It was a matter of seconds. A car moved and shots were fired. A young lady was dead.
With an amazing speed the pundits started their chatter. While people were trying to make sense of things and investigators were trying just to get to the site people who were not there, witnessed little or nothing, had already made their minds up, became judge and jury, and passed sentence.
“She was murdered…” some shouted. “FAFO,” others chortled, and people instantly became experts on ballistics and the intent of strangers and knew for a fact what had happened. The whole thing was like ten blind people trying to describe an elephant only by touch, but each was certain their emotions were justified and their positions beyond scrutiny. The young lady who was killed and the agent who took her life quickly became almost incidental to the story because the rage machine was already on the job making sure those who profited by the disquiet of the masses would get what they needed.
This is America these days where each of us, in our own way, wants the presumed power of being offended and with it the license to rage. It’s our righteous way of justifying our lack of control, the legal cover for dehumanizing each other, and the permission to inflict ourselves upon those with whom we disagree under the guise of a supposed “justice.” Somewhere along the way the old ideas of pause, investigate, consider, and ponder before rushing to conclusions, especially emotional ones, slipped away from us only to be replaced by a well-oiled rage machine where masses can be manipulated by well-designed efforts to separate them from reasonable consideration, thoughtful discourse, and basic human respect. It is bipartisan. It is universal. And it is evil.
The only way its power can be broken is for individual people to make the day-to-day choices not to become angry just because someone told them to be. You, and I, and we have to make constant daily decisions to not dehumanize whatever “other” is connected to our lives and we have to have the eyes to see that sometimes when we think we’re full of righteous anger we’re actually just being played. In a world where emotion is the final and ultimate measure of truth and feelings define the essence of things this will require a great unlearning of that which a generation of us have been taught about the world.
But if we don’t, our world will burn and every one of us with it.
The Beautiful Path 