Editor: Unlike with so many other mass-murderous terrorist attacks, I felt atypically despondent during the three days following the Las Vegas mass shooting, and initially didn’t know why.
But then it unpleasantly sank in: The horrific outdoor-concert attack by Stephen Paddock was by a man who to me looked as American as apple pie, symbolically, with the white-flour-dough crust; whereas in my psyche (via the news) the past deadly terror attacks against populous Western targets were perpetrated by olive-skin young men with sizable black beards common amongst the Muslim male population — the latter after which I’d experience, not thick depression, but instead fear mixed with anger.
Retrospectively, forensically dissecting my reactive emotions when learning of Paddock’s still-inexplicably-motivated mass murder, it was as though my immediate thoughts were, ‘How could he do it to his own fellow countrymen?’
And then came the déjà vu of having previously heard about this not uncommon perspective, typically mentioned (albeit not too loudly) in post-attack news analysis regarding the shocked public psyche.
Good Lord, I thought, as I put my figurative hands to my face, had I reverted, however unknowingly, to a form of terrorist-attack racial-religious profiling in which my emotional reaction is based upon the skin colour and theistic faith of the perpetrator, who, after all, is a fellow human being regardless of continental origin.
But how does one go about successfully permanently suppressing such reactive emotions?
Frank Sterle Jr.,
White Rock
