Reaping the whirlwind

Once again I'm sick at heart because of the news of a mass shooting, this time at a prominent LGBTQ+ club in Colorado Springs called Club Q.  At the time of this writing, five people are dead and another twenty-five wounded.  The suspected shooter, Anderson Aldrich, was subdued by two people at the club and is now in custody, currently being treated for minor injuries.

There's a lot to unpack, here.  How Aldrich got a gun, despite a previous arrest for a bomb threat.  Where he picked up the hateful and homophobic ideology that impelled him to do such a thing.  It was just revealed that he's the grandson of California Assemblyman and staunch MAGA Republican Randy Voepel, but whether that will turn out to be relevant to Aldrich's horrific act of violence remains to be seen.

The queer community is, understandably, reeling.  Colorado Springs is soundly conservative, and Club Q was one of the only safe havens they had there.  Social media this morning has been full of tearful, terrified individuals who have once again been reminded of how vulnerable they are, and how much unreasoning and vicious hatred still exists in this country.

My horror started turning to anger, though, when I saw the tweet yesterday morning from Representative Lauren Boebert, whose district includes Colorado Springs.  "This morning the victims & their families are in my prayers," she wrote.  "This lawless violence needs to end and end quickly."

With all due respect, Representative Boebert, you can take your thoughts and prayers and shove them up your ass.

Boebert has been a strident voice in the anti-LGBTQ+ right wing, accusing the left of "grooming children" for such actions as pressing educators to honor trans youths' pronouns and including LGBTQ+ representation in school library books.  She warned drag queens to "stay away from Colorado's Third District."  Oh, but when her own hateful ideology comes back to her own district in the form of violence, she wants to -- as AOC succinctly put it -- "thoughts-and-prayers her way out of" any responsibility for what happened.

There's a line from the Bible that covers this kind of thing.  It's Hosea 8:7.  "Who sows the wind, reaps the whirlwind."

Neither I, nor any of the other members of the queer community whom I've spoken with, wants anything to do with the thoughts and prayers of people who after today will go back to doing everything they can to harm us.  No, not just harm us; eradicate us, erase every last one of us from the face of the Earth.

Think I'm exaggerating?  Consider monsters like Pastor Dillon Awes of the Steadfast Baptist Church in Watauga, Texas, who a couple of months ago told a cheering congregation that gay people should be lined up against a wall and shot in the head.  Or Pastor Joe Cammilleri, who saw a boy wearing fingernail polish and said to his congregation, "Oh, I just want to break his fingers."  Or far-right commentator Matt Walsh, who has built his career fighting against trans people's right to be who they are, and just last week crowed about once again being allowed to be as horrible as he wants to on Twitter now that Elon Musk has taken over: "We have made huge strides against the trans agenda.  In just a year we’ve recovered many years worth of ground conservatives had previously surrendered.  The liberation of Twitter couldn’t have come at a more opportune time.  Now we can ramp up our efforts even more."

Anyone in public office who honestly wants to stem the tide of violence against queer people can start by speaking out against these ugly spewers of hatred.  Until such time as Representative Boebert and the others like her will stand up and say to them, "This is morally indefensible.  LGBTQ+ people are deserving of the same rights and protections as anyone else.  No one gets to threaten the life, safety, and happiness of any other human being.  Not on my watch," they can sit down and shut the fuck up.

Actions like that of Anderson Aldrich are meant to terrify.  And yes, I've heard a lot of fear in the people I've talked to and those whose posts on social media I've seen this morning.  But not a single one of them has said, "So I'm just going to go back into hiding."  Queer people know all about the devastating effects of shame and fear; it's what kept me in the closet, literally for decades.  Whatever happens, we're not going back there.

Silence validates hatred.  Acquiescence perpetuates the feeling of being less worthy, less valued, less human.  Once we've mourned the victims of the shooting, innocent people who were just there to dance and laugh and socialize and have fun, we will redouble our efforts to make sure nothing like this ever happens again, and you can bet we will fly the rainbow flag more proudly than ever.

You homophobes think we can be bullied and threatened back into silence?  You ain't seen nothin' yet.  Gives a different twist to the line from the Book of Hosea, doesn't it?

Who sows the wind, reaps the whirlwind.

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Liars and truthers

Words matter.

People with a commitment to the truth should demand that media and politicians make their statements using unambiguous language, and not hesitate to call them out when they don't.  Obfuscation is the next best thing to telling outright untruths; it misleads and confuses just as much.  Which, no doubt, is what was intended.

It's why my blood pressure spikes every time I hear how the media usually deals with the blatant falsehoods spoken by Donald Trump and Sarah Huckabee Sanders.  They're not "alternate facts," not "opinions," not "differing interpretations."  They're lies.  And we should not waver in identifying them as such.

But the word I want to address today is "truther."  It's been appended to the loony claims of most of the current conspiracy theories.  We have 9/11 "truthers," Sandy Hook "truthers," flat Earth "truthers."  And it's a word the media, and everyone else, needs to stop using.  These people are not only not speaking the truth, they have no interest in the truth whatsoever.  All they want is to bend the facts to fit their warped view of how the world should work.  Any evidence that doesn't fit their claims is ignored, argued away, or labeled as a fabrication.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

This comes up because of a pair of self-identified "truthers" who were arrested a couple of days ago for harassing the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas, Frank Pomeroy.  This is doubly horrific; not only did Pomeroy have to deal with the massacre last November of his parishioners by shooter Devin Kelley, Pomeroy's fourteen-year-old daughter was killed in the tragedy.

But to people like Jodi Mann and Robert Ussery, this is just more fuel for the fire.  The "Deep State" engineered the event, they said, during which no one was actually killed.  Grieving friends and family members were played by "crisis actors."  The whole thing was staged to turn people against supporting the Second Amendment, which is the first step toward confiscating all guns and the government imposing martial law.

And the Sutherland Springs massacre isn't the only thing Mann and Ussery claim didn't happen.  According to Ussery and Mann's website, Side Thorn, neither did the mass murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the Boston Marathon, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and the Jason Aldean concert in Las Vegas.  All of them were complete fabrications.

This belief has led them to do things that any sane person would consider completely incomprehensible.  In the case of Pastor Pomeroy, the pair spray-painted "The Truth Will Set You Free" on a poster put up for friends of the pastor's slain daughter to sign.  Ussery and Mann demanded proof from her father that the girl even existed, demanding to see her birth certificate or other evidence that she wasn't -- as they claimed -- an invention of the media.  Ussery, Pomeroy said, repeatedly followed him around screaming threats, including one that he was going to "hang Pomeroy from a tree and pee on him while he's hanging."

So finally, the pair have been arrested for harassment.  Fortunately.  They've also sent threatening notes to the students-turned-activists who survived the Stoneman Douglas shooting.  They are, they said, actors, and the shooting was "100% a staged drill."

One of the students, Cameron Kasky, has responded to this allegation with his characteristic humor and grace, tweeting, "Anyone who saw me in last year's production of Fiddler on the Roof should know that no one would pay me for my acting."

The problem is, that's not going to stop Ussery and Mann and others like them.  These people are on a crusade, and welcome being arrested as a chance to give their lunacy a public forum.  But what prompted me to write this was not the craziness of an obviously false claim.

It's that the media has been consistently calling Ussery and Mann "truthers."

No, they are not truthers.  They are either delusional or else are outright and blatant liars.  They are promoting a dangerous conspiracy theory that has no basis in fact, and besides that, are attacking grieving family and friends of people who were victims of mass murderers.  There is no "truth" about this at all.

It's a deranged false claim, and the people promoting it are guilty of threats and harassment.  Pure and simple.

We need to stop soft-pedaling things.  It gains nothing, and in this case, subtly lends credence to people who do not deserve it.  The media -- and by extension, we who consume it -- need to be unhesitating in labeling a lie as such.

That is how you become a "truther."

Mass shooters and broken homes

One of the hardest things to get past is the natural tendency to accept something unquestioningly simply because it sounds like it should be true.

It's a special form of confirmation bias -- which is using scanty or questionable evidence to support a claim we already believed.  Here, it's more that we hear something, and think, "Okay, that sounds reasonable" -- and never stop to ask if the evidence supports it.

Or, actually, that the evidence presented is even correct.  I ran into an example of that a few days ago at the site Dr. Rich Swier.  It's a video by Warren Farrell, social activist and spokesperson for the "men's rights movement," in which he makes the contention that there is a single factor that unites all the school shooters -- growing up in a home without a father.

Farrell says:

The single biggest problem that creates school shootings is fatherlessness.  Either minimal involvement with dads, or no involvement with dads.  This often comes after divorce, and the 51% of women over the age of thirty who are raising children without father involvement.  Sometimes it starts with fathers being involved, but after two years of not being married, 40% of fathers drop out completely.  That combination accounts for 100% of school shooters.  Adam Lanza, Stephen Paddock, Nikolas Cruz, Dylan Roof.  They're all dad-deprived boys.  We don't see this among girls; we don't see this among dad-involved boys.  The solution is father involvement.  We can start that in school.  We can start that with fathers being involved in PTAs.  Changing the culture, letting men know that the most important single thing they can do in their life is not to be a warrior, outside in the killing fields, but to be a father-warrior.  Be involved not just in PTAs but in Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, coaching, in giving up high-paying jobs to spend more time with your children.  

Sounds perfectly reasonable, doesn't it?  Moreover, it's hard to think of a reason why we wouldn't want fathers to spend more positive interactive time with their children.  So it's easy just to say, "Oh, okay, that makes sense," and not to question the underlying claim.

Because it turns out that what he's saying -- school shooters are created by fatherless homes -- is simply untrue.  The contention seems to have originated with a Fox News story, and the whole thing took off, despite its simply being factually incorrect.

[image is in the Public Domain]

Now, mind you, there are cases of mass shooters who grew up in dysfunctional, fatherless homes.  Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas shooter, was the son of a bank robber who spent most of his son's childhood in prison.  The father of Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland school shooter, died when his son was five, and he was left with a mother who apparently was abusive, and eventually he was farmed out to relatives and friends.  Dylann Roof, the Charleston church shooter, was the product of divorce, and his father was allegedly physically abusive not only to his son but to his second wife.

But consider some of the others.  Adam Lanza, the Newtown school shooter, was the child of a couple who divorced when he was in fifth grade, but his father remained involved.  When Lanza's anxiety and apparent obsessive-compulsive disorder made it impossible for him to attend high school, he was taken out and jointly homeschool by his mother and father.  Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 2007, was the son of a pair of hard-working Korean immigrants who were "strong Christians" and had sought help for their son, who had shown signs of sociopathy and withdrawal all the way back in first grade.   Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida, was not the product of divorce, and if anything, his father sounds more stable than his mother.  Neither Eric Harris nor Dylan Klebold, the Columbine High School shooters, were the products of broken families, or even dysfunctional ones; nothing I could find (and there are thousands of sites out there dedicated to the tragedy) indicated that either boy grew up in anything but a perfectly ordinary upper middle class home.

So it's not sufficient to say, "Okay, that seems reasonable."  If you have a claim, it better be supported by all the evidence, or it's time to look elsewhere.  I'm certain that the awful home situations of Paddock, Cruz, and Roof contributed to their anger and eventual violent attacks; but clearly this isn't (as Farrell claims) proof that "the cause of mass shootings is fatherlessness," and his contention that 100% of mass shooters were functionally fatherless is simply wrong.

Once again, the situation is that we need to question our own biases.  The cause of mass murders in our society is multifaceted, and admits no easy solution: bullying and the resultant sense of powerlessness that engenders, the difficulty of obtaining consistent mental health services, poverty, child abuse, split families, radicalization/racism/fascist rhetoric, the easy availability of guns, and the culture of glorifying violence undoubtedly all play a role.

Certainly, we should all commit ourselves to doing what we can to remedy any of those problems; but claiming that one of them is responsible for a complex issue is facile thinking.  And as tempting as it is, such oversimplification never leads to a real solution.

Stopping the rumor machine

Twenty-six people are dead in yet another mass shooting, this one in a Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, a small community 21 miles from San Antonio, Texas.

The killer, Devin Patrick Kelley, died near the scene of the crime.  He had been fired upon by a local resident as he fled the church, and was later found in his car, dead of a gunshot wound.  It is at present undetermined if the bullet that killed him came from the resident's gun, or if it was a self-inflicted wound.

Devin Patrick Kelley

Wiser heads than mine have already taken up the issue of stricter gun control, especially in cases like Kelley's.  Kelley was court martialled in 2012 for an assault on his wife and child, spent a year in prison, and was dishonorably discharged.  All I will say is that I find it a little hard to defend an assault rifle being in the hands of a man who had been convicted of... assault.

I also have to throw out there that the whole "thoughts and prayers" thing is getting a little old.  If thoughts and prayers worked, you'd think the attack wouldn't have happened in the first place, given that the victims were in a freakin' church when it occurred.

But that's not why I'm writing about Kelley and the Sutherland Springs attack.  What I'd like to address here is how, within twelve hours of the attack, there was an immediate attempt by damn near everybody to link Kelley to a variety of groups, in each case to conform to the claimant's personal bias about how the world works.

Here are just a few of the ones I've run into:

• Someone made a fake Facebook page for Kelley in which there was a photograph of his weapon, a Ruger AR-556, with the caption, "She's a bad bitch."
• Far-right-wing activists Mike Cernovich and Alex Jones immediately started broadcasting the claim that Kelley was a member of Antifa.  This was then picked up by various questionable "news" sources, including YourNewsWire.com, which trumpeted the headline, "Texas Church Shooter Was Antifa Member Who Vowed to Start Civil War."
• Often using the Alex Jones article as evidence, Twitter erupted Sunday night with a flurry of claims that Kelley was a Democrat frustrated by Donald Trump's presidential win, and was determined to visit revenge on a bunch of god-fearing Republicans.
• An entirely different bunch of folks on Twitter started the story that Kelley was actually a Muslim convert named Samir al-Hajeeda.  Coincidentally, Samir al-Hajeeda was blamed by many of these same people for the Las Vegas shootings a month ago.  It's a little hard to fathom how anyone could believe that, given the fact that both gunmen died at the scene of the crime.
• Not to be outdone, the website Freedum Junkshun claimed that Kelley was an "avid atheist" named Raymond Peter Littlebury, who was "on the payroll of the DNC."

And so on and so forth.

Look, I've made the point before.  You can't stop this kind of thing from zinging at light speed around the interwebz.  Fake news agencies gonna fake news, crazies gonna craze, you know?  Some of these sources were obviously pseudo-satirical clickbait right from the get-go.  I mean, did anyone even look at the name of the site Freedum Junkshun and wonder why they spelled it that way?

And for heaven's sake, Mike Cernovich and Alex Jones?  At this point, if Cernovich and Jones said the grass was green, I'd want an independent source to corroborate the claim.

So it's not the existence of these ridiculous claims I want to address.  It's the people who hear them and unquestioningly believe them.

I know it's easy to fall into the confirmation bias trap -- accepting a claim because it's in line with what you already believed, be it that all conservatives are violent gun nuts, all liberals scheming slimeballs, all Muslims potential suicide bombers, all religious people starry-eyed fanatics, all atheists amoral agents of Satan himself.  It takes work to counter our tendency to swallow whole any evidence of what we already believed.

But you know what?  You have to do it.  Because otherwise you become prey to the aforementioned crazies and promoters of fake news clickbait.  If you don't corroborate what you post, you're not supporting your beliefs; you're playing right into the hands of people who are trying to use your singleminded adherence to your sense of correctness to achieve their own ends.

At the time of this writing, we know next to nothing about Devin Patrick Kelley other than his military record and jail time.  We don't know which, if any, political affiliation he had, whether or not he was religious, whether he was an activist or simply someone who wanted to kill people.  So all of this speculation, all of these specious claims, are entirely vacuous.

Presumably at some point we'll know more about Kelley.  At the moment, we don't.

So please please please stop auto-posting these stories.  At the very least, cross-check what you post against other sources, and check out a few sources from different viewpoints.  (Of course if you cross-check Breitbart against Fox News, or Raw Story against ThinkProgress, you're gonna get the same answer.  That's not cross-checking, that's slamming the door on the echo chamber.)

Otherwise you are not only falling for nonsense, you are directly contributing to the divisiveness that is currently ripping our nation apart.

As the brilliant physicist Richard Feynman put it: "You must be careful not to believe something simply because you want it to be true.  Nobody can fool you as easily as you can fool yourself."

Interesting times

A few days ago, I started reading Michio Kaku's wonderful book Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century.  The book is fascinating, buoyed up by Kaku's ebullient writing style and endless optimism about our future, touching on the possibilities of artificial intelligence, planet-wide information systems with unfettered access for all, medical advances that could extend (healthy) life span to perhaps twice what it is now, and the ability to harness clean energy sources that are for all intents and purposes inexhaustible.  He suggests that our species, in a time that on the grand scale is a snap of the fingers, will be heading for the stars.

At the same time, here on Earth things are looking pretty awful, as if we'd finally succumbed to the Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times."  Only a few hours ago, we here in the United States had yet another senseless mass shooting, this time an attack on a center for the developmentally disabled in San Bernardino, California.  The attack left fourteen confirmed dead and an equal number injured; the suspects are, at the time of this writing, still at large, and their motives for attacking the center are unknown.  Just a few days ago, an ultrareligious right-winger killed three people and wounded nine at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs.  Many have linked the attack to vitriolic rhetoric from so-called Pro-Lifers like Joshua Feuerstein, who has suggested that doctors who perform abortions deserve to be murdered.  We have one presidential candidate who has openly praised noted conspiracy theorist loon Alex Jones; another claimed yesterday that "the majority of violent criminals are Democrats."  Further afield, the UK Parliament has given the go-ahead for bombing Syria, ISIS has murdered a Russian captive in retaliation for air strikes against ISIS-held areas, our "allies" in Saudi Arabia are very likely in the next few days to behead Ali Al-Nimr, a protestor who was arrested when he was only 17, and in general the world just seems to be a fucked-up morass of misery, hatred, horror, and death.

I'm an optimistic guy, for the most part.  I have always been firmly convinced that most people, most of the time, are doing their level best to act morally and responsibly.  I've also been a strong believer in the idea that you don't have to agree with someone in order to get along with them.  I've had more than one cheerful pint of beer with a friend whose political views are (to say the least) opposite to mine.  I'm a staunch atheist, but have dear friends who are Jews, Christians, Buddhists, and Wiccans. (I'm not leaving out Muslims deliberately; I just don't happen to be close pals with any.)

But in the current atmosphere, when the tenor of the news seems to be paralleling the diminishment of the light as we approach the winter solstice, it's hard to keep those ideals in mind.  It becomes increasingly easy to give in to despair, to decide that humanity isn't really worth saving, that any good we do is outweighed by the tremendous evils that we visit on each other for reasons of religion, race, belief, and sometimes for no reason at all.

Still, we do some beautiful things sometimes.  Billionaire Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has pledged 99% of his share revenues to charities connected with personalized learning, curing diseases, connecting people and community building.  The Planned Parenthood clinic that was attacked has been the focus of two separate fundraising drives, one through GoFundMe and the other through YouCaring.

But I keep coming back to the heartache of why we, here in the 21st century, are still having to face people being murdered for wanting control of their own bodies, for wanting to be able to speak freely and criticize their governments, for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  It's so far from Kaku's idyllic space-age wonderland that I find myself wondering if the human race will survive long enough to meet even one of his high-flown predictions.

I think the solution lies with the like-minded sticking together, and telling each other that there are still good people in the world, that we will make it through these dark times.  That the days will lengthen, winter will warm into spring, and (perhaps even!) the news will one day be dominated by positive stories.  We have to remain optimistic; if we don't, if the good people of the world give up and succumb to despair, then the evil really will have won.

[image courtesy of NASA]

I will leave you with a poem that I first discovered when I was 13 years old.  I still can't read it without choking up; not too long ago I tried to read it out loud to my son when he was going through a rough patch, and we both ended up bawling.  I think it's more relevant now than when it was written by Max Ehrmann, almost a hundred years ago.

Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and ignorant; they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals;
and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be critical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass.
Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with imaginings;
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.
With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy.