The Buffalo Massacre and the Propaganda of the Deed

 There is a popular misconception that monsters are hideously ugly creatures that send us running in the opposite direction when we spot them.

That is incorrect.

Monsters are not possessed of horns, fangs, prehensile tails, bat wings and cloven hooves.

They do not have bolts in their necks or wear built up shoes or bay at the moon.

Nor are they particularly stupid.

They look like everyone else, like the pastor of your church. Or the little old grandmotherly lady that bakes cookies for neighborhood events. Or the kid that mows your lawn in the summer.

That's what makes them dangerous. We don't know until it's too late that they are monsters.

There are other misconceptions about monsters.

For instance, women are considered the weaker sex and incapable of deliberate evil.

This concept ignores the cavalcade of female Nazi concentration camp personnel who perpetrated some of the worst atrocities in history during the Second World War.

And children, specifically young teen-age children. They are considered too young and innocent to be capable of evil behavior.

In Rochester, New York, we have seen kids as young as 13 being involved in attempted murders and murders, as well as non-fatal shootings and stabbings.

One particularly gruesome incident occurred in Rochester last year, where a 16- and 13-year-old set fire to a poor old man on Lyell Avenue, who dies of those burns.

Remember Steve Amenhauser?

No, monsters are not precluded by age or sex.

Which brings us to yesterday's massacre at a Tops grocery store in Buffalo, New York.

Payton Gendon, 18, from Conklin, New York (near Binghamton) drove several hours and 200 miles to Buffalo, New York.

Equipped with body armor and a gun, illegally customized to make it more effectively deadly, he drove to a Tops grocery store in a Black neighborhood and proceeded to shoot 13 people, 2 White and 11 Black, killing 10 Black people.

Among the victims was a Black security guard who was a retired Buffalo police officer and also an 86-year-old Black lady.

Gendon, who live-streamed his actions on social media and left a manifesto declaring his hatred of Blacks and Jews, was taken alive. He was taken to court and ordered held without bail, while his attorney requested a psychiatric examination for his client, as though evil is merely a mental aberration.

Gendon himself comes from a reasonably financially comfortable family and attended SUNY Broome Community College.

Gendon didn't know any of his victims personally and could have chosen any large city with a large Black, or Jewish, community to engage in his monstrous activity of racially motivated murder. Why he chose Buffalo is anyone's guess. It could have just as easily been Rochester. Or Syracuse.

And as for live streaming his foray into mass murder, that could be supposed to encourage other White supremacists into committing the propaganda of the deed, which can be defined as promoting physical violence against political enemies, even if it is suicidal. 

New York State, which has become accustomed to random homicides, and Rochester, which is the state's deadliest city per capita, were shocked to their core.

Perhaps it is because progressive Democrats have so frequently accused the political enemies of racism, usually untrue, that such accusations appeared to be a retelling of the boy who cried wolf too often. It was losing its force. People got bored with hearing that word bandied about.

But racism IS real as are all the other "isms" directed at people who are not "mainstream" or "different" from us.

And it blew up in our faces yesterday.