Manifest Destiny 2009

The shooting at Fort Hood is beginning to look like another story in the long history of manifest destiny narratives. What they all have in common is that some kind of god told a person (or a people) that he should listen to the voice in his head (presumably the voice of God) and do what it says. Whether it is a voice telling Israelis to keep building their houses on occupied Palestinian lands, or Christian settlers usurping Indian lands in the settling of the American West, or Islamic Jihadists detonating suicide bombs, or right-wing Christians killing abortion doctors, they all have the voice of God as their navigator or inspiration.
Most of the time throughout history the voice of God has been benign. Most believers in God have used that voice to tell them to be good or to do good works. The problem is, as soon as a person decides that voice in his head is the voice of God, all bets are off as to what head voice messages are assigned to God and what are not. God’s voice is hard to distinguish from whatever other voices exist in the head. You can assign God to the deep voices or to the little bird-type voices. The problem remains: how can you tell for certain which messages are God’s and which are not?
The safer course is to assume that all voices in your head are of your own making, not anyone else’s, especially a god’s, and to question every voice you hear no matter what. Relinquishing authority to someone else, especially an invisible voice, is kind of dangerous. It leaves you open to the possibility of believing a message to kill someone is a good thing.
That’s why we would be a whole lot better off if we question authority, especially if that authority comes to us in the form of a voice or in the form of an authority who is telling us to do something our reason or the law tells us is quite wrong.
Therefore, it is probably better to listen to the narratives that are life-affirming and respectful of others rather than those that are not. That way, we won’t end up thinking God told us to do something or start believing homicide is better than suicide because at least we are thinking of others when we kill them.
As soon as we turn our lives over to the care of God, we have relinquished some responsibility for governing our own lives. That is why I have a hard time understanding why conservatives advocate taking more responsibility for ourselves and yet also stand behind the notion of a God whose voice can surely be mistaken or invented as an excuse to take the law into ones’ own hands.
I would rather leave out trying to tell which voices in my head are God’s or someone else’s and assume they are all just voices in my head. That way, I will not empower some voices more than others and will remain skeptical of them all.
However, in American culture we have the triple-edged sword of freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, and freedom of speech. In other words, we are free to believe anything we think and free to purchase a gun to act on those beliefs without regard to consequences until after the action has occurred, unless we have previously sent enough verbal signals in advance to call attention to our intentions. Unless those verbal signals are confronted, it is often too late to prevent the consequences. Such is the dilemma of freedom of speech, of religion, of the right to bear arms.
In the case of the Fort Hood shooter, the verbal signals were there. Apparently the supply of Army counselors was so small in relation to the demand that the screening process was made loose enough to keep the supply of counselors greater than was safely advisable. Sending a devout Muslim with extremist sympathies to Afghanistan was the straw that broke the back of what was left of the shooter’s sanity because it put him in a psychological double bind: he was going to have to hear the confessions of American soldiers who would be apparently killing his own religious brethren. He could not imagine withstanding that personal torture. Belief in absolutes trumps mundane duty to one’s profession when the two conflict.
The respect America gives to freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, and freedom of speech will continue to be ingredients readily available to produce a “bomb” ready to go off almost anywhere in America, even at a military installation. That’s the price we pay for those freedoms, and this Fort Hood narrative is just one more in the pantheon of sad narratives that are a part of the on-going American story. And we hear them in one form or another when the body count is large or valued enough or the perpetrators initially seem unlikely (an American soldier shooting other soldiers on an Army base).
Maybe we need more counselors for all of us, especially those of us who are prone to view the world in terms of absolutes and those of us who have trouble identifying the voices in our heads. But that would mean universal mental health care coverage, and we can’t even get to universal physical health care without diluting compromise. You’re still on your own there, but you can have all the guns you want without a prescription.