Image from NASA's website.
Why is the shooter's immigration status even being discussed? Why is it relevant to our national analysis of this tragedy?
Sacco and Vanzetti's wrongful conviction for a murder they didn't commit, was a trial of their politics and their immigrant status (see, http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/sacvan.html) at a time when America was seized by anti-immigrant hysteria. The anti-immigrant mob mentality prevailed then, much like today, when pundits and politicos paint every act of every immigrant an indictment of all those who don't "look like us," scooping out the soul and leaving a shell to backfill with "they're all the same" "you know what they're like" "what do you expect from them" "you can't trust them" "they're so odd" "they don't look like us" "they don't talk like us" "they dress so funny."
But there is no them, no they. Just us. All of us.
Just how much pain and alienation must the shooter have felt, how ill must he have been, to terrorize and kill those innocent people and then take his own life? What was the depth of his psychological and emotional abyss? His desperation and sense of isolation? That is the real question -- not whether he had a green card. And what will we - all of us - do to connect with one another to relieve our neighbor's pain and loneliness and desperation, so that this will never happen again? Jay Marks.
