Making Sense of the Dallas Shooting

I woke up to news of another shooting, this time in Dallas. All I could think was, “Dear God, not again.”

There are a lot of hot takes on social media right now. So many people trying to answer difficult questions:

Why did this happen?

Who’s ultimately at fault, and who ought to be held accountable?

I understand the need to impose some kind of coherent narrative on what appears to be chaos. I’ve said before that theodicy (i.e., defending God in the face of evil and suffering) is the practical realization that any story is better than no story.

I think that even more basic than defending God, however, human beings in the face of great tragedy — like police shooting civilians and civilians shooting police — have a need to seek some defense of reality, to search for some meaning to be wrested from the grinding jaws of meaninglessness. I suspect we vent our rage and fear as much for the apparent hopelessness of days like these as for the injustice that gives birth to these days.

Our isolation from one another — an isolation we’ve assiduously cultivated in the midst of lives that often, sadly, lack the sustaining power of community — stares back at us from the mirror on days like this, when misery descends upon us, and hope turns its eyes in despair. Where do we turn?

We see one another’s anger and fear on social media — anger and fear that we’ve seen each other post about in one form or another for so long now that we’re pretty sure we can anticipate what everybody else will say before they even have the inclination to say it — and it reminds us that though we often know what people hate and what they care about, we often don’t know why. We don’t know much about the stories that shape people, driving them to respond to these kinds of tragedies with such intensity, to shout down what they imagine to be the source of their latest pain.

Social media helps people point to the narratives that give them a set of rudimentary tools to make sense of their suffering. A quick rant, a shared link, a public meltdown. In many respects posts on social media function as a modern form of parietal art, the cave paintings of our ancestors, which were an attempt to extrapolate meaning from a frightening world, and then to share those insights with the tribe. What we often fail to realize, though, is that true meaning isn’t an epiphany of individual inspiration, of solitary genius; it’s the product of the tribes that form us, that give us the conceptual tools we need to make sense of what would otherwise be senseless.

Social media at its best, can enable us to form at least the beginnings of community. But at its worst, social media offers only the simulacrum of community, a false sense that we know more about one another than we actually do. I fear that my tendency on days like to today is to scroll past the pain and fear people are experiencing, because it’s unnecessary (since I already believe I know all I need to know about how you feel about it) and exhausting (since I know somewhere deep down that if I really do try to listen past the passion and anger, I will find myself overwhelmed by it).

The irony, of course, is that it is precisely on days like today, with the reverberations of violence still ringing in our ears, that we really need each other in the most profound communal sense, not only to process the pain with our attempts to point at stories that explain the madness, but we need each other to help write another story — one that ends not in death and disruption, not in recrimination and blame, but with the peace and justice necessary for all God’s children to flourish.

Together we need to craft a story that not only prompts us to write other stories, but that calls us to the kind of action that will allow us to make a difference in a world where too many families are mourning on days like today.

We need a story that honors and protects police, while at the same time asking that those police be held to an extremely high standard of conduct, in virtue of the fact that we allow them to bear deadly weapons.

We need a story that publicly admits the problems in a system that so disproportionately punishes African Americans — especially African American men — and seeks to remedy the wrongs committed against those whose stories we’ve too often convinced ourselves weren’t worth listening to.

We need a story that moves us beyond the easy believism that requires as a response only that we say we will pray for everyone involved, and calls us forth into the streets, into the courts and jail rooms and treatment facilities to demand and work for a change that offers us a new and equitable system that takes all people’s stories into account.

We need a story that draws us out of our isolation, out of facile assumptions about one another, and into the rich life of God’s beloved community.

I’m not foolish enough to think that there won’t be more days when I’ll awaken saying, “Dear God, not again.” However, the hope I have is that together we can live with one another on a level deep enough that the frequency of those days might decrease.

That’s a story I’d like to tell.