After Orlando, we grieve… and dance

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/06/2016 (3409 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On Saturday nights, people dance. People sing. People search for the freedom that follows the body in motion, as it undulates in time and in tempo with the rhythms.

Most of us are drawn to these beats from the time we are children. Some think we learn this before we are born. Our first DJ is our mother’s heart, beating out the backbone of a steady song: dub-dub, dub-dub. There are few experiences that all people share: this early soundtrack is one.

So perhaps that is why there is freedom in dancing, in the way it unites. Perhaps that original unity is why dancing has long had a special place at the heart of LGBTTQ cultural life. In dance, the hurts that dent and divide us fall aside. The march of events pauses, and the world waits for the beat to subside. In motion, people become simply living, and alive.

Forty-nine people were murdered in Orlando, Fla., at Pulse dance club, billed as the one of the top gay nightspots in the city. Fifty-three more were wounded. Most of them were LGBTTQ people; most of them were Latino. Over half of them were not yet 30; in this, they were just some of millions who go out on Saturday nights to chase the joys of a young, vibrant life.

The shooter, too, was young, aged 29. He dreamed of becoming a cop; he settled for being a security guard. His first wife told reporters that soon after their 2009 marriage, he became explosively violent and controlling. In a more just world, this fact alone might have prevented him from buying weapons. (“Thoughts and prayers,” U.S. politicians said, without promise to action.)

Political forces want neat narratives to advance their causes, but human lives are rarely neat or without contradiction. Before and during his murderous act, the shooter proclaimed allegiance to various forms of extremist Islam; he also, according to a number of witnesses, was a longtime regular at Florida’s gay bars, and sought to meet men via thriving apps such as Grindr.

Meanwhile, his ex-wife recalled the shooter’s authoritarian father, who expected nothing less than the “perfect son.” Though we are not his psychologists, it is not difficult to sketch lines between these dots, connecting the pressure cookers of restriction, expectation, aggression and, finally, hate. All of his past was inside of him, on that horrific day.

To gloss over that fact, is to gloss over the problem. Here we pause, because there is a fact we must acknowledge head-on. Across millennia, a constant work of cultures has been to secure ways to healthily socialize its young men. This is not an indictment of them but a fact borne through time: when young men are connected and supported, they generally thrive.

When they are not, that is the gap where extremism jams its crowbar, and pries until at least a few come loose. No matter the nature of the messenger, the message boils down the same: you are the righteous one, the deserving. The respect that you crave? The rewards to which you are entitled? If you haven’t received those things, it is Their Fault. The Others.

Many types of messengers exploit this weakness of human cognition. Surges of ethnic nationalism are predicated on this flawed instinct. Secular militant groups in the United States are driven by it, as are various cults and petty hatreds. Religious extremism is a common vehicle for this message, and no major religion has been exempt from shocks of staggering violence.

Tackling this is not simple. There is no easy answer. But we cannot avoid identifying the common thread that links so many outbursts of raw hate. The man who slaughtered 77 people in Norway five years ago would likely bristle to think he had anything in common with the Orlando shooter, who professed allegiance to an extremist ideology the former abhorred.

They were not so different, I think.

At their core, they were both angry young men, searching for identity — and, finally, driven to destroy what they had been taught to think was the source of their pain. They were taught wrong, and vocally rejecting and refusing space to all forces that preach supremacism, exclusion and hate is a critical part of the solution.

There are others. The United States could certainly do better at preventing people with high-risk profiles from buying particularly devastating weapons, and the surge of public pressure following the Orlando horror makes this seem more likely than it has in recent memory.

We can also do better at understanding links between family violence, and wider mass attacks. According to one study, 57 per cent of mass shootings in the U.S. between 2009 and 2014 included the murder of the perpetrator’s family members or current or former intimate partners.

In this light, domestic violence should never be treated as a discrete attack triggered by intrapersonal tensions — as, unfortunately, it still often is — but as a warning sign of a mind fragmenting to violence as a means of power, control and vengeance. The rage unleashed when someone attacks those closest to them is, often, just the beginning.

Above all, we have to keep focus on bringing each other into the fold, of connecting. It isn’t easy, especially not as populations become more fragmented, and cities more sprawling. But it is not naive to assert more loving and healthily networked communities are ones where extremism finds less space to leverage its hate, fewer hollow vessels to fill with rage.

So, come together then, in these days of grieving. It’s a Saturday in the lazy days of summer, a fine time for dancing in whatever way we are able. A time to cast aside all that divides, and remember that we are all bodies in motion: seeking light, seeking life, seeking safe spaces to breathe and belong to each other, to the great mystery of it all, and to the night.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca