When horrific tragedies occur, especially when perpetrated by fellow human beings, we often feel at a loss to understand how such horrors can occur. Our words fail us:
A dairy truck driver, apparently nursing a 20-year-old grudge, walked into a one-room Amish schoolhouse here Monday morning and systematically tried to execute the girls there, killing four and wounding seven before killing himself, the police said.
Yet the need to understand is important on several levels. The attempt to understand allows us to focus on the events without feeling the full impact; we distract and distance ourselves with thoughts of what went on and how it could have happened. At the same time, understanding such events may, we hope, allow us to prevent future horrors. Anyone with children, or who cares about children, desperately hopes to find a reason why these children, in this school, were targeted by this man. We cannot so readily dismiss it as "senseless" because if it was in fact senseless, there is no defense. We must make sense of what happened.
The Amish are pacifists. They epitomize everything that is meant by those who proclaim that "violence never solved anything." That such peaceful, deeply religious, people should be targeted seems terribly unfair, yet they are not the first, nor will they be the last, whose children, especially whose women and female children, have been targets of evil and deranged men.
Why do some men seem to hate and fear women so powerfully that they must kill?
In the depths of our unconscious minds, the world is female. For the infant, everything about the world that matters is female, Mother. We emerge from union with an all nurturing Mother, we are nurtured and deprived by our Mother, and childhood is a slow separation from the font of all goodness. Fantasies of, and wishes for, reunion are ubiquitous, and the source of considerable difficulty for those who fail to create a fulfilling life for themselves. Utopia is a derivative of such fantasies, the wish for a world in which all of our material needs are met.
For people whose development has been impaired and have never been able to give up such fantasies, the constant feelings of deprivation it engenders can be extraordinarily painful. Narcissistic character traits often are the result of too little or too much deprivation during our earliest years. Further, even in people who have made an apparently adequate adjustment, in regressed states, as in a Major Depression, earlier conflicts and developmental failures, can be re-evoked, and lead to disaster.
The "dairy truck driver" had an apparently normal life. He was happily married, with three children, and gave all appearances of being a loving father and husband, yet he planned and carried out an atrocity that can only be called, in a word which is thoroughly inadequate to the event, "evil":
Mr. Roberts’s relatives said they, too, were stunned by his violent outburst and had had no indication that he had been planning any attack. His wife issued a written statement offering sympathy to the families of his victims and said she could not reconcile the day’s events with the man she had loved.
Her statement was read by a family friend, Dwight Lefever, and described Mr. Roberts as a devoted father who had always taken the time to play with his three children, ferry them to soccer practice and birthday parties, and had “never once refused to help change a diaper.”
A change had begun to occur in 32 years old Charles C. Roberts:
The police said, however, that Mr. Roberts’s co-workers had noticed changes in his behavior over the past several months. While he had long been known as an upbeat and outgoing person, this year he began to appear sullen, his co-workers told the police. Then, late last week, Mr. Roberts once again appeared upbeat at work, Colonel Miller said.
“We think that’s when he decided to do what he did,” Colonel Miller said. “It’s like his worries and burdens were lifted from him.”
Often we see such sudden changes in Depressed patients who decide to finally take action to relieve their psychic agony; once the decision is made to kill themselves, they feel better. They know they will no longer suffer. That still begs the questions: What does it take for a man to decide to take others with him? What kind of thinking is involved in a decision to kill innocent girls?
Primitive man had initiation rites to protect their young men from the power of the female. After all, only the female could create life, without her the man is nothing, yet the regressive pull back to the female left the man feeling weak and helpless. By initiating the boys into the rites of manhood, they were physically separated from their mothers and offered a powerful bond with other men to protect them from the regression.
[A more modern form of this is seen in men who cannot resist the allure of a seductive woman; some become active seducers to feel poweful; others use prostitutes for similar reasons; some will rape. When done in context with other men, there is a protective bond with other men, who as a group can deny the power of the devalued woman.]
Every society must find a way to protect their men from the regressive pull; after all, how can any society function if their men are weak and helpless. Many of the sexist jokes that make the rounds on the Internet are directly inspired by the male need to devalue and weaken the hold that the primordial woman has on them. The use of humor to sublimate fear, anxiety, and aggression is a reasonably healthy response to the dimly felt pull. The frightened man, often fueled by alcohol, who hits his wife or girlfriend, has an obviously less healthy adaptation. Fear and aggression of women must be controlled for successful societal functioning.
In the West. the Radical feminists attempted to resolve the question by identifying all men as potential abusers. The extreme view was the idea that all sexual relations between men and women were tantamount to rape. This attack on the possibility of heterosexual love and against all male aggression continues to reverberate in our society.
How a culture finds a balance between love and weakness, fear, aggression and violence, is a puzzle that is not easily solved. I wonder if a more mobilized society, one which deems it appropriate and acceptable for all members of the society to have the right and the knowledge to defend themselves, will not eventually be the avenue of wisdom.
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