Bad craziness

According to multiple news reports, several hours ago an 88-year-old man walked into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, lifted a rifle, and shot a security guard, Stephen Tyrone Johns, to death. Other guards returned fire and wounded the shooter. If the major news services are correct, the man with the rifle is a white supremacist and a holocaust denier.

This is bad craziness of the worst sort, and it saddens and angers me. I can't even imagine the pain of Johns' family.

When President Obama visited the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany five days ago, his speech included this bit:

We are here today because we know this work is not yet finished. To this day, there are those who insist that the Holocaust never happened -- a denial of fact and truth that is baseless and ignorant and hateful. This place is the ultimate rebuke to such thoughts; a reminder of our duty to confront those who would tell lies about our history.

I wish today's shooter had the same appreciation of the Holocaust.

In one of the most powerful and moving experiences of my adult life, in 1985 I spent several hours walking around the Dachau concentration camp outside Munich. On an information plaque in one of the buildings, I read that the first and mildest punishment of prisoners was to make them stand at attention in a particular spot on the grounds for 24 hours with no shoes or coat. It was early May, still chilly and breezy enough that I was wearing a sturdy Army jacket. I went to that spot, stood at attention, initially comfortable in my shoes and jacket, and waited. In less than half an hour, I was extremely uncomfortable and stopped.

In the same building with the plaque were pictures of two rooms, one filled with the bones of the dead and the other with the shoes of the dead. I went to each one and stood inside it. The weight of the pain and the suffering and the evil of each place was so great I feared it might crush me, and even as I type this I can feel the emotions of those brief visits clench my heart. In each of those rooms I was aware down to the marrow of my bones that I was in the presence of something undeniably and completely wrong, something that should never ever have occurred.

I'm not Jewish, so I do not have that tie to the Holocaust. I am half Armenian, but I learned that fact too late in my life to have any real emotional connection to that heritage as part of my identity. Fortunately, you don't have to have a link to the Holocaust to realize what a horrible thing it was. You only have to think, and then only for a moment.

Denying any fact is a stupid idea and never useful. Denying the Holocaust is simply bad craziness.

The right response to today's event, the good and kind and charitable response, is to feel sadness for all involved--yes, most particularly for the guard and his family, but even for the shooter, a man so wracked with insecurity and hatred and, quite likely, ignorance that he could do such a horrible thing. And, I'm trying, I really am, to hold myself to that reaction.

The part of my heart that is filled with my own anger, however, holds a dark desire that the shooter survive long enough to join the general population of a major prison, where perhaps he might receive from the inmates a suitable greeting for his senseless murder of an African-American guard.

I know that I must fight and control this lesser part of my nature, I really do, and I try, and I almost always succeed. Some days, though, it's hard, it really is.