Let’s do some conceptual housecleaning. Having a purpose and having a reason are two different things. The terrorist has a purpose in mind. He’s trying to change a government’s behaviour, whereas the reason someone goes postal is that he’s angry. He’s acting on his anger, but he’s not trying to express his anger. This is important. We can prevent terrorism by addressing the injustice that’s driving it. That’s undesirable but doable. But we can only prevent someone going postal by not pissing him off. But that’s pretty much impossible. No one’s trying to piss him off. It’s just that, well, sometimes people get pissed off and there’s nothing to be done about it. And sometimes they get so pissed off that they go postal.

When they do we like to chalk it up to mental illness. “Only a crazy person would …” But this is unhelpful. It amounts to saying, “It’s crazy to …”, so that crazy becomes a behaviour rather than a mental state. We can say, if we like, that the adjective modifies a behaviour. But then all it can mean is a behaviour the rest of us don’t like, whereas what we want to say, presumably, is that a mental illness caused that behaviour. But of all the behaviours we don’t like, only the tiniest fraction are caused by a mental illness. Imagine my saying to my opponent over the chess board, “I don’t like it that your knight forked my rook and queen. So you must be insane!”

I assume we call it going postal because it was in the wake of someone opening fire in a post office that the expression caught on. But it was neither the first time nor, quite obviously, the last. Nowadays it seldom happens in a post office. It’s moved over to shopping centres, schools, churches, synagogues, mosques … And whereas the weapon of choice used to be a firearm – perhaps it still is – the Ford F150 has recently been gaining in popularity. In fact given the hegemony of social media, the expression ‘going postal’ may already have a competitor in ‘going Bourbon’.

So what’s my point? Patience, grasshopper. I’m about to make it. When a volcano erupts, or tornado strikes, we grieve for the victims, but we don’t shake our fists at the mountain or the sky. No one asks, “What is the world coming to?” But when someone goes Bourbon we look for something to flagellate. Somehow we think acts of God are to be expected, and so accepted, but the acts of man are not. Why is this? Is it because we think going Bourbon is somehow contra natura? But if so, how is it contra natura? Human beings are animals. Animals compete for territory. From competition proceedeth war. Terrorism is a species thereof. Wherein lies the surprise? Human beings get angry. Anger sometimes goes Bourbon. Wherein lie the surprise?

There’s something going on with us that we think a tornado warrants a passing mention on the news but we’ll worry the minutia of a Bourbon for weeks. I wish I knew what it was.

Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy

Tags: Bourbon Street attack, going postal, terrorism