Peace is but a dream in this new year
An Islamic State flag lies on the ground rolled up behind the pickup truck that a U.S. Army veteran drove into a crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans on Wednesday. Credit: AP/Gerald Herbert
Hopes that this new year would enter peacefully were probably always foolish. It's a perennial wish, but one we should acknowledge as more dream than expectation if we're being honest with ourselves about the state of our nation and our world.
Both sides of the new year's onset were wracked with violence.
Regionally, a man was pushed onto the subway tracks at the 18th Street station on the No.1 line in Manhattan on New Year's Eve, and 10 people were shot outside a nightclub in Queens on Jan. 1.
Nationally, at least 14 people were killed in New Orleans when a U.S. Army veteran intentionally drove a pickup truck into New Year's Eve revelers, and an active duty Green Beret master sergeant killed himself and blew up a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas on Jan. 1.
Add in the fatal pre-Christmas car attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany; the shooting of six people in the Bronx on Dec. 30; and the horrific burning-to-death of a sleeping woman on a stopped F train in Coney Island, and it's enough to make one wonder what is going on and whether fraught tensions nationally and abroad are making our mental illness problems even worse.
It's easy to feel uneasy about this. But it's also easy to go numb, and so understandable as a way to cope. And we have many ways to cope.
We can insulate ourselves by saying that the victim should have been paying attention, that it happened far away from here, that it was a gang affair and could never involve me. We can take comfort in local authorities saying that no known credible threats exist locally, while ignoring that authorities in those other places typically knew of no credible threats before mayhem visited them.
We refuse to be cowed and continue to gather in large numbers in public as an act of defiance and a celebration of what makes us human. And we get back on the subway, a little warier, a little more attentive, a little more on edge, but back nevertheless.
And it works, until you're the one in a daze after losing a loved one to this random roulette as what happened in the case of the two young men who grew up on Long Island and were killed in New Orleans.
There are pragmatic questions that must be answered about whether extra street barriers or surveillance cameras or law enforcement personnel or tweaks to legislation would have helped to prevent the violence. The more piercing questions deal with the perpetrators, their motives and states of mind.
How can we get help to people whom family, friends and neighbors knew were struggling with mental health issues? How do we balance civil liberties issues with society's clear need to make sure that people who are a risk to themselves and others don't do harm? What did we miss when someone we never thought capable of such evil acts ends up committing them? We can conclude from some physical evidence that someone had acted on a recent political radicalization, but how did that happen and why? Is there something about military service that is a contributing factor in some of these cases?
These questions tend to rise and fade in a pendulum sway each time one of these horrific incidents occurs. And that process will continue until we keep our focus on those questions, ignore the misinformation that pollutes the aftermath of these tragedies, have the hard debates required to devise difficult but needed solutions, and then act.
Even that might not be enough. We all are imperfect beings in an imperfect world. But we owe it to ourselves and to each other to try. A happy new year shouldn't be a pipe dream.
Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
