What would you have done? Would you have done the right thing?
We can all imagine situations where heroic action might be called for -- the burning building, the drowning child, the plane captured by terrorists, and now the gunman in the UU church. Part of what makes us human beings intelligent is that we can map out scenarios in our head, deciding in advance what would be the right thing to do. The outfielder with a runner on second knows to throw home on a base hit. The careful driver anticipates that the child might run into the street and has her foot already on the brake. At the moment when a decision is needed, we might not have time to think. We plan out the right thing to do. And sometimes, the right thing to do is to die.
I don't want to think about Jim David Adkisson this morning. He's going to die in prison, whether by execution or otherwise, and that decision will have to be made later. I don't want to think about what drove him to it, or how such a dangerous man got a gun so easily, or whether his reading Bill O'Reilly had anything to do with it. Those are good things to think about, but this morning I want to think about the people in that church who did the right thing, two of whom, Greg McKendry and Linda Kraeger, are now dead.
Greg McKendry, we are told, was the usher, the first person to put his body between the gunmen and the children. He wasn't a soldier or a police officer or a firefighter, but that morning he was in charge of the sanctuary and it was his job to protect those children, one of whom was his foster son. And he died a hero, at the age of 60. I'm sure there were a lot of things he planned to do with his remaining decades that will now not get done. And he can't tell us whether he thought about those things as he put his body in the way.
Fortunately, John Bohstedt could and did tell us what he was thinking. He sized up the situation and rushed the shooter, planning to at least point the gun into the air. He "didn't perceive himself to be in physical danger", though in retrospect he clearly was. He doesn't mention sizing up the odds or counting the cost -- I don't expect he had time for that.
Humans are far from unique in the capacity for self-sacrifice -- the social insects are the champions of it. Self-sacrifice poses a classic problem for evolutionary theory -- if the organisms that reproduce are the ones that survive, why shouldn't self-sacrificing organisms be out-competed by purely selfish ones? The most basic answer is the theory of kin selection -- you can help propagate your genes into the future by sacrificing on behalf of your relatives. The biologist J.B.S. Haldane, asked whether he would give his life for his brother, famously said he would give it for two brothers or eight first cousins, working out the math of his genetic connections. (Two bees from the same hive are more than sisters but less than clones by this arithmetic.) Of course we don't do that math in a real situation, but evolution _should have_ given us a predisposition to sacrifice for our relatives. And as we UU's are fond of quoting from various Native American traditions, "we are all related".
We have a value system that honors self-sacrifice in a good cause. We will do our best to ensure that UU's remember the heroism of Greg McKendry, just as we remember the heroes of 9/11 and the heroes of war. I hope that in a similar situation I would do what he did, even though I also have plenty of things I want to do with the rest of my life and I am firmly convinced that there is no afterlife in which I might be rewarded for my sacrifice.
I'm not a big connoisseur of mainstream media news, but I've noticed that the Knoxville shootings have not drawn the obsessive media coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings or even the missing cheerleader in Aruba. There's a reason for this, of course. Evolutionary biology also says that we're preconditioned to be more affected by the deaths of teenagers, like Romeo and Juliet, then by the deaths of babies or of older people. Babies, after all, are usually replacable by similar babies, and older people have already passed their genes onward to the extend that they're going to. in Knoxville two older people died. No children died, and the perpetrator didn't even die, so there is less mystery about his motives.
Of course it's no thanks to Jim David Adkisson that the story turned out that way. We don't know if he planned to kill any children, but he planned to kill a lot more people of whatever ages, and it appears he planned to be killed himself by the police. But in the three minutes before the police got there, some heroes did the right thing.
Last modified 5 August 2008