Asian Journal- The Filipino-American Community Newspaper

UNLESS you’re an ostrich with your head buried in the sand, you couldn’t have missed the up tick in the rash of mass murders and murder suicides in recent times, in many places in the US. There’s a common thread — one man driven by rage, jealousy, paranoia, desperation, depression over economic pressures, family problems or just plain deranged, decided he can’t take it anymore and instead of committing suicide, decide to inflict murder and mayhem killing several others, either his own family members or total strangers. By last count, there were 7 mass murders committed by ordinary people since the beginning of 2009, with a total casualty count, including the murderers themselves nearing 60 before the first 100 days of the year were over. Is this a social trend? Pundits and talking heads predict that as the recession becomes more firmly entrenched, we can expect more of this type of horror.

With each horrific case, the public seems to become more inured and desensitized to violence and death, becoming more accepting of all these, as a normal feature of modern life. Ever since the Columbine mass murder perpetrated by 2 young misguided misfits garbed in black trench coats about 10 years ago, things haven’t been the same. There were copycats exhibiting lemming-like behavior since then. Evil glamorized by repetition and attention-getting drama seems to have morphed into many other incidents in North America and elsewhere, resulting in incalculable, untold pain and suffering among families of the victims. We remember with great pain the Virginia Tech mass murder which snuffed out the lives of 32, including Cho, the killer, who was a quiet, deranged malcontent who never quite fit in. In the blogosphere chatter, many noted that perpetrators of this troubling trend were often the quiet ones. Word is out on the street to watch out for the quiet "pressure cooker" types, those who never cause a ripple and yet, has a fondness for weapons, but who can implode and explode with volcanic intensity and wipe out those around them.

In the past month alone, a young gun enthusiast from Alabama, depressed over his life and who kept mostly to himself, killed 5 members of his own family and 5 other total strangers at random in a barrage of gunfire before taking his own life. A Vietnamese immigrant, Jiverly Wong, aka Vuong, a quiet, social misfit and also a gun enthusiast, driven by severe paranoia and frustrated over his "poor life" and poor English skills, gunned down 12 others in an immigrant center, 10 of whom came from 8 countries and who were students just trying to learn English as a second language. One was a Filipina, Dolores Yigal, a recent immigrant who was studying so she could find a job. One was a long time substitute teacher named Roberta King. One was an Iraqi woman who survived 3 car bombs in her native Iraq and left behind a devastated family, a daughter at the Sorbonne in Paris and another daughter, a Fulbright scholar. All these lives were cut off by one sorry excuse for a human being in one fell swoop.

Among ordinary families from all strata and from nearly every ethnic group, there has also been a rash of killings among fathers who have decided they have failed and will kill themselves and are taking their whole family with them. On rare occasions, it is a mother who does it. Sometimes, the sick and the elderly decide to take matters into their own hands and end it all. The murder suicide rate among families is on the rise, thankfully not in epidemic proportions just yet as to cause panic. Perhaps, this is fueled by the effects of the economic downturn, with mounting financial pressures and with an unprecedented number of foreclosures, forcibly displacing families from their nests. And yet to merely focus on economics as the root of this troubling phenomenon is shortsighted and misses the whole point.

After all the news vans are gone from the crime scene, after the vacuous words of any sitting president have been said, after all references to the story are buried in the inside pages and eventually ground to a halt on the internet, and when the grieving families have no more tears to shed, many questions as to why such things happen with alarming frequency remain unanswered.

There seems to be a moral turpitude that ails a society that looks at murder suicide as an option. This much is certain, when extreme hubris rules the heart and mind, there will always be a lack of personal responsibility and accountability when something goes wrong. It was always because of someone else’s fault or because of a set of circumstances. We tend to blame everything else but ourselves. The tendency to shirk responsibility is probably wired into our DNA right at the Garden of Eden with Eve playing the blame game early on. The devil made me do it. So did Adam. The woman gave me the apple. It is our inability, due to pride, the deadliest of all human failings, to own up to sin. And so it was with the fallen angels. There’s only one antidote to pride for us mere mortals and that is to cultivate daily a grateful, humble heart that thanks God for every moment of life on earth. Our Blessed Mother exemplifies the kind of heart that bears all. That is why she is worthy of emulation.