Terrorism in San Bernardino Revised

When my mother died in Redlands, I thought I would not return to the town again.   I returned one more time.

I was born in San Bernardino.  It was a beautiful city with a rich cultural mix of people.  I lived there until I was ten, in a block of houses across from a farm; because of the farm we could see the mountains from our front yard, especially Mount San Gregonio.  Although it was years before I saw and understood amber waves of grain, when I first learned the lyrics to America the Beautiful I knew in my bones what purple mountains’ majesty meant.  

Every spring my father suffered from severe attacks of sneezing caused by his allergy to the orange blossoms blooming on our favorite tree.  Its sturdy low branches made a great climbing tree. I remember the sound of my father chopping down the tree when I was about five. 

My kindergarten teacher lived at the end of the alley behind our house.  She kept chickens; our family’s dachshund sometimes dug under her fence and chased them.

The roots of one of the eucalyptus trees that lined the block buckled the sidewalk in front of our house; this made roller skating exciting and fun. 

I walked with my big brother three or four blocks to my elementary school. Later I walked with friends or bicycled alone to school.  

Parts of San Bernardino were laid out in a grid.  Long avenues of very tall palm trees lined the streets all the way to the mountains.

 

When I was ten we moved eight miles away to Redlands, then a small rural town nestled in the midst of orange groves.  As I grew up, many of the groves were pulled out, bulldozed over, and made into subdivisions.  The apartment where the San Bernardino slayers lived, on the north side of Redlands, had once been an orange grove.

Since last month, San Bernardino and Redlands have become synonymous with domestic terrorism and murder.  I grieve for the families and friends of those who were killed, and grieve for the murderers.  I am sad, too, that this place I love has become a symbol of loss and bitterness.

Because my life has been comparatively easy, probably at the expense of others, I am bewildered by the anger, resentment or rage that would cause a person to kill; I don’t understand. I don’t know if the San Bernardino slayers sought to end obscurity with notoriety, as some shooters do, or to revenge wrongs.  It is hard to believe they believed that they truly served God, although people of the book have violated the sixth commandment in God's name before.

 

I’d wish I could think that Daesh attracted the naturally cruel, the murderers, the evil, but I don’t.  I think the poor, the bored, the underemployed, the resentful, the obscure, find Daesh, and Daesh, for its own ends, skillfully turns them to harm.

These phrases from W.H. Auden’s poem September 1, 1939 help me.

. . .

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

. . .

There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.