Andrea Yates has been ruled not guilty by reason of insanity. This is one of those bright lights that I don’t often see shining in our current climate. The light of understanding and compassion.
Amidst the courthouse video clips of Andrea, unattractive, medicated, deeply sad, and dressed in Walmart ill-fitting pastels, we also are treated to photos of her children, beautiful, angelic, innocent. There’s compassion all around here, and no need to discuss who suffered more. I wait to hear that Bill O’Reilly in the “no compassion zone” may find grave injustice in the court’s decision.
For there is nothing more evil in our culture than a woman who murders her children. That is a horror that no one can assign a pragmatic or emotional justification for that will meet it. So much of the rhetoric characterizes this form of murder as “unnatural.” But, I fear, it is all TOO natural, pegged to our very survival, that if we feel we are not able to nurture our young, that we feel, on a deep animal level where no morality can reach, we have to kill them to put them and us out of our misery, to enable us just to go on another minute when we are in the grips of mental illness.
Humans feel violence all the time. We check it when we can. As a culture, there’s not a lot of “checking it” going on these days. Indeed, we live in a time when the act of violence is indulged for the state, and individuals as agents for the state, in a highly expansive way. State-condoned violence is unparalleled in its exercise these days, as terrorism is increasingly identified as violence not sponsored formally by a recognized government.
Terror, violence, survival instincts, fear, and mental illness are as natural as natural can be. It is only with the pastiche of what we call western culture that we paint on the surface of this this messy, blood-letting, bodily-fluid-filled, smelly, ugly, disgusting mortal nature that we all have. The animal cannot be moralized. But, the decision of which parts of our darker natures are allowed to surface in polite company can indeed be moralized, and may be at the heart of why we are in the mess we are in.
Fear of abortion, fear of man-on-man sex (which Andrea Dworkin posited represented potentially uncontrollable violence on men in our homophobic psyches), are the Western Christian’s bellwether for immoral manifestations of our animal natures. The fear is so deep that we use it as a litmus test to elect officials who condone nearly all other means of violence at the human disposal. Capital punishment and war are heartily endorsed as biblically-approved state-sponsored forms of violence.
There is an eery cleansing that takes place when the violent act is disconnected from the individual. It’s the kind of cleansing where you can call mass murder something like “the final solution,” or “democracy on the march.” We live in frightening times when the individual act of violence, usually out of what may be the most human reasons of all which is simply utter despair in the face of the uncontrollable. Despair that is only worsened in a culture that will not permit it, that moralizes it as a “lack of faith,” that renders it silent, removing its only remedy which is the support of a caring world.
