, the entire country would have gone on lock-down and we would hear about the attack non-stop for the next month." Another sharp observation came from a friend of the Mohammad's, who appeared on CNN and gave example after example of how politicians and the media stir this religious animus.
Clowns like Bill O'Reilly inflame these passions with manufactured phony outrage to drive ratings, with such garbage as the "War on Xmas." RW media and Evangelical pastors lavish endless self-pity on conservative Christians that their world is in danger of being taken away (the same type of self-pity incidentally that the NYPD tried to wield and got severe public backlash over by its citizens and in the NY Times - the strong comments confirm this). An FBI report confirms that this paranoia is not even close to the truth; Muslims and Jews are far, far more likely to be targeted for their faith.
The human race is a completely baffling species. We’re full of envy, self-obsessed and easily frightened. But you’ll never be able to convince me anyone of us come into this world with an inherited or genetic racism. I’m absolutely convinced of the opposite. Not a single soul comes onto this planet with a predisposition toward bigotry or racism. It’s learned, inherited, conditioned. If you put a baby from Mongolia, with a baby from Montana, and a baby from Mozambique and a maybe from Malta and brought the up together they’d know nothing of racism or . It’s the bigoted uncle or the racist grandfather who plant the ugly seed. Then it’s the subtle reactions and lazy unrealized prejudices of the parent that seep in, all the unspoken body language and subtly spoken/veiled bigotry. Familial, regional, ethnic and national pride poison the well also. It’s finished off by vile propaganda of the ruling elites to keep us divided and conquered.
Step out of your comfort zone people, break bread with those from different backgrounds, take the long way home, remind yourself of the curiosity you had as a child, and reach for that wonderful component which, without, there is no chance at society: empathy. People are the same the world over.
There is enough food and resources to share that truly no one on this planet should be forced to go without. There's a way, but we don't wanna believe it. It's too idealistic, too much the terrain of dreamers, wishful thinking. Nah, we're just too lazy, distracted and self-centered. Most of all we're just far too propagandized to to honor our true inner voices.
In times like these I think of the inhabitants of this Pale Blue Dot sharing the only world we know, and lament the lack of collective thought. As our poet laureate Samuel Clemens said about his countrymen in the 19th century and it's just as apropos in 2015, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
Sometimes I wish there would be a cataclysmic event to stop the world in its tracks, like a UFO landing in Central Park on a reconaissance mission. As Perry Farrel of Jane's Addiction said if there ever is such an occasion, "I hope it'll be musicians they meet first." If not, we can console ourselves with the thought that "we'll make great pets," as he once sang in his next band. If we ever do get a visitation from one of the billions and billions of other planets we'd be forced to accept there is only one true race here, the human race. Racism would officially vanish on that day.
Another Southerner of the same surname as the killer comes to mind, who some of you may be familiar with. He was a true modern day sage. He died way before his time at 33, but his social criticism and philosophy are for the ages.
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Will we ever evolve as human beings?
I know one thing. At the every least the three young students probably would have had the capacity to ruminate on all this freely, intelligently, and compassionately. Anyone capable of such a violent slaughter would not. We lost the kind of human beings we could use a lot more of in this world.
I can't get that lovely young lady's radiant smile and positive life force out of my mind.
It's so fucking sad.