This morning I am thinking about what Nicolas Cruz would have done had he not been able to obtain a rifle. My first thought was that he would make a bomb. Then, no, he would drive a car into a parade or other special event. That would avail much more destruction than a rifle and with much less technical preparation than a bomb. These thoughts came after watching the well-spoken youths of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School marching for gun control.
Watching them, and other news about them and Cruz, I remembered another Nicky Cruz from almost 50 years ago. That Cruz was a gang member in one of New York’s darkest neighborhoods. A young pastor named David Wilkerson, from a small Pennsylvania town, felt led by God to extend God’s love in a practical way to gangs in NYC. The book, The Cross and the Switchblade, documents the story of his work on the streets. Because of Wilkerson’s passion and commitment to connect with the worst and the least, many gang members were saved from the life of violence they had been locked into.
So I thought, “I wonder how many of those marching to Washington have some culpability in this recent Cruz narrative. How many of those had participated in making fun of him or in acts of rejection and psychological bullying, targeting his abnormalities or just wrote him off as a sad, hopeless oddity.” A friend of mine once said, “What if someone had got to Bin Laden when he was still ‘Bin Baby’”. What I am getting at is that I think the core issue is anger, rage built up over years, exploding toward the perceived enemy to make them also feel the same internal devastation, despair and rage.
It’s a conundrum that those who need love the most are often the most unlovable. Did anyone truly listen to Nicolas Cruz before now? I don’t know. Who knows how deep in his soul the rage went or if he could have been different had someone decided and committed to be his friend, like Wilkerson had to the other Nicky Cruz?
That’s the trouble with “could have beens” though; they’re imaginary. What we all know however, is that everyone needs love and understanding from friends that prove friendship when we least deserve it. We know that bullying and rejection and even indifference cause anger. We know that unchecked anger leads to violence.
The conclusion of my thoughts is that this and other devastations like it are the voice of humanity crying out for help for a sickness that desperately needs the devoted attention and the deepest and most uncomfortable and sacrificial compassion from all who can give it, young and old, educated or not, the religious and irreligious, all of us in every walk of life.
I admire the students that have responded to this terrible calamity by action. My thought, however, is that the root issue is so complex and so demanding that we naturally gravitate toward something relatively simple and perceivably controllable. So, I wonder if the emphasis on controlling the instruments used in “rage killings” might actually be a distraction from what can be fundamentally fruitful. An honest look inside our individual and collective selves may reveal our culpability in this social demise. If we first identify our failings to tangibly care about people, then we can engage in works of healing that make a truly significant and lasting difference in the world.