Vic Socotra

11 November 2009

A Matter of Scale

It would already have turned to 11 November on the Continent when the event occurred. The commemorations of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the 18th year of a new century would begin shortly, and head in this direction across the still-dark sea.

We have turned the holiday into an event to honor all who served in all our wars, but the original event brought a close to the most colossal act of collective violence in the history of the world.

At least it was until the next one; which praise be has not been followed by something so monstrous as to eclipse it. Our humanity might not survive that.

Maybe we have learned something, or maybe the scale of the violence has changed because it could no be sustained.

Allied casualties at the battles around Ypres on the Western Front took 100,000 alone, enough to match the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in a single morning.

At Verdun a million perished, French and Germans locked in an embrace of madness.

Our wars and our violence are much smaller in scale, and accordingly more intimate.

John Allen Muhammad, the man known as the DC Sniper, was executed at the Greenville correctional Center downstate last night. He went peacefully and without a last statement, though they offered him the chance to make one.

That is more than he gave the lady down the street at the Home Depot that he shot eight years ago, or the other nine people he murdered with a high-power rifle from his improvised mobile sniper nest.

I try not to take joy in these things, but it is hard not to. He tied this city up in knots for months, changing my younger son’s entire senior year in High School, and the culture of the whole region.

I remember the night of the Home Depot murder. I lived on the front side of Big Pink, facing Route-50, and they say that Muhammad fled back east, under my balcony that night.

They forces of compassion tried desperately to win a reprieve for him, and they might have thought that the Governor, a god-fearing man who opposes the death penalty, might intercede.

Governor Kaine declined, and they went ahead with the procedure.

I am not going to waste a lot more thought about the man or the reason for his personal savagery.

There is so much more to regret, and so much more to remember today.

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