(This is a substantially revised version of my post of March 4)
On the afternoon of January 23, a man with a gun and a history of making violent threats crossed the thin line from threat to action and committed a horrific act of violence in our small town, and seven people were shot dead1. Four of the shootings happened within a mile of our home, which is only one of the many jarring revelations that would follow. The day after the shootings we were all trying to make sense of what had happened when the phone rang-it was the New York Times wanting to interview Lisa about the events and the community’s reaction. The media trucks arrived the next day and lined Main street for a week or so, as it seemed everyone wanted to know about Half Moon Bay and the shootings. To the surprise of nobody (and to the relief of many), it wouldn’t be very long before media attention would be redirected to another shooting in another town, and then another, an endless, tragic media caravan documenting the deepening sickness of our time.
In the first few hours after the shootings, I was feeling a strong desire to do something. It was an unsettled feeling, a discomfort in my gut, perhaps a need to be (or at least feel) helpful in the midst of such trauma and grief. At one point, I picked up my camera bag and started to walk out the door but I stopped. Who did I think I was to rush into something like this and why did I think I had anything to offer?
My hospice chaplaincy experience has given me some tools for helping grieving individuals process and reflect upon the death of their loved ones from illness and disease, and I often do that by encouraging the bereaved to share stories of their loved ones. While this process can be helpful for many, the special needs of the victims of violence and trauma are of a different order of magnitude, and in that moment of pause at the door of my house, I rightly knew that I would have been at a loss as to how to offer support to those most directly affected. More practically, I don’t speak Mandarin or Spanish, and while working with the bereaved via a translator is possible, it is not ideal. Much of the grief experience is conditioned by our culture, spiritual traditions, and language. Fortunately, there are other individuals and organizations with the skills and cultural sensitivity to provide support, and they have quickly established networks and gathered resources.
But that leaves me with the question, why was my almost-reflexive response to pick up my camera bag? What did I think I was going to be photographing on that sad day?
A week after the shootings the community came together for a moving memorial service. Lisa was instrumental in planning this event, and she continues to work with the interfaith coalition and community partners to address the needs of the survivors.
In the weeks that followed, it was revealed that some of the murdered farm workers and their families had been living in dire circumstances, without proper shelter or sanitation. There are strong voices in the grass-roots immigrant and farm worker support networks who say that they have been trying to get the attention of those in power to address many of these issues for a long time. At last, local, State, and Federal agencies are investigating, and of course, politicians at all levels are saying the right things, but it should not have taken the murder of seven people and the traumatizing of dozens of others before there was a response.
The suspect’s reported motivation for his deadly rampage was frustration with a disputed $100 repair bill. He also claims that he has struggled with mental illness. Perhaps. I think it is safe to say that there is certainly more to the story, but it’s going to be difficult to fully map the constellation of events that led to the violence on January 23rd. Even as we once again ask the “why” questions, we know that there’s no possible explanation or motivation that will bring any solace to the survivors.
Some in the support community are asking a very provocative question. It’s not a new question-it goes as far back as the biblical prophets-they want to know if we who have privilege and power are willing to consider that the burdens, stress, and trauma of generations of systematic injustice and economic inequality in our community may have contributed to this act of violence.
It is human nature to turn away from things that are disturbing or difficult or that make us question our sense of how the world works and our place in it. With the never-ending stream of images of acts of violence and trauma that assault us, it is no wonder that we turn away and distance ourselves from the traumas and tragedies. We might even like to believe that they don’t affect us personally, but they do.
We are all grieving. We have all been burdened with grief and loss-not just the personal grief of the death of loved ones or broken relationships. We grieve acts of war and violence, injustice and the breaking down of social cohesion at all levels of society. People now speak of the immense grief they carry for the catastrophic loss of critical ecosystems and species due to climate change.
I wonder if there isn’t a deep, deep fear that if we look too closely at the brokenness around and within us, we will have to acknowledge that something is fundamentally wrong with the world, and what do we do with that? In an attempt to maintain some sanity, I believe that we willfully choose to forget certain events. The traumatic event becomes like a faded photograph in our memory-we vaguely recall that something bad happened, but the details-the names and the faces elude our recall.
Grief is sneaky. We may think that choosing to turn away from our grief means that we’re somehow “over it”, but this only postpones our reckoning with the pain and brokenness, because grief will make itself known.
Back to the question of that camera bag. If, as I was walking out the door, you had asked me what I wanted to photograph with my camera I would not have been able to offer a clear explanation. Even then, I could not imagine how I would have directly approached the grief, pain, and trauma of so many with a camera in my hand. I respect the work of the photojournalists and media workers who are able to document the events of war, violence, famine, and natural disasters and all of the brokenness of the world-sometimes at great personal risk, including the risk of death. Their work is important, as they are our eyes and ears and witnesses to all the painful truths that we sometimes turn away from and ignore. But this is not work I am able to do-at least not in the same direct way. I needed more clarity and discernment, so I stepped back from foolishly blundering into something I wasn’t prepared for.
As I said above, I could not imagine how I would have directly approached the grief, pain, and trauma of so many with a camera in my hand. But there are other ways in which a camera and a sensitive approach might be helpful. I have come to believe that when I picked up my camera bag and started out the door, it was with an intuition born of my own willful forgetting that the memory of this tragedy would very likely be fleeting for many of us and that remembering is the first step on the path to healing2.
My interest in documenting and preserving the memory of this violent act is not directed at the surviving victims and their families-they will never forget. We cannot allow ourselves to forget them. With that in mind, I am just beginning to photograph some signs of how the grief and loss are being expressed as a way of preserving the memory of the events for those of us who are prone to want to forget, but I need to sit with this idea and allow it to gestate further.
These shootings and murders came just a few days after the shootings in Southern California and were then followed by more shootings and deaths-so many that I have lost count. I have already forgotten the names of the communities where so many have been lost to violent acts. I do not want to forget the names of the people who were my neighbors-even if I didn’t know them. They deserve to be remembered just as we all want to be remembered.
Aixiang Zhang, 74 Zhishen Liu, 73 Qizhong Cheng, 66 Jingzhi Lu, 64 Marciano Martinez Jimenez, 50 Yetao Bing, 43 Jose Romero Perez, mid-30's
For a fuller picture of these events, I encourage you to read all of the NY Times articles that are nested together.
There are some situations where remembering and recalling traumatic events is unhelpful and possibly harmful.