1/2/2025
Greetings,
How ARE you? You looked sharp in your press conference about the NOLA attack.
SoW, I appreciated your expressions of solidarity with those affected & your thanks to first responders & investigators. Your closing remarks about the vitality & resilience of the people of NOLA reinforced my decision to proceed with my trip there next week.
I was struck by your emphasis on the driver’s “desire to kill,” as if this was somehow aberrant & surprising. Aren’t our soldiers taught to kill as part of their military training? Prof Dave Grossman popularized the term, “killology” to characterize our efforts to train people to overcome an innate psychological resistance to killing, which historian S. L. A. Marshall originally wrote about in 1947. Students like Patrick M. McKinnie (PMM) are still taking up these ideas in their MA theses inquiring about the “power of technology in combination with psychological enablers” that allow people “to kill in a remorseless manner.”
The guy who drove his car into the crowd with the ISIS flag flying was thoroughly desensitized to the horrors of killing & his act should come as no surprise. Troubling YES, surprising, NO.
Onto other matters.
Thanks for recognizing Mitsuye Endo (ME) among the 20 folks getting Presidential Citizens Medals. She was the perfect person to defy the stereotypes that led FDR to inter the Japanese-Americans in forsaken places like Tule Lake. As a Methodist, with a brother in the army, & limited knowledge of Japan, she illustrated the profoundly racist aspects of Executive Order 9066. In ME’s honor, I encourage you to devote some resources to improving the Tule Lake National Monument, which could use more preservation & enhanced interpretation.
Please brainstorm with Jason Tower of the United States Institute of Peace about how to avoid the “negative peace” which could come about in Burma if China is successful in pressuring the junta to hold an “election.”
BYBS,
