By Charles Rein

Rein on All Fronts

With the Buffalo shooting this past Saturday, in my eyes, the media has become transformed into stray, unkept street dogs pursuing a juicy bone. Many in the media are behaving like salivating, street dogs, filled with unending hunger. Many journalists and commentators are out to portray this shooter in the most simplistic narrative. In doing so they see themselves as "sounding the alarm" over what many talking heads see as a straightforward black versus white or a white supremacism issue. 

I would argue the case.

While we can all agree this was a horrible event, I suggest we all STOP, take a deep breath and reassess our emotions, regarding this tragic event. If we hold fears or hatreds inside, then to quote a short, green philosopher credited with being 900-years-old:

"Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering."

A similar quote has been credited to Ibn Rushd, whose name I'm sure rings a bell. The 13th-century writer was more popular than any Muslim scholar in the Western world, who tried to reconcile the philosophies of Aristotle and Plato. He famously wrote hundred of years before Yoda:

"Ignorance leads to fear, fear leads to hatred, and hatred leads to violence. This is the equation."

 A Scifi.stackexchange.com commenter posted:

"Yoda is pointing out that negative emotions do not typically lead to positive ones. Even a relatively unselfish negative emotion like fear can, if not addressed, lead to a cascade of other, even darker thoughts..."

So what pushes us blindfolded and alone onto this freeway of fear?

In future commentaries I will dive deeper into these issues. But I feel it's enough to say here, (less than 500 words) to consider this an appetizer on this topic.

With a risk of my readers thinking I've created a new Yoda blog, I'll quote the 900-plus-year-old green philosopher once again who stated:

"Many of the truths that we cling to depend on our own point of view."

While please hear, I am certainly not justifying violence, I believe it's valuable to understand where beliefs such as from the shooters come from? And not just him! What would someone have to believe in order to hijack a plane, or to blow themselves up and kill others while wearing a suicide vest?

So let's try to understand why someone would shoot to kill, nearly a dozen fellow Americans inside a supermarket one quiet Saturday afternoon.

Faster than a Biden sticker "I did that!" could appear, we need to investigate the reasoning behind some individuals' actions. To treat an individual's actions with a simply childish bumper sticker philosophy, saying he was "totally evil" is not only a cop out, it's a disgrace to those victims' lives. As adults we owe it to them and to ourselves to look deeper into these issues of violence and seek to understand.