WORKING ON A THEORY ABOUT ORLANDO
A CounterPoints Column
By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
For expert fiction and non-fiction editing consultation, email me at safero@earthlink.net
Among so many other lessons to be learned from the mid-June mass-murder
shooting at Pulse, the Orlando LGBT club, is a caution against locking
ourselves into assumptions and conclusions before enough information is
gathered and known. Now that a few weeks have passed since the horrific event,
and the initial furor has cooled off a bit, we can more easily see where some
of those early assumptions and conclusions wrong.
Many—including Republican presidential candidate Donald
Trump—shut off all further analysis once they learned that the lone American-born
shooter was a practicing Muslim, had an Arabic name—Omar Mir Seddique Mateen—and that he had both identified himself as an "Islamic
soldier" and pledged his allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and the
Levant (commonly known as either ISIS or ISIL) in 911 calls he made in the
midst of the shootings. From that moment on, many declared the Orlando massacre
to be an act of "radical Islamic international terrorism."
In addition, many of our more conservative friends concluded
that the tragedy might have been averted had there been either "some"
or "more" armed security inside the club itself.
Of course, there was always an alternate theory that the
American-born Mateen was less motivated by radical Muslim theory than he was by
traditional American-bred homophobia. And within a day or so of the shooting,
evidence emerged—though it has still been not been fully substantiated—that he
may have been a self-hating gay, and that the public allegiance to ISIL might
have merely been a way to paste on a higher motivation to the shooting and
cover up conflicted feelings about his own sexuality.
In addition, timelines released by several news outlets
showed that an armed off-duty Orlando police officer was working at the club,
and engaged in a shootout with Mr. Mateen before Mateen entered the nightclub,
and that two on-duty officers entered the club within minutes and exchanged
gunfire with the shooter, forcing him to retreat to a bathroom.
But even though some of this information was available
within hours of the first reports of the Orlando gay nightclub shooting, it was
ignored in many minds because it included facts that conflicted with convenient
conclusions already drawn.
Jumping to conclusions has probably been one of humanity's
favorite pastimes since we first came upon this earth. But that human tendency
has escalated in American life especially—on both the left and the right—since the
rise of social media as our primary news-gathering medium and national
discussion forum. This is in part because if one doesn't enter into the
conversation early, and with a strong opinion one way or another, the
conversation rapidly passes you by. Two weeks, a provocative tweet Facebook
post about the Pulse shootings would have gotten you scores, and perhaps
hundreds, of replies. Post something about the shootings now and you may get a
small discussion, but more likely you'll generate no more than a reply or two
and then silence, as most people have moved on to new things.
Another incentive for drawing an early conclusion is that it
relieves one of the responsibility of thinking through what to do about
something that has disturbed you. Pick a pre-determined cause, and along with
it comes a pre-determined set of actions or attitudes to take in response. In
the first few hours following the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal
Building, for example, popular opinion in America had labeled it an act of
foreign-inspired Arab/Islamic terrorism. I recall that after Timothy McVeigh, a
young white American Army veteran, was captured and identified as the bomber,
one of the national news outlets interviewed a somewhat befuddled older white
woman, asking her about her reaction to the McVeigh arrest. " I don't know
what to think, I'm all confused," she replied. "Now I don't know who I'm
supposed to hate."
But such confusionment—if that be a proper word—does not
have to be. Some years ago, while I was a reporter for Metro weekly newspaper in San Jose, I was assigned to a story that
demonstrated to me both the value of waiting before concluding and both a way
to bring it about.
Late one weekend night in the winter of 1998, the
African-American head of the San Jose State University Black Student Union was
discovered lying unconscious in a deserted open-air hallway in an off-campus
housing complex, having suffered a severe head injury from a possible assault
while talking on a pay telephone. Lakim Washington was a militant and highly
vocal leader for Black student rights on the SJSU campus, and had clashed with university
administration officials and with a number of white students, including his two
white roommates, in the months prior to the assault.
Within hours, leaders of the San Jose State BSU charged that
Washington had been the victim of a racially-motivated attack. Although there
were no known witnesses to the attack, and Washington himself could give no
information because he fell immediately into a coma, my editors at Metro believed the charge. I believed the charge, and was assigned
the story, essentially, to provide evidence that it was true.
The problem was, as hard as I tried, I could find no such
evidence. No witnesses came forward. Washington came out of the coma, but
reportedly could not remember anything about the attack, and his family would
not allow reporters to interview him in the hospital where he was recovering. In
addition, representatives of the university police began spreading the story
that there had been no attack at all, but that Washington had hit his head on
the concrete walkway after suffering an epileptic fit, even though he'd had no
prior history of epilepsy.
Eventually I turned in a story that presented the Washington
assault as an unsolved mystery where a racial attack had been charged but not
proved, and which the university police seemed reluctant to investigate. A few
days after the article was published ("Violent Night" Metro newspaper, January 22, 1998), a young woman read
it, called the police, and reported she
had information that Washington had actually been assaulted by her boyfriend, an
African-American, after the two men had argued over the use of the telephone.
In other words, despite the early and "obvious" conclusion of a
racial component by so many people, including myself, race had absolutely
nothing to do with the assault.
In other words, despite all the first assumptions by so many
people—myself, my editors, and members of the SJSU BSU—after first hearing
about the Lakim Washington assault, there had been no racial component to that
incident.
It was during the Lakim Washington investigation and story
that I began to formulate guidelines for guarding against such premature
conclusions.
First, work from a "working theory" rather than a
conclusion when you don't have enough facts in hand about a particular
situation. This is more than just semantics. A conclusion demands defending and
is difficult to change because you have committed yourself to it, even when the
actual facts eventually prove otherwise. A working theory is just that, a
theory. It is presented as a possibility, not as an established truth, is not
necessary to defend, and is more easily modified if need be.
Second, continue to collect facts and modify your theory as
necessary as new facts are presented.
Finally, use any newly-discovered facts to try to disprove
your working theory, rather than trying to prove it. When you try to prove a
theory—or a conclusion—you tend to ignore everything that disproves it. But if
you work to disprove your original theory, it is easier to see the flaws in it
and modify that theory or abandon it altogether, if necessary. On the other
hand, if you honestly try to disprove your working theory and find you cannot,
it makes it more likely that your original theory was correct.
Using this formula, one could generally start off with the
theory that given America's history, any situation involving more than one race
in this country is likely to have race as one of its factors, to a greater or
lesser extent. But after that, all other possible factors should be taken into
account to see if their presence might, in fact, disprove the theory of a
racial cause.
Using this method of theorize-and-attempt-to-disprove, its'
entirely possible to conclude that there are not enough proven facts available about
the Orlando gay nightclub shooting to draw a definite conclusion. It's still
possible that Mr. Mateen's actions were inspired by his fundamentalist Islamic
religious beliefs and the actions of such terrorist organizations as ISIL. It
is also possible that either American-born homophobia or shame-of-being-closeted-gay
were the determining factors. And it is possible that the ultimate cause was
some combination of these factors or others yet unknown. But it's important to
realize that such uncertainty is okay. One ought to be careful not to jump
unless one knows where the danger is coming from and which location it is
traveling to, lest one ends up jumping directly in its path.
Meanwhile, there's no magic to this method of working
through our original theories. Much work has to be done to make it work, in
almost every instance. Additional facts have to be ferreted out, sorted and
resorted, and retheorized. We often have to throw out our most treasured
prejudices. Sticking with pre-conceived notions is far, far easier on the mind,
in the short run. In the long run, however, disaster can easily follow if the
myths we have manufactured in our heads do not agree with the reality we face
in the actual world.
That's my working theory, anyways.
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