Fort Hood and the things we feel deep inside

November 8, 12:38 PMSpiritual Life ExaminerRabbi Ben Kamin

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Before we take on the haughty, self-important mode of some of the media anchors, and act as if we have some kind of exclusive access to the anguish of the families who lost or are nursing the victims of the massacre:  Our overriding priority and responsibility, in the aftermath of Thursday’s wanton attack on innocent soldiers by an obviously deranged military psychiatrist, is to grieve for the families of the dead.

Many of them were so tragically young and they represented, as our national service has come to embody, the real America—men and women, all colors and creeds, offering a multiplicity of skills, a diversity of personalities and moods, dreams, hopes, all living together in what is essentially a small city replete with schools, day care centers, gymnasiums, housing complexes, and a set of laws and expectations.

The right way to go with this is to consider the human sadness.                        

We must consider also that the “wounded,” young and older, so often subsumed in the configuration (understandably) almost as an afterthought relative to the horrifically final declaration of “13 dead,” nonetheless will unfold as some 25 or so scrolls of suffering:  “Wounded” means “I don’t have an arm anymore.”  It means “I can’t eat without a tube,” or “I can’t evacuate my waste without a sack for the rest of my life.”  “Wounded” means, for a man or a woman, possibly, “I can’t have children.”   It also means that, but for a few flickering seconds of someone else’s madness, one suffers pain management issues and emotional deprivation for the rest of one’s natural life.

The right way to go with this is to consider the human sadness.  The truth is that our volunteer military, though successfully over-subscribed, is over-extended, over-committed, and overwhelmed in a number of categories, geographically, materially, spiritually, and by its recent public admission, in terms of average literacy.  So many good young men and women sign up because they just can’t find work anywhere else.

The truth also is that shootings at US military bases have been occurring, tragically, around the globe, although, thankfully, the rate has declined somewhat, according to the Department of Defense.  The Army has been forthright in declaring its inability to deal effectively with the post-traumatic syndromes that are demonizing the souls of young men and women trying to cope with what they are doing and seeing in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere.  Our military even acknowledges that a terrible stigma still clings to even the notion of a soldier struggling with emotional and mental disorders—which can be harder to overcome than some physical wounds.  Short shrift is being paid, meanwhile, to the impossibly high suicide rate that pervades all the sectors of our armed forces.

A lot of folks, in their helplessness and outrage and fear and guilt, have been struggling with conflicting feelings about this frightful event.  We are all so tired and we feel vulnerable and on edge and ethnic rage is always a quick release.  Look, more than one national Islamic agency expressed condemnation and sorrow.   In the end, if we respond with hate and generalizations, then there will just be more blood.

Image: US Soldier at Ft. Hood following the attack (AP)

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