War: I can’t write about anything else
Did you know that (aside from mosquitos) the most deadly animal to humans is ourselves? There are roughly 415,180 homicides each year in the world – this statistic is inaccurate due to countries with poor vital statistics (many people, particularly girls, are invisible and unrecorded). Also, this massive number does not include war or suicide. If it did, humans would be even more deadly than mosquitoes.
I spend so much time reading, writing, and studying emotional maturity and life journeys. I’m enchanted by the goodness of humans, the way our voices unite in invisible waves when we sing together, and how a mother’s body transforms – stretching skin and increasing oxytocin – to nurse and adore her baby. The way families open space in their lives for adoption, and how people rise above harmful upbringings. The way my grandmother holds and tells stories and the way people laugh, paint, and kiss. My life is filled with wonder as I watch human magic sustain life and connection. But humans are the deadliest mammals, too.
Humans are capable of producing incredible horror. Edgar Allan Poe wrote grotesque stories in the shadows of the Enlightenment to demonstrate this human horror. I see evidence of this human shadow in the videos from across the world too horrific to describe. Humans ripping bodies and buildings and families apart with weapons and others making excuses with borders and language. There is only one meaning for the word weapon, only one use for the noun: something used to injure, defeat, or destroy. Humans made this word for one purpose only. So while humans have an incredible capacity for tenderness and connection, we also have a harrowing capacity for destruction and hate.
I want to turn my back on this grotesque demonstration of human capacity and only focus on the beauty but these humans in the videos and news articles are my species, they are my people: I see my face in their faces and my children in their children. None of us chose where we were born and I see enough of me in them that my mind and my body know that these are my people. The humans building weapons and destroying human lives are my species too. The ones protesting, the ones digging for bodies, the ones holding strangers, the ones wearing uniforms and pulling triggers – we are all the same species. We are all human. How can we massacre ourselves in this way?
In Andrew Solomon’s book Far From the Tree, he interviews Sue, the mother of one of the Columbine shooters. She surprised Solomon with her kindness and warmth and love for her son. She said, “After Columbine, I felt that Dylan killed God. No god could have had anything to do with this, so there must not be one. When everything in your world is gone, all your belief systems, and your self-concepts – your beliefs in yourself, your child, your family – there is a process of trying to establish, who am I? Is there a person there, at all?”
Amid war, I don’t know why I keep thinking about this chapter from Far From the Tree and this mother of a mass murderer who loves, misses, and remembers her son, who also cannot forget what he did. Maybe it is because all I want to do is worship and witness the goodness of humanity while telling stories about monsters to explain away the horror but there are no monsters, only humans. Sue’s story exposes humanity in its incredible horror and its incredible beauty. There is no excuse or explanation for all the suffering and destruction caused by people against people – she loves the boy she raised and is horrified by what he did. When God is killed and we are left to ourselves, what do we have? All Sue has is her questions: “Who am I? Is there a person there, at all?”
Statistics: https://ourworldindata.org/homicides
Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash
