When you stop caring about people, you can do anything.
Ignore any suffering, endorse any wrong. Heck, you can, as Robert Crimo III did, cause suffering and inflict wrongs yourself. Show up at your own town’s Fourth of July parade and fire 88 shots from an assault rifle into the crowd of your neighbors, killing 7, wounding 48 more.
You’re free to do that, then shrug it off afterward.
We wonder how Crimo could do it, while at the same time imitating him, in our own small way.
Part by necessity. The world is a terrible place. You can’t mourn every bird nudged out of every nest, every child who dies anywhere. Life would be continuous agony. You have to be concerned about yourself, primarily, your family, next, if you’re lucky enough to have one. Then a few neighbors, coworkers, friends. We make such a big deal out of the tiny fraction we care about, we completely ignore the majority who don’t count.
Some cause harm. For a lark. In Crimo’s case, he pulled the trigger, he claimed, inspired by friends being shot by police — imaginary friends apparently. Lies are helpful that way. The grease on which our bad deeds slide. Crimo says he was a zombie, a sleepwalker.
There’s a lot of that going around. Those who aren’t psychopaths prefer to let others do their harm for them. The reasons hardly matter. Our government hurts people based on their immigration status. Their paperwork. It’s such a familiar excuse, we forget just how flimsy it is, how false. Just as baseless as other popular pretexts: the color of someone’s skin, their religion, gender. Meaningless distinctions that become meaningful to those who want to oppress and hurt, or ignore oppression and pain.
As if the 2022 Fourth of July massacre weren’t close enough — a 13 minute drive from my house to Ross Cosmetics, the Highland Park store and social center Crimo chose as a sniper’s nest — after the killing I noticed a photo I took at a Trump rally at the corner, within sight of my window.
It was 2020, the COVID Plague Year. Northbrook activist Lee Goodman had taken to posting the COVID death tolls on a sign at the corner of Shermer and Walters — then under 200,000 dead. Trumpers began holding rallies at that corner to register their displeasure at anyone keeping track of something as trivial as Americans dying in a pandemic, the opening salvo of what, five years later, has become a general war on education, experts, data, information.
Not only don’t we care who gets hurt; we don’t even want to see an official toll. Statistics are for losers.
It might seem facile to draw a line from Crimo to the administration. Why not? Both are motivated by the same blithe unconcern for life. It’s only a matter of degree. Human Rights Watch just issued a paper: “100 Human Rights Harms in 100 Days: The Trump Administration’s Assault on Rights in the United States and Abroad.”
No. 1 is “Children, adults, and whole families may find it more difficult to feed themselves as the administration eliminated over $1 billion in food assistance for school lunches and food banks in food insecure school districts and communities across the US.”
Are those kids going to die of hunger tonight? No. But it’s a hint at what’s going on — if you don’t care about hungry kids, what do you care about? Trans high school athletes, apparently.
There’s 99 more. No. 2 might hit closer to home. “Millions of people in the US may experience new impediments to receiving Medicaid benefits, food assistance, childcare, and other services benefits due to the administration’s decision to eliminate federal staff involved in setting eligibility standards for health programs.”
Ouch, right? See that’s the thing, when you hurt others; sooner or later, it rebounds, and hurts you.
When a Venezuelan immigrant is shipped without due process to a hell-hole Salvadoran prison, it’s bad for him. But also bad for you, because the same due process he doesn’t get can also be denied you — laws are guardrails against abuse, and while you smile at the other guy’s car skidding off a cliff, nothing is to stop you from sliding right after him. The guardrail’s gone for both of you.
On Thursday, Crimo was given seven consecutive life sentences without possibility of parole. As much as I’d like to celebrate his rotting in prison, I’m not taking my moral cues from him. Crimo is a cautionary tale for everybody, the poster boy for the truth that, by hurting others, you end up hurting yourself. He is where not caring about suffering can lead you.
