There are two massive shooting stories in the news today.
At Fort Hood, a massive military base in Texas, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a Muslim Army psychiatrist stationed there, is alleged to have entered the Soldier Readiness Center and opened fire, killing 13 people and wounding 30 others. He was vehemently opposed to the war in Iraq, and was about to be deployed to the Middle East just before he committed the shootings.
The very next day, 40 year-old Jason Rodriguez opened fire in the offices of an engineering firm where he was fired two years ago. He killed one person and injured five others. When asked why he did it, he replied, “because they left me to rot.”
These events seem particularly American, encapsulating complex themes that have come to dominate the news over the last couple of years. Was Hasan a terrorist, or a man driven insane by an unjust war and the attendant prejudices associated with his Islamic faith? Was Jason Rodriguez just a very vivid example of the despair and misery caused by the current economic meltdown?
Another story that I read about earlier in the week, and which will now be practically obliterated from the news, was that of the Cleveland Rapist. A convicted sex offender living in a derelict, primarily black area in Cleveland, Anthony Sowell has been charged with five counts of murder after the bodies of 11 women were discovered at his home.
His victims, primarily African-American drug addicts and prostitutes, were haphazardly concealed around his home and property, and apparently the stench of rotting flesh was overwhelming. However, even though everybody in the neighbourhood could smell it, they all attributed to Ray’s Sausage, and thought of Sowell as just another sketchy character who liked to sit out on his front steps and drink King Cobra Malt Liquor. Although the police regularly visited, and a naked woman was once reported to have been seen falling from the second floor, nobody thought that anything was seriously amiss at Sowell’s home.
The subtext to this story is quite a bit more horrible than the first two, I think. In a depressed and over-looked area, one populated by people living on the margins, life is cheap. Presumably, in this part of Cleveland, you just don’t ask too many questions, and even if a house smells of rotting flesh, well, that’s just the way people in these parts live. And so, people turn a blind eye, indifferent to the continual, and steady miseries that are systemically inhibiting and destroying the people who live in such communities, choosing instead to focus on the more sensational events that speak more directly and immediately to the lives in the mainstream.