Cook: Love and July 16

A single jet pulls away from formation to form a missing man formation during a Blue Angels flyby of the Chattanooga Unite Tribute Concert at Ross's Landing on Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2015, in Chattanooga, Tenn. Samuel L. Jackson, a Chattanooga native, emceed the benefit concert for families of victims of the July, 16, shootings at military facilities in Chattanooga.
A single jet pulls away from formation to form a missing man formation during a Blue Angels flyby of the Chattanooga Unite Tribute Concert at Ross's Landing on Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2015, in Chattanooga, Tenn. Samuel L. Jackson, a Chattanooga native, emceed the benefit concert for families of victims of the July, 16, shootings at military facilities in Chattanooga.
photo David Cook

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They say Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez - the author and architect of one of worst days in our city's history - was radicalized.

Radicalized?

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The term "radical" has become part of our national, post-9/11 lexicon; we use it to speak of terrorism, beheadings, and lone-wolf shootings. Long ago, in 19th-century Britain, the word was used to describe an extreme faction of politicians. In 1970s California, surfers were radical, then skaters.

Yet the Latin etymology of the word "radical" - think of the lowly radish - has nothing to do with Abdulazeez, or ISIS, or violence of any sort.

Radical means "root."

As in the root of all things.

The foundation.

And the foundational root of life - its core, its wellspring, its Grand Central Station - is never violence, or division.

The root of life - its genesis, the meat and bones - is family.

Community.

Love.

"The law of our species," Gandhi once said.

To become radicalized is to return to the central truth of this hot mess we call life - that we are connected and glue-gun bound to one another in ways known and unknown, seen and unseen.

To become radicalized is to search and honor the jeweled heart - the immortal diamond, as Richard Rohr calls it - in all people, saint or racist, knave or knight.

To become radicalized is to heal and mend, not divide.

"We can only be human together," the South African hero Desmond Tutu once said.

Because at the rock bottom of things, there is not a violent core.

Yes, we're bloody - red in tooth, claw and AR-15s - but that is not the truest definition of human nature. (Were it the case, we would have blown each other up a long, long time ago.)

"In 'The Descent of Man' Charles Darwin wrote only twice of 'survival of the fittest' - but 95 times about love," writes David Loye of the Darwin Project.

That's why Abdulazeez was so deviant; we recoiled from July 16 because it was so deeply antithetical to the truth of life. Violence is anti-life, a shockwave to our sense of self and others.

What Abdulazeez did was incredibly evil, but it was the most unnatural - the least radical - act of all.

Yet we forget all of this.

Indeed, violence is as old as the hills. Cain killed Abel, and will again. Violence has been our sidekick since the beginning, and in the long scroll of this city, how different is Abdulazeez from the white men who lynched Ed Johnson, or the patriotic Americans who engineered the Trail of Tears? Abdulzeez's violence was not the first loosed on the city, nor the last.

Dallas. Minnesota. Orlando. The list is as long as you want to make it.

So the point of this column is not to promote love in some incensy, hold-hands-and-sing kind of way; violence is real - it burns, cuts, gorges, rapes, disfigures, imprisons, cauterizes, starves, robs and destroys.

The question America must face, then, is this:

Do we have an understanding of love that is stronger?

Either Gandhi, King and all the spiritual saints are right - love is the strongest force in the universe, they all said - or they're not. If they're right, then love must become a word at home within policy, not just feel-good, bumper-sticker talk. Love must be reclaimed as something real, pragmatic and effective. I fear we only have a flat-earth understanding of love in a time of rocketships and atom bombs.

Put it this way: How do we get past the current crisis? What is on the far side of the mountain?

What does a less-violent America look like?

Not long ago, in the short space left here, I would have rattled off the answers to my own questions.

Not today. We're tired of other people giving us answers, of all these voices, all this talk.

So you answer the question for yourself.

If in 10 years we have healed even in the slightest as a nation, what did it?

What is at the root of this?

The problem?

And the solution?

David Cook writes a Sunday column and can be reached at dcook@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6329. Follow him on Facebook DavidCookTFP.

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