Crazy?

In the most recent tragedy down in South Carolina (and isn't sad  we have to qualify it?), there has (again) been finger-pointing at mental illness as the central issue. Yes, of  course, he was crazy, or (to paraphrase Lewis Carroll),  he wouldn't have done it. But there is a problem with such an obvious observation.

• First of all, ascribing this tragedy just to mental illness paints anyone with any sort of psychological problem with the same stigma. When it is pointed out that one out of every four people has to deal with some form of emotional issue, and that covers everything from depression to psychosis, we get a different and less scary perspective. Actually,  very few seriously mentally ill people are any risk to others. To themselves, perhaps. but they can be so scared of others they would avoid any contact sooner than seek them out to harm them.
• Second, this speaks far more to our own fears than it does to anything to do with those who struggle with mental illness. We see stories of phobias, delusions, loss of contact with reality (the vast minority in the field), and we worry that we might have something like this happen to us. We have a bad day, or even a  bad year, and we feel as though we are going crazy, so someone like Dylann Storm Roof becomes a shadow we desperately want to pretend isn't there.
• Most important, the people who suddenly want to focus on mental health are more probably looking for an issue to distract us from looking at the self-evident causes for such tragedies. Racism. Guns. System-wide inequality. (Feel free to add anything I've overlooked.) I do not mean that mental health is not an important issue, nor to pretend someone like Mr. Roof isn't mentally disturbed. But when we focus on that one thing as the only motive, we tend to ignore the broader issues.

It would be a wonderful world if we could act from our rational selves. We were all created in God's image. We've just forgotten that. And in our frantic attempts to recapture what we have lost, we fall into a self-centered view of the world, where we resent others for not doing and being what we want. them to do or be, So when we come up against anyone whose skin is a different color from ours, or who speaks a language we are not familiar with, or whose culture is not in sync with ours, we are so frightened by this threat to our world-view that we  feel a need to eliminate it.And that, my friends, is my suggestion as to the root of the problem.