Love, Weaponized

On October 27th an active shooter killed eleven people in a Pittsburg synagogue.  Three days later, as the community and families of the dead tried to process their loss, something miraculous happened. Rabbis and members of the Jewish community, instead of closing their doors in the face of heinous anti-Semitism, threw them open wide, inviting people of all faiths to #ShowUpForShabbat services across the nation. They responded to hate with love.  

Love is a powerful antidote to hate, and this instance of love was more powerful than the hateful one that prompted it. Think of the fear people had to overcome in order to attend a service at a Jewish synagogue after the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history. Love allowed them to do this.  

Love can comfort and sustain us when the unthinkable happens, as it did in Pittsburg, but it can be more than a salve for our wounds. It can be a weapon. If we want to combat American carnage like the Tree of Life mass shooting, we must weaponize love.  

But how?  

Like an actual weapon, love can be a preventative measure, one that disarms hatred before it produces a figure like Robert Gregory Bowers. But if love is a weapon, we must learn how to wield it, and we must begin at the beginning, with children.  

The American Pediatric Association has finally, unequivocally come out against any form of corporeal punishment for children. They write that, “[a]versive disciplinary strategies, including all forms of corporal punishment and yelling at or shaming children, are minimally effective in the short-term and not effective in the long-term. With new evidence, researchers link corporal punishment to an increased risk of negative behavioral, cognitive, psychosocial, and emotional outcomes for children.” Though it could have come sooner, this is good news. Not all parents will heed this advice, of course, but many will, ensuring that more children are raised in an environment where violence is not mingled with love. This will help more children grow into loving adults.  

Love can operate outside the home as well. It can come to school. We teach our children math, reading, and science, and we regularly assess their ability to retain this information, but how often do we teach love or assess children’s ability to express it? Our nation’s children should learn early in their academic careers how to express emotions, including love, and recognize them in others. 

In the same way that we don’t expect parents to teach their children algebra, we should not put the onus only on parents to teach their child what loving relationships look like. There are a variety of loving relationships, many of which are not familial. We relate to one another as friends, mentors, neighbors, romantic partners, and even as strangers. A parent, no matter how well meaning, is simply not able to relate to their children in all these ways. They can be models of course, but love is learned through practice, not merely observation. We need to actively teach children how to be loving in a safe environment under the supervision of a professional who can facilitate and mediate the expression of love and other emotions between children.  

This is not to say that parents, or for that matter the community, should be absolved of the responsibility to teach children how to love, but, much like with algebra, we provide support, supplementing the training children get in school, showing them how to apply their knowledge in the real world.   

Some school districts are responding to the emotional challenges facing today’s youth by implementing programs that teach children emotional awareness and how to support one another, but these programs are purely voluntary and woefully uneven. We need a federally mandated and funded nationwide program that address the emotional needs of children, one that teaches them how to love, especially how to love across difference.  

We must begin at the beginning, but we can’t end at the beginning. It’s nice to think about children and the possibilities associated with youth. Children are innocent and teachable. But we can’t focus solely on children and ignore adults like Robert Gregory Bowers. He committed a hateful act, it’s true. He is to some, I imagine, irredeemable. But banishing him from human society does not address the questions we desperately need answered: what allowed him to murder eleven complete strangers? And how do we prevent atrocities like this from happening again? 

Beyond those vital questions, I have more: can Robert Gregory Bowers be taught to love? And can we learn to love him? 

It’s easy to postulate from the comfort of my home that the Robert Gregory Bowers’s of the world deserve love, especially when I haven’t lost anyone due to their actions, but I would argue that individuals who carry out extreme acts of violence are in desperate need of love, and we as a society owe it to them. It’s our responsibility to love our fellow humans.  

In an interview, a man who lived in the same apartment building as Bowers described him as a “quiet loner who kept to himself” and claimed he never saw Bowers interact with anyone expect the landlord. This neighbor went on to say, “[t]he most terrifying thing is how normal he seemed.” Is it normal to have no human contact beside your landlord? I would argue no. Humans are social beings. We need human connection to flourish. We need love to flourish. While we can’t know every facet of Bowers’s life, if he had any loving relationships, they seem few and far between. 

We don’t know everything about Bowers, but we do know that, according to the Pittsburg Post-Gazette, Bowers’s father “was charged in 1979 with rape, and was found six months later in a picnic area near the Tionesta Dam, dead from an apparently self-inflicted rifle wound to the chest.” Robert Gregory Bowers was seven-years-old when his father committed suicide. To heal from that trauma, he needed a tremendous amount of love. Did he get it? We can’t know for certain, but his actions this year suggest not. These, then, are the questions we must grapple with: can we give it to him now? If not, why not? If love is a weapon in the fight against hate, what better person to turn it on than Robert Gregory Bowers?