Dear Editor,
He was not even a man, a mere stripling of 18 years old; a schooler readying to be a citizen. He did become a globally known one on Saturday afternoon, but not of the kind that comforts. One so young, yet he seethed with a lifetime of hatreds that multiplied in his mind until he was driven to a cruel, calculated madness. The youngster now charged with 10 counts of murder in way out Buffalo, New York drove “hours” from the border of Pennsylvania accompanied by his lethal cargo of virulence and sheer unmitigated evil. Jews and Blacks triggered the worse premeditated malice in him, the Blacks got the brunt of both when he got to them in Buffalo first.
My God, this world in which we live, this pain that we inflict so callously on one another, and sometimes with such aplomb. I think of Buffalo, and I struggle to understand the inhumanity that unleashes such pathological hates, such a self-fulfilling personal Armageddon. Not only for the shooter, but those targeted because of their colour held as dreadful, their quiet, working presence, the space on this vale of tears that some say doesn’t belong to them, in which they must have no place. As I ponder this cultivated madness in a young man, I recall our own frenzies and ecstasies of madness. They have a name just like Buffalo – Lusignan and Bartica are the first ones that come to mind, with another like Cotton Tree and the three that were felled there in the grisliest of circumstances. Yes, we have had our own mass killings, and they had their own shades of the racial, and all those other mysteries that stalk this society.
I try to come to grips with these unparalleled savageries, these animalistic (and also part satanic) orgies, and I confess to not having a clue, as to how man can descend to this unrecognizably monstrous and heinous state. We have somehow managed to keep in check up to this point our own worst impulses through harrowing situations, a rigidly polarized country. Regarding how enduring that would be is another riddle that no one even tries to dabble in, or answer, anymore. We have always had race and politics as our bosom companions to galvanize us into fevered positions on the opposite sides of the divide, with nothing in the middle to cushion any dangerous future head-on collision. In this respect, we are almost identical, in those two toxic elements, to what is now predominant in America now labouring to cope with its own wrenching ruptures. For our part, we have not done well with, or addressed at all, what is required to reconcile and heal us if anything at all.
Sincerely,
GHK Lall
