Communicable Diseases

National and international health agencies remain vigilant about the onset of epidemics, local and global.  When some dread disease caused by infections of one kind or another threaten the health and well-being of populations, sometimes resulting in deaths of the vulnerable, the elderly, the young, the immune-impaired.  Is there immunity from the deadly onset of hatred and all it connotes?


Hatred, step-sister to suspicion and fear, is a communicable disease.  It infects at random, where we might not anticipate that it would.  Seemingly normal people become fixated on characteristics of others who do not physically resemble them, or who worship a religion foreign to their own, or whose ethnic derivations have left them with a heritage and customs that seem to conflict with their own.


All societies in all countries of the world have among their populations those who seem more susceptible to the alienating effects of fear and suspicion leading to the irrationality of hatred.  And this is where the conductor of the trio steps in and introduces other elements; threats, resentment, violence.  This is an ugly orchestration of the more dire of human emotions.


And it happens all too often that someone runs amok, causing a stunned population to view the aftermath of a personal vendetta resulting in mass murder.  It happens in Norway, in France, in Britain, in Iraq, in Syria and in Egypt, India and China, and in Canada and in the United States.  When it occurs in a country with strong rules and regulations and laws demanding equality and justice, it comes as an especial shock.


No sooner did the news media lay to rest a mass murder that took place in one state, then another occurs in yet another state of the union.  "I think all of us recognize that these kinds of terrible tragic events are happening with too much regularity for us not to do some soul-searching and to examine additional ways that we can reduce violence", a sober-voiced President Barack Obama commented from his Oval Office.


He would, he said in response to a query, talk with community and faith leaders, law-enforcement and elected officials about how they could go about attempting to reduce the prevalence of gun violence.  He personally supports an assault-weapons ban, which sounds like a very good idea, but this is election time and that is an issue that will garner push-back from powerful lobby groups.


This was not a movie theatre where a showing of a legendary comic-book hero took centre stage in the guise affected by a drug-addled psychopath shooting his assault-weapons purposefully and accurately to slaughter as many men, women and children as he could manage.  This assault was inside the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek, near Milwaukee.


And this man was not a budding neuroscientist, but a U.S. army veteran who also happened to be a neo-Nazi racist armed with a legally obtained weapon, and obviously determined to murder those whom he took to be involved in the 9-11 attack on America.  "We never thought this could happen to our community.  We never did anything wrong to anyone", mourned Devendar Nagra.


A man with an alcohol addiction, and an addiction to racial hatred.  Two children looking through a window of the community gurdwara where the faithful were assembling for morning prayers, ran to warn those assembled in the prayer hall that a man with a gun was entering.  The children ushered fourteen hysterical women into a pantry where they hid for two hours while mayhem raged around them.

"They were telling all the women to be still and to be brave, and they were telling the women not to cry.  They are the heroes who saved the women in the closet", said one of the women, in tears.  They were tears of fear and frustration, tears for the six people who were killed, and the three others wounded Sunday.  Including the police officer who went to the aid of one person and was shot nine times himself.


Astoundingly the special agent in charge of the FBI's Milwaukee division stated: "While the FBI is investigating whether this matter might be an act of domestic terrorism, no motive has been determined at this time."  No motive?  No kidding!