The Massacre at Fort Hood and the Lessons of "The Searchers."

The massacre at Ft. Hood is an incomprehensible tragedy. As human beings, we naturally seek rational explanations for things, even for madness. Was Major Nidal Makik Hasan, the lone gunman who killed thirteen of his fellow servicemen and wounded forty two others, mentally unstable? Was he pushed over the edge by the emotional burnout from counseling those who have been psychically and psychically maimed by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Or was Hasan consumed and motivated by the hateful ideology of Islamic extremism?

When it comes to mass murders like Hasan, we may never have satisfactory answers that will explain the carnage these individuals unleash. Perhaps these men’s neural processes (and thus their though processes) have gone haywire in ways we cannot understand. Perhaps these men, like Captain Ahab, have identified the source of their mental anguish as a group or entity, which they then scapegoat as the origin of the world’s suffering.

If the terrible white whale, Moby Dick, was killed, then the world could be cleansed of the malignant energies that consumed Ahab like a cancer. But Ahab became the personification of the evil he sought to annihilate.

Like Ahab, mass killers seem to have lost the capacity to empathize and love because they are consumed by righteous anger. Killing others becomes, sadly, the final act in a mental disintegration where hatred and anger devour the last morsels of their humanity.

Human beings are frail and flawed creatures. The battle between reason and irrationality, love and hate, takes place in every soul. Some individuals succumb to the dark and violent impulses that have best all of us at one time or another. The inability to channel suffering into constructive outlets compounds the world’s infirmities.

Art offers a guide for how pain can be transformed into higher states of consciousness. In John Ford’s masterpiece, The Searchers, the character played by John Wayne has most of his family wiped out in an Indian raid. He is driven on a mad quest to inflict revenge and rescue his young niece, the sole survivor who was kidnapped rather killed in the raid. However, when Wayne learns that his niece become a squaw his hatred and bigotry erupt into the desire to kill her too. In one of the most powerful and yet tender moments in all of cinema, Wayne’s character steps back from the brink of madness and embraces the woman who had become the symbol for all he hated, but the last link to all he loved.

We, too, are like the main character in The Searchers. Our psyches are split, our longing for love clouded by the rage we feel at those who have wronged us. We must either dissolve our hate or our hate will dissolve us. But if we can dissipate our hate, then we often find it has resolved itself into love. That is the lesson of The Searchers.