Читать книгу Hope’s Daughters - R. Wayne Willis - Страница 79

“Angry Loner”

Newspaper headlines chose those two words to describe Cho Seung Hui, the mass murderer at Virginia Tech. I recall that the acquaintances of Lee Harvey Oswald described him with the same two words. The two boys who ravaged Columbine had earned the same epitaph. Going it alone is risky business. The first thing the Bible pronounces “not good” is aloneness.

There was a popular book published in 1961 titled A Nation of Sheep. It criticized those who swallow uncritically whatever the authorities—presidents, parents, and preachers—feed them.

Our pride revolts at being called a sheep. Sheep are not known for being smart. They just go with the flock. Sheep-like passivity and docility in humans lead to wars and all manner of ills. Americans value independence and self-sufficiency. We imagine ourselves tigers and lions and eagles and such—almost anything but sheep. But one day, sooner or later, life puts us in touch with, like it or not, our essential sheepness. It may come in the form of a diagnosis, a marriage crisis, a parenting crisis, a job loss, or a death. Then we suddenly realize how frail, weak, defenseless, shorn—sheeplike—we really are.

Support groups like Alcoholics Anonymous have grasped the importance of being in a flock. The first step in their twelve-step program is to admit powerlessness to control or fix or manage their lives on their own.

We need a flock to include and enfold us, to accept us as we are, to draw us out of our autonomy. We need a flock that can allow us to ventilate our self-loathing and dissipate our anger. As the Yale boys put it in their Whiffenpoof Song: “We’re poor little lambs who have lost our way.”

Do I hear a baa?