Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback

A man with years of tax troubles and disputes with the IRS crashed a small plane into the building that houses the IRS office in Austin, Texas this morning.  Two people were injured and one is unaccounted for.  It's not clear from the current coverage what happened to the pilot, although it seems likely that he is dead.  Before crashing the plane, he had set fire to his home and left a six page letter/blog on the Internet explaining his actions.

Authorities have announced that this appears to be an isolated incident and that there is no ongoing threat.  The Department of Homeland Security released a statement that said,

We do not yet know the cause of the plane crash.  At this time, we have no reason to believe there is a nexus to terrorist activity. We continue to gather more information, and are aware there is additional information about the pilot's history.

Press coverage has also emphasized the description of this as a suicide, and most outlets are referring to his writing as a suicide note and using words like "rambling" and "incoherent" to describe it.

I find this spin absolutely fascinating.  Towards the end of his letter, the pilot wrote,

It has always been a myth that people have stopped dying for their freedom in this country. . . . I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I insure nothing will change. . . . I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be white washed and ignored.

If you read his writing all the way through (you can download it here), you will disagree with his conclusions but you will not find it hard to understand at all.  It is not incoherent.  He is very clear that he is angry at the government, why he is angry at the government, and that he is about to do this to draw attention to his grievances, cause other people to pay attention to his thinking and inspire others to also kill themselves in similar attacks.

Let's suppose you didn't know anything about this story.  Suppose someone told you that a man, angry at the United States government and believing that its citizens should rise up against it, killed himself by flying an airplane into a building housing a government office.  He left behind writing detailing his belief that the government is corrupt and encouraging others to similarly die for the cause of freedom.  What is your mental image?  Mine is not of a computer engineer.  It's of a terrorist.

So why does DHS say this isn't terrorism?  And why is the media reporting it as an incoherent suicide?  Why does it seem so important to portray this person as crazy, while others, such as the Fort Hood shooter, are terrorists? 

The practical difference is that this man has no links to any organized group that anyone can tell.  When DHS says this isn't terrorism, they really mean this isn't organized terrorism, and they are right.  There is also, frankly, and element of religious and/or racial profiling.  Terrorists are Muslim and come from the Middle East, southern Asia or Northern Africa.  Americans can't be terrorists.

The other reason it's important to us to maintain this distinction, however, is that it makes us feel safe.  We have an image of terrorists that is truly frightening and represents an ongoing danger.  The thing that keeps us from being scared out of our minds is that, for the most part, we believe them to be "over there" and not here.  Those who may be here fit a certain profile and hence are easy to catch.

This pilot, on the other hand, isn't "over there."  If he's a terrorist, then there's a much greater risk of terrorism than we would like to think about.  There is no way to keep them out, because they're already in, and there is no way to figure out who they are.  So we tell ourselves that this guy was crazy and suicidal.  We know such people exist, and even that there is some danger from them, but they don't represent anything near the threat that terrorists do.  They are isolated incidents.

A certain amount of psychological self-preservation is a reasonable thing.  We do all sorts of things to prevent ourselves from being paralyzed by fear, and that is what allows us to function.  Sometimes, however, it pays to take a step back and ask whether we are protecting ourselves from fear or simply being oblivious to the truth.

A man in a wheelchair is, as I write this, holding at least 5 people hostage in the Wytheville, Virginia Post Office.  We know he has a gun, and he has what he claims is 5 pounds of C-4 explosive strapped to his chest.  The only demand he has made thus far, at least as far as police have reported, is for pizza.

This story especially caught my eye because I have been joking around all afternoon, giving people my latest "hot tip" -- on December 23, do not attempt to mail a package at the Inman Square Post Office in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  As you might guess, I myself attempted this feat this morning.  The post office in question is very small, and it was very busy this morning, as were, probably, most post offices in the United States, including the one in Wytheville.

Wytheville has a population of just 8,500 people.  This is not a bustling metropolis, nor is it a place anyone would pick as a high profile terrorist target.  I bring this up, because most of us, rightly or wrongly, have an idea in the back of our minds that, because terrorists with major government agendas tend to pick very public, large places to attack, that no one ever attacks small towns. 

This is, if you think about it, obviously false.  While it may be true that people with grandiose agendas pick places like the World Trade Center, the Oklahoma City Federal Building, Fort Hood, or even the Holocaust Museum, there are numerous examples of people with smaller agendas, or just pure mental illness and no agenda at all, who strike in much more random places.  Those places are often small.

I often write about how trauma affects us, even from a distance, because we can make a personal connection to something about the event.  Certain types of incidents, locations, motives, or any number of factors that can make us identify just that little bit more it takes to go from thinking an event is horrible to really taking it personally.  For me, today, it is knowing that I mailed a package in a crowded post office today, and knowing that it is just random chance that there wasn't a gunman in a wheelchair with explosives coming after me.

He had compassion fatigue. He was a Muslim. He had money problems. He was depressed. He was disgruntled. He didn't want to deploy. He was a terrorist. He was harassed. He faced discrimination. He hated his boss. He was turned down for unemployment. He blamed the company. He blamed the army. He should have been stopped.

Today, as America reels from the second mass shooting in as many days, the blogosphere and the traditional media are lighting up with commentary on why the shooters in the Fort Hood and Orlando killings did what they did. If you google the stories, you find headline after headline with various speculation about motive, interspersed with the occasional article referring to the motives in each shooting as a "mystery."

Human beings don't like uncertainty, as I discussed yesterday. And the media doesn't like to report anything nuanced, and certainly not "we don't know." Where's the human interest in that? So we look for answers, and sometimes the answers we come up with sound good . . . until you think about them.

The shooter at Fort Hood is a psychiatrist. He had treated many people who suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Now there is speculation that this experience caused him to be traumatized himself, and in turn caused yesterday's shootings. No sooner had that theory hit the airwaves then we had articles arguing the opposite -- that PTSD is not contagious, and we are just making excuses.

The truth is, PTSD is indeed contagious, in a documented phenomenon called "compassion fatigue" or sometimes secondary or vicarious traumatization. People who work with the traumatized are susceptible to symptoms of trauma themselves -- this is a documented phenomenon and there are documented ways to try to prevent it. But as much as compassion fatigue is a real thing, most people who have it don't shoot people. Saying that is the cause is much too simplistic.

The shooter is also Muslim, true. And yet, most people who are Muslim don't shoot people either. And if mass shootings are caused by being Muslim, how do we account for the Orlando shooter, who certainly wasn't, or the perpetrator in the Pittsburgh gym shootings, or at Virginia Tech, or Columbine? Why is the Fort Hood shooting "terrorism" and those are horrible violent crime?

In Orlando, the shooter almost certainly was a disgruntled former employee with money problems. This is all true. But how many thousands of people fit that description, and never hurt a fly? How many hurt themselves but not others? How do you know who is who and which is which. Unfortunately, you don't.

There is a lot of commentary today suggesting that we as a country are hesitant to admit the "truth" about Fort Hood, and I think they are right. But that truth isn't that the shooter was a Muslim terrorist. That truth is that we just don't know. We may someday, or we may not. And if we don't know, we can't know it won't happen again, and that scares us.

We want to think that if we exclude certain ethnicities or nationalities or religions from our lives, we will prevent the next shooting from happening to us. We want to believe that if we know the Fort Hood shooter was a terrorist, we can protect ourselves by staying away from terrorists. But in Orlando, we discovered that that isn't true either. And that scares us more, so we pretend there's no inconsistency there, no nuance. It seems we'd rather live with our bigotry in this country than with our fear of what is random.