Giovanni Maria Benzoni’s “Achilles About to Kill Hector, Pallas Athena Between Them” (19th century), white marble. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
I was working on a story about Emily Katz Anhalt’s new book, “Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths” (Yale University Press), when I decided to take a break with The New York Times online. The headline hit me in the gut:
“At Least 58 Dead and 500 Hurt in Las Vegas as Gunman Rains Bullets on Concert.”
Image via AOL.com.
The suspect, Stephen Craig Paddock, 64 – and, according to Las Vegas Police, also dead by his own hand – was described as a quiet, unassuming man with no criminal history by his understandably defensive brother. Of course, he was. The president called for peace and unity. Of course, he did. The investigation will no doubt show that the shooter had some disproportionate rage at rejection. Of course, he did. There will be memorials, services, flowers, thoughts and prayers and a presidential visit. And life will go on as before – until the next unassuming man (let’s face it, it’s always a guy) picks up a gun or a knife or sets off a bomb. Of course, it will and he will.
Anhalt – who is like a Greek mythological figure herself, a supremely rational woman cursed by the gods to live in an irrational world – acknowledged to me that there is no way to stop every psychopath. But our failure to control our anger and our violent impulses – the subjects of the epic Homeric poems “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” and the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides – prevents us from being the free, democratic society we think we are.
I still believe there are practical solutions to this problem. First and foremost, you have to curtail the number and uses of guns. I’m no fan of hunting, but I’m not fool enough to believe you’ll ever stop people from it. There is, however, no reason for average citizens to have automatic weapons. None. I see Congressman Steve Scalise is back after enduring a shooting at a Congressional softball game. I wonder if he still supports America’s loose gun laws.
Secondly, we have to make a commitment to mental health, acknowledging that it is a silent problem that kills. Mentally ill people are not, for the most part, evil. They’re sick people. If they had breast cancer, we’d have a ribbon campaign up and running in five minutes. But because we’re ashamed of emotional problems and can’t equate them with ill health, we bury them with tragic consequences.
Third, we must stop playing the blame game. It’s not time for conservatives to point out that liberals don’t want a wall built. It’s not time for liberals to say, even in jest, Well, there goes a few more dead Republicans. It’s time to own our gun laws, gun fixation and gun legacy from the Brits and the Second Amendment, as a nation. And to have some compassion, please. At the end of Homer’s “The Iliad,” Achilles, his rage spent, finally locates the suffering of the enemy in his own.
Are we going to – at last – address our violence, our own lack of empathy, once and for all? Or is it going to be another case of Of course, we will?