You will hear the killer’s name over and over again in the days and weeks to come, but his name is not who he is anymore.
Omar Mateen is the Islamic State. He is Donald Trump, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. He is intolerance of the LGBT community. He is the AR-15 and the NRA – and the lawmakers in its pocket. He is the news media that peddles violence and the film industry that glorifies it. He is conservative, liberal, Muslim.
Omar Mateen is the reason to open our hearts and close our borders. He is the catalyst for the nation to unite in mourning and divide in blame. He is the predictable cycle of violence in America, and his story will be hijacked to win elective office, to drive the sale of guns and ammunition, and to propose feel-good laws that ignore root problems.
Omar Mateen is the pathological need to be right, a near-universal human flaw. Those who consider themselves to be voices of reason and compassion, opinion writers included, don’t see their role in the tragic farce. As they sermonize through clenched teeth about what is right and what is wrong, their intolerance of the intolerant only fuels hatred and ensures the continuation of the cycle. Minds are rarely changed by way of force or insult, but that hardly matters. It’s enough, it seems, for people already in agreement to pat each other on the back and heap scorn on the dissenters.
Omar Mateen is human complexity – despite what pundits say. The world view of Peter Bergen of CNN, for example, demands that the killer be in his right mind, as if any killer is. Mateen’s ex-wife, Sitora Yusufiy, suggested on Sunday that her former husband suffered from mental illness, but national security analyst Bergen resisted that narrative. His lens reveals Mateen to be a terrorist, plain and simple. No person battling mental illness, he said, could hold down a job for several years and plan a mass murder. There’s no shortage these days of tidy assumptions presented as fact.
Omar Mateen is the search for order where none exists. In times of tragedy, Americans look to their leaders, both cultural and political, to make sense of the senseless. What can be done to make sure it never happens again? The answer is nothing. Not in this country, in this century.
Hatred has already begun its long seduction of the next Omar Mateen. Somewhere, his future victims watch the Orlando coverage without realizing they are witnessing their own eventual fate. The hate on the campaign trail, television, the internet, social media and in newspapers will help fuel the killer.
Omar Mateen is modern America – a mile over the edge of sanity and falling still.