I Know Why

Allow me to make one thing clear from the outset: if he lets himself be captured, he’s no brother of mine. Each scenario, in order to be perfect, must end with total fatality. Like a hi-rise dropped into an icy sea, a mountain tipped over into a small, agrarian village, the sun come down upon us all.

If that sounds sloppy and bombastic, you have no sense of the heightened Real around such events. When you explode the everyday, you, in effect, explode every day. That’s the aspiration at any rate.

Well, you know how things go, the course they take; the news outlets almost have it down to a template. But you probably don’t know how pathetic it sounds if the uniforms end up wrestling the gunman to the ground. After all, how hard can the alternative be?

Open mouth, insert muzzle, flex the two knuckles on your index finger.

And if it’s a long-barreled device, sorry, but that’s no excuse. My brothers must have handguns, too. If they don’t, that means they didn’t prepare, didn’t take things seriously. If it’s not a gun at all that’s involved, if it’s a matter of plowing through holiday crowds, or setting propane tanks ablaze at auditorium exits, then the preparation for self-obliteration is that much more important. It would be nice if you could count on the uniforms to shred your flesh, or an angry mob to drag you through the streets, but not all of us can be so lucky. 

Those who’d emulate us but spare themselves at the climax of climaxes just don’t grasp the concept of a broad, hairy hand that ushers humanity off the planet; a hand upon which, if you will, we are but gentle fingers. If they did, they’d see that they, too, are among those who must be made gone. 

But to those who will understand what I’m about to do, to myself and to others, I’m reaching out so that together we might acknowledge our silent kinship and stop all the pointless self-torment. What you want is something beautiful; accept that.

By now it should be evident that this is not a manifesto—regardless of how it will be characterized to the masses; rather, it is a loving letter from a new pen pal, a communication from someone impossibly distant and embarrassingly sincere. Its aim, simply, is to state, I know why you do what you do.

Moreover, I say, take heart: you’re part of a sublime impulse that’s awakening across an invisible diaspora. The circumstances that apparently prompt your actions are but convenient catalysts that permit you to unleash the gushing emptiness inside. The purity of this impulse becomes clouded on its way up from its source and into discernible action. That’s why the typicals, in all their hand-wringing, must find us inscrutable and term us mad. The alternative, to see our fundamental objective as the only one that now makes sense, the only one that can save the non-human and redeem the human, would tear their hypocritical souls in two.

So they focus their interpretations and diagnoses on the anguishes of family, the workplace, on social, political, or sexual frustrations. Yet these are only the symptoms of a grander, entirely justified, malaise.

Similarly, these self-righteous typicals misunderstand our short-term goals as well. They have little to do with spreading terror or even pain—they are, in fact, ultimately peaceful. It’s the serenity of euthanasia we’re after, even if that serenity ace is achieved through deafening means.

Of course there’s bound to be some panic, but it should last mere minutes. If my brother has done his homework, he knows where the masses of living bodies are concentrated, knows how to reap efficiently. 

Before I joined this community, I’d scratch my head, too, I’ll admit. There’s always such an emphasis on psychological triggers rather than philosophical truths. After all, wasn’t there a psychologist decades ago who convincingly asserted that individual insanity is the result of attempting to adapt to an insane world—or perhaps the refusal to do so? So let’s ignore the influence of any personality traits, shall we? Instead, we should be opening our eyes to the glory of how countless individual soldiers bravely enact the unspeakable, doing so without the comfort of camaraderie that comes from being part of an observable army. 

It’s in the public’s interest, though, to deny any commonality among these troops, to scoff at the notion that all of us lone wolves may, in fact, be part of a pack. Because if that were true, couldn’t it spread, this movement? No, we who would poison everyone with rainfall if we could, we’re not quite as random and idiosyncratic as many like to think.

Moreover, what if our reasons, our motivations, actually made sense? 

My authentic brother, the one who understands me—or the one who reads this and is inspired, for the first time, to forego simple fantasies and to walk tall into the battlefields that are hallways and parking lots—then he knows we’re part of the same tide.

A tide that seeps quietly from cracks in the floor, and, before you know it, floods your entire home. A tide that turns your home into sand. 

Oh, and please know that we will do this. It is not a matter of conjecture. We will, bit by bit, siege by siege, spree by spree, wipe out every last one of those who are now standing. It’s a tall order but, yes, we have faith. And yes, “faith” is the right word, for we know that there is something that calls us, something whose voice grows only stronger in our inner ears. 

You see, I know why all of them do these things. Why they kill by the handfuls in their precious communities, and how they feel, at the last instant, a greater purpose in all these modestly scaled death-days. Yes, I know why. It’s very simple, really, this credo; in fact, it’s one you have likely heard before:

Think globally, act locally.