Read any news site today and you’ll find two very different tragedies that have galvanized the world. One for it’s scope and devastation; the other for its brutality. Both stories look for answers to the unanswerable – the death of innocent lives born from an anger buried deep within the two perpetrators.
It is also about race. One man was black. The other white. Both lost touch with reason in order to carry out heinous crimes against “other”. One, an apparent Islamist extremist. The other, a pure racist. One is dead. The other faces incarceration for life.
But before all of this, they were both someone’s child. A fathers son. A mothers joy, born to a world with infinite possibilities. But somewhere along their respective paths, they diverged. A switch went off and we lost them forever.
I wonder what lessons we can learn from these two, very different men, who fell into darkness. Can we find a moment of humility to look back into their stories. To learn how and why that switch went off. How they both succumbed to the elixir of hate. We owe it to ourselves and to those lost in their rampages. We must talk to each other and be open to our collective experiences.
But, can we do this?
Ten Graces, LLC 