16 Jul Evil and Heartbreak in Pennsylvania
As bizarre as it sounds, I feel a bit like I have to write everything there is to write about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump RIGHT NOW! because otherwise, it will slip off the front pages and into the historical archives any moment now. The speed of the news cycle, the public’s attention span issues, and the ruling class’s desire to move on as quickly as possible have all combined to make the story seem like “yesterday’s news” already. That’s unfortunate for any number of reasons, but mostly because this IS the defining story of the current political era.
Even more bizarrely, I suppose, with so much to say and so little time to say it, I want to focus today on one aspect of the story that, at least thus far, has been largely overlooked: the shooter. Had the shooter been politically active or aggressively ideological, one suspects his story would be important and would be front-and-center in an ongoing debate. As it is, the shooter was a political nobody and, more to the point, a social nobody, a lonely kid who had been bullied for much of his life. That’s not interesting – or at least it’s not interesting in the sense that the press and the parties can turn into a cudgel with which to beat their enemies. And so…who cares, right?
As soon as I learned about the assassination attempt and learned a bit about how it had happened, I felt an enormous pit in my stomach. Part of this was the understanding that this event and its aftermath revealed and accentuated so much of the political dysfunction in our country. Grotesque though it may sound, I don’t suppose anyone was surprised by any of the reactions, either by the Left or the Right. Everything – from Lefties lamenting that the shooter missed to Righties insisting that what was good for the Gabby Giffords was good for the gander, meaning that President Biden was personally responsible for the shooting because he used martial-sounding language – was utterly predictable. And it was utterly soul-crushing as well.
The bigger part of the pit in my stomach, however, was that I knew immediately who the shooter was. Now, to be clear, I don’t mean that literally, as in I knew Thomas Matthew Crooks. It’s just that I knew, without even a hint of a doubt, that this was a lonely, troubled kid who had been relegated to the outskirts of society. I can’t explain how I knew it. I just did. I felt it deeply and unflinchingly. And it broke my heart.
If you Google “bullying” or, better yet, “epidemic of bullying,” what you’ll find is that the educational establishment, in general, believes that we, as a nation, are indeed suffering from and through an “epidemic” of bullying. And the anecdotes bear this out. They’re horrifying. At the same time, however, there is something not quite right about the claims of an epidemic. Most of the evidence is anecdotal, and where actual statistics exist, they are not particularly useful. “Children report bullying in school 4 times as often today as they did in 1957.” Really? No kidding?
It’s not that I don’t believe that bullying is a serious and significant problem. Believe me, I do. My youngest son – and incoming high school freshman – has been mercilessly bullied for the last four years. This is an issue that is near and dear to my heart. I think it’s important – on both the aggregate and personal level.
The problem, rather, is that I don’t think anyone, anywhere understands what is going on, why it’s going on, or how to deal with it. This is especially true of the aforementioned “educational establishment” but applies to others as well. Is there an epidemic of bullying? Or, rather, is there an epidemic of poor parenting, coupled with poor moral formation, coupled with therapeutic nonsense, coupled with social dislocation and confusion?
Bullying – that is to say the formation and enforcement of social hierarchies, often with violence attached – is almost certainly a part of the human condition, something that has been an aspect of man’s fate since his fall from grace. The nature of this hierarchy formation and the response to its more vicious elements are likely what has changed and, in my estimation, are likely what has made the issue seem much more serious and maddening.
I imagine that most of my fellow Gen-Xers will recall the dawn of the anti-bullying era that coincided with our early educational experiences and which featured such things as “warm fuzzies” and “cold pricklies.” These are, more or less, symbolic representations of “empathy,” part of the belief that children can overcome natural aggression and desire for status by being encouraged to understand feelings, to emphasize making each other sense that they are appreciated, and by trying to understand how their words and actions affect other people. Warm fuzzies and cold pricklies were very much a 1970s, post-hippie-era attempt to embrace emotions and try to “care” more for one another, but they were also emblematic of the entire evolution in moral reasoning in the West – starting with the Reformation and evolving over the decades into the emotive-mush that has characterized our society for the last half-century.
Educators – and others, including many on the political Right – have fallen into the trap of believing that “values” are what makes a person moral. I “believe” in X. X is good. Therefore, I am good. Values are important, of course, and some values are extremely important. Yet, values produce, in most cases, a morality of thought, not action, of belief, not deed.
In a sense, we, as a society, have spent the last century teaching kids what to believe rather than how to behave. More to the point, over the last half-century – the warm-fuzzy-era – we have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to eliminate the hazards of social interaction by teaching kids various belief systems that are derived exclusively from emotions and sentiments. “Bullying is mean. It hurts people’s feelings. It makes them think that they are unworthy of love and friendship. It is unkind.” To be sure, all of this is true, but it’s useless in and of itself. What we have NOT done is teach kids how to behave. We have not forced them to practice proper behavior. And we sure as hell haven’t forced them to suffer consequences for bad behavior. As long as everyone thinks the right things and understands that some things are inappropriate, then all is well.
As C.S. Lewis put it – and as I am exceptionally fond of mentioning: “The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting, and hateful.”
In other words, people don’t know innately how to behave in al social situations. They don’t know, for example, that magnanimity is a very powerful and very important virtue, that those who show mercy and kindness in success are likely to experience even more and even greater success. They have to be taught that. They have to be trained to know that pettiness and cruelty in success can jeopardize that success.
I have written a great deal in the past about what motivates the victims of bullying to carry out acts of violence as a form of representational vengeance. The question of the moment, however, is what motivates bullies to bully, what has created the conditions in which bullying appears epidemic?
This is a complicated question, obviously, and one that cannot be answered easily much less in a single essay by someone who has a personal stake in the matter. Nevertheless, I think it’s a question the answer to which starts with our contemporary civilizational emphasis on thoughts and beliefs over behavior.
Over the next several weeks and months, a great many people are going to dig into the lives of the Crooks family. They’re going to blame them for this, fault them for that, and attack them for the other. And no doubt, they may have done some awful and terrible things.
I doubt it, though. Mostly I feel sorry for them. They lost their son – in a gruesome and horrifying way. He will forever be remembered as a person who was killed, justly, committing an act of great evil, murdering one man and attempting to murder others. And all of this is in addition to the pain that they suffered for years, watching him be tortured every day for years, by his contemporaries, who will all be remembered as “good kids.”
That’s heartbreaking. And it’s not something that warm fuzzies can fix.
