Just as I embarked on writing this week’s column, I heard the news of yet another atrocity — the worst mass-shooting in our nation’s history — this one with the dubious distinction of being both a hate crime and a terrorist act.
How much more unacceptable must things get, before we refuse to accept them?
President Obama has starkly outlined the crossroads where we stand:
“This massacre is a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school, or in a house of worship, or a movie theater, or in a nightclub.
And we have to decide if that’s the kind of country we want to be.”
Will we choose fear, and hatred, and arming ourselves to the teeth? Or will we stand united? Will we turn on each other? Or to each other? Which do we choose?
I’m no authority on hate, but I know a lot about fear.
Fear and I go way back … at least as far back as when I used to babysit for my two younger brothers.
I would lie awake every minute until my parents came home, sure that every creak, every bump, every thump of the central air was a knife-wielding attacker about to kill us all.
The fact that he never materialized or left any evidence of his visit was no proof that I was wrong.
You cannot talk people out of fear; we always have an answer. You cannot give us facts, or figures, or tell us to “snap out of it!” You cannot argue us out of fear because there is nothing rational about it.
The one useful thing I have learned about fear is that you cannot remain there when you are laughing.
J.K. Rowling knew this.
In “The Prisoner of Azkaban,” the third book in her Harry Potter series, she has Professor Lupin teach Harry and his friends how to deal with a “boggart” — a shapeshifting entity that assumes the guise of one’s worst fear.
“You see,” Lupin tells the class, “the thing that really finishes a boggart is laughter. What you need to do is force it to assume a shape that you find amusing,” and utter the spell: “Ridiculous!”
I experienced this power of laughter in a small way in my own life, many years ago. I was taking an Amtrak train home from college when all of a sudden, there was a loud “Bang!” and the lights went out as the train coasted to a stop.
We must have been in a tunnel, because it stayed dark and still for a very long time. Too long. There was no explanation of any kind, and several of us were beginning to get really spooked, when suddenly another train rushed past — so fast that our train rocked, where it stood, from the suction.
Then the lights flickered back on. That’s when someone sang the 5-note “alien” theme from the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” and the entire car erupted in laughter.
Fear had been banished.
Eleanor Roosevelt once famously said that “It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.”
ISIS, and those who wreak its havoc, has chosen the darkness; and they are counting on it to poison us, as well. They are counting on us to hate, and fear, and take up arms against each other.
Which brings us back to that crossroads.
In Brad Bird’s terrific 2015 movie, “Tomorrowland,” the central character is a teenage girl named Casey Newton who refuses to accept that NASA is closing Cape Canaveral down.
It means her disillusioned father will lose his job; but Casey still believes in the future — even if he and other people whose career it was, no longer do.
She is an optimist, as we see when she reminds her father of a story he used to tell:
According to an Indian legend, there are two wolves that battle constantly inside us all. “One is darkness and despair,” Casey reminds her father; resentment, ego, and lies. The other is light, empathy and hope. She asks him, “Which wolf wins?”
The answer is: “The one you feed.”
So here we stand. Which wolf will we feed?
