“Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.”
- Albert Schweitzer
THERE’S a common thread in murder suicides— one man driven by rage, jealousy, paranoia, desperation, depression over economic pressures, family problems or just plain deranged, decided he can’t take it anymore and instead of committing suicide, decide to inflict murder and mayhem killing several others, either his own family members or total strangers.
With each horrific case, the public seems to become more inured and desensitized to violence and death, becoming more accepting of all these, as a normal feature of modern life.
Ever since the Columbine mass murder perpetrated by 2 young misguided misfits garbed in black trench coats years ago, things haven’t been the same. There were copycats exhibiting lemming-like behavior since then. Evil glamorized by repetition and attention-getting drama seems to have morphed into many other incidents in North America and elsewhere, resulting in incalculable, untold pain and suffering among families of the victims.
We remember with great pain the Virginia Tech mass murder which snuffed out the lives of 32, including Cho, the killer, who was a quiet, deranged malcontent who never quite fit in. In the blogosphere chatter, many noted that perpetrators of this troubling trend were often the quiet ones.
Word is out on the street to watch out for the quiet “pressure cooker” types, those who never cause a ripple and yet, has a fondness for weapons, but who can implode and explode with volcanic intensity and wipe out those around them.
A Vietnamese immigrant, Jiverly Wong, aka Vuong, a quiet, social misfit and also a gun enthusiast, driven by severe paranoia and frustrated over his “poor life” and poor English skills, gunned down 12 others in an immigrant center, 10 of whom came from 8 countries and who were students just trying to learn English as a second language. One was a Filipina, Dolores Yigal, a recent immigrant who was studying so she could find a job. One was a long time substitute teacher named Roberta King. One was an Iraqi woman who survived 3 car bombs in her native Iraq and left behind a devastated family, a daughter at the Sorbonne in Paris and another daughter, a Fulbright scholar. All these lives were cut off by one sorry excuse for a human being in one fell swoop.
Among ordinary families from all strata and from nearly every ethnic group, there has also been a rash of killings among fathers who have decided to kill themselves because of their failures and are taking their whole family with them.
On rare occasions, it is a mother who does it. Sometimes, the sick and the elderly decide to take matters into their own hands and end it all. The murder suicide rate among families is on the rise, thankfully not in epidemic proportions just yet as to cause panic.
After all the news vans are gone from the crime scene, after the vacuous words of any sitting president have been said, after all references to the story are buried in the inside pages and eventually ground to a halt on the internet, and when the grieving families have no more tears to shed, many questions as to why such things happen with alarming frequency remain unanswered.
There seems to be a moral turpitude that ails a society when some of its members regard murder suicide as an option. This much is certain — when extreme hubris rules the heart and mind, there will always be a lack of personal responsibility and accountability when something goes wrong.
It would always be because of someone else’s fault or because of a set of circumstances. We tend to blame everything else but ourselves. The tendency to shirk responsibility is probably wired into our DNA right at the Garden of Eden with Eve playing the blame game early on. The devil made me do it. So did Adam. The woman gave me the apple. It is our inability, due to pride, the deadliest of all human failings, to own up to sin. And so it was with the fallen angels.
There’s only one antidote to pride for us mere mortals and that is to cultivate daily a grateful, humble heart that thanks God for every moment of life on earth. Our Blessed Mother exemplifies the kind of heart that bears all. That is why she is worthy of emulation.
“Thou shalt not kill” is a commandment that holds in good times and in bad. There’s no moral relativism on this. Each is precious to God or He wouldn’t have sacrificed His own Son if He didn’t think we were worth the time and trouble. Each murder is a grievous sin against the Holy Spirit from whom all life comes. It is us who has discounted our own worth.
Part of the reason we have discounted the value of human life is that modern society has become so desensitized to violence and death via the content in films, games and media that pass for entertainment these days, that we take life for granted as though it means nothing.
Does hell exist? How is punishment meted out in the afterlife? In the physical universe, scientists claim that there are black holes in the known universe that can’t be seen by human eyes but with gravitation so strong that it suctions, as in a whirling cosmic cauldron stirred by mighty forces, all the stars and planetary systems that come within its orbit, so strong that not even light can escape.
Need a visual image for hell aside from Dante’s Inferno? Black holes could fit the bill as a repository for lost souls, a cold, dark, fetid, state of gnawing pain and bitter regret, filled with the piercing screams of the damned, without the presence of God for all eternity, and forever blotted out from all memory except their own.
Is it possible that the morally bankrupt and depraved, regard the taking of a life as an option when things do not go their way or when the course of their lives hit a snag and overweening pride tells them to end it all, instead of getting down on their knees to pray to the God of their beings for the humility, the courage and the strength to endure?
Gone is the fear of God, much less the love of God. As we steer farther and farther away from God and place something else in the center of our lives, scenarios of helplessness and despair such as what we are witnessing more frequently these days may be expected to unfold with eerie regularity.
Many of us have become egocentric, overly individualistic, self-absorbed individuals. Perhaps during this period of testing, we would be a lot happier, healthier and less prone to veer towards lives of quiet desperation if we focused less and less on ourselves and more on the welfare of the other person and commit spontaneous, frequent acts of kindness and generosity to family members, total strangers and even those we struggle to love. It would be a tough slog but doable.
ACTS OF KINDNESS, countless and given without expectations of return are the ANTIDOTE to the darkness of depression and thoughts of murder-suicide. These are like shafts of bright light that warm the human heart.
There was one telling incident I never quite forgot. Long ago, I was running breathlessly huffing and puffing in my stilettos to drop some coins on a parking meter on Wilshire Boulevard I knew had expired because of a long, drawn-out presentation I was making on the upper floor of a nearby high rise.
Fortunately, I narrowly missed getting a thirty-some dollar fine from the parking enforcer because a panhandler had dropped some coins for my car’s meter, from his can of coins. It stunned me to see him feeding all the meters that were expiring on that block.
Of course, he may have been merely trying to annoy the heck out of the parking enforcer. Who knows? I only saw the kindness in the act. That stayed with me. From then on, I would remember and always be inspired by the completely anonymous gesture of that person who had practically nothing but still gave of the little he had.
That’s when I knew kindness is contagious like the flu. n
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Nota Bene: Monette Adeva Maglaya is SVP of Asian Journal Publications, Inc. To send comments, e-mail monette.maglaya@asianjournalinc.com