One Small Answer

I note this week in the aftermath of Tech that rather than heartfelt prayers and regret, our local rag is filled with letters from gun control advocates, NRA members, anti-choice partisans, and many others with special interest axes to grind. The first words of condolence I heard from a politician were prefaced by a pledge of allegiance to the second amendment.

Josef Stalin wrote, "A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic." Are thirty deaths merely props for a cause? All I know for sure is that after Columbine, September 11th and Tech, I feel the same kick in the gut, the same loss in the pit of my stomach, the same desire to make some sense out of it.

After World War II it was written 'there can be no art after the Holocaust.' Maybe so. My path of solace leads towards my bookshelves. If art is too trivial, perhaps there are answers in the hard sciences. I found something by the dean of the Austrian school of economics, Ludwig Von Mises, from his book Human Action. He writes that all economic thinking is derived subjectively from the choices people make that bestow value on some things and not on others. "Choosing determines all human decisions. In making his choice, man chooses not only between various material things and services. All human values are offered for option. All ends and all means, both material and ideal issues, the sublime and the base, the noble and ignoble, are arranged in a single row and subjected to a decision which picks out one thing and sets aside the other. Nothing that men aim at or want to avoid remains outside of this arrangement into a unique scale of gradation and prference."

Where does killing your peers fall on the value scale? Von Mises says, rather clinically, all choice is rational - even if it appears insane, it's rational to the one who made it. At Tech, the killer produced an 1800-word video manifestatio. I don't buy any of it; any of his 'rationality,' when kids from my old church youth group now at other colleges are the same ages as his victims.

Von Mises paints a very cold picture of human action. Another economic text I picked up was written by Ayn Rand. She wrote, in order for people to enjoy the maximum fruits of liberty, all altruistic thoughts and acts must be eliminated. I didn't find the answer to Tech I sought in the sciences from Von Mises or Rand. I found instead a rationality that lacks compassion.

Last night Connie and I held our usual after-action debrief as we drove home from a ministry that provides food and money to the poor. We talked about how it may be true that some people aren't fully honest in describing the predicament that led them to seek charity. My reaction has been for a long time now that it doesn't diminish us if we fall for a phony story; that if someone is desparate enough to cheat us out of food or gasoline, or a Thanksgiving turkey, we remain sufficiently bountiful to afford it; to be content to be fools for Christ, if needs be, and not worry about it.

Working with the poor helped form my resistance these days to 'ism's, 'ologies,' or 'authority,' if, as concepts, they override compassionate response, and because I've learned things are invariably more complex than they first appear, and aren't cleanly reducible to the logic and structure of any one system. One night a man came into our shelter with a buddy, his tent-mate. The friend's face was bruised and swollen, the result of a beating. As he sat at the dining room table, the man poured all the beer from a 12-pack down the sink. As he emptied each can, he yelled , "This is what happens to people who owe me money."

I'm told folks who live in tents have their own ology - the code of the woods. Yet that didn't prevent this injustice, one of the cruelest acts I've ever witnessed. On another day that same man volunteered to clean a chair where an incontinent woman with dementia had just sat. How is it that this man could be so cruel and kind? Are these conscious ethical choices framed by an external code of conduct or whims compelled by an internal conscience seemingly present one day and absent the next?

Von Mises tries again. He writes, "The most popular objection raised against economics is that it neglects the irrationality of life and reality and tries to press into dry rational schemes and bloodless abstractions the infinite variety of phenomena." He objects to the objection since he recognizes that while we can with scientific preciseness chart observable human actions there will always be ultimate data that remains unknowable. In this, he is wise.

I once attended a lecture by Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and author. He was asked how anyone could believe in God after the Holocaust. He said he didn't know but nevertheless his job was to remember and write so that it could never happen again. I'm reminded of the orthodox Hasidic Jews in Auschwitz who one Friday as they worked conducted a heated debate over God's existence. The arguments flew back and forth. Finally they concluded it was not possible to have faith as an inmate of a concentration camp. At sundown, they ceased arguing because it was time to recite the Sabbath prayers.

I note this week an article about Ot Hakapara which was founded by German Protestants who don't think their church did enough to stop the Holocaust. The program sends young Germans to Israel for one year to work in nursing homes, libraries and community centers. It doesn't answer the question posed to Wiesel, or settle the debate of the Hasid's, but it's an answer in itself, like the story of Liviu Librescu, a professor, and Holocaust survivor, who was killed by the Tech gunman on Holocaust Remembrance day as he bought time for his students to escape.

There's no art, nor anything anyone can write, that adequately commensurates for September 11th, the Holocaust, for Tech, or accounts for the million of lives that constitute Stalin's death statistics. There's no answer to why. There's no answer to where was God. There are no valid partisan political cards to play in the aftermath that are appropriate. I choose in response only to perform small acts of charity I pray cause more good than harm; to be a fool for Christ and not care; to be present to hear hard luck stories that reach the pit of my stomach and rebound towards offering compassion to my family and friends, and prompt a desire to seek justice for strangers. This small answer is all I have.