Remember Waukesha

On Nov. 21, the joy of a Christmas parade in the idyllic town of Waukesha, Wis., was shattered by tragedy. Darrell Brooks, recently released from jail on $1,000 bail for allegedly running over the mother of his child with a car, allegedly drove his SUV into a crowd of parade participants, killing six people, including senior citizens and a child. Many others are still, weeks later, recovering in hospitals around Wisconsin.

Most national tragedies like this, understood as a seeming act of domestic terrorism, ignite national mourning and soul-searching, the angles of the event exhaustively explored by national journalists seeking to determine the deadly motive. But inexplicably, the Waukesha murders have been forgotten, except for the attention from journalists of local media.

By comparison, when a 21-year-old man opened fire and killed eight people at massage parlors in the Atlanta area, it ignited considerable condemnation of the gunman’s church and his treatment for sex addiction at an evangelical clinic. Even many evangelical leaders were quick to connect this gunman’s actions with evangelical teachings on sexual purity. Many commentators openly suggested that evangelical teachings might be radicalizing young people toward violence. Some even found a standard sermon on Revelation at the church the gunman attended and pointed to it as a trigger to the gunman’s violence.

Yet, in the case of Waukesha, in which Darrell Brooks posted hateful and racist rhetoric online, no similar avalanche of articles connecting the dots is found. What’s more, many news organizations refused even to name this crime as an act of intentional violence, describing the tragedy as something that a car did or as a crash that happened, as if an SUV drove itself into a crowd of children, parents, and seniors. Waukesha has mostly been forgotten. Outside of a few conservative internet sites, the conversation has mostly moved on.

How should Christians think about this? On the one hand, we might appreciate the lack of a rush to judgment and the sobriety of refusing to blame an entire people group or ideology for the actions of one extremist. Scapegoating and broad brushing people groups not only doesn’t help prevent future violence, it further marginalizes and radicalizes its objects. It also stigmatizes our neighbors. After 9/11, Muslims were often lumped together with jihadists in ways that made many American Muslims feel targeted.

On the other hand, the quiet surrounding the Waukesha tragedy sows distrust, especially directed toward mainstream journalists, who have the power, by their work, to create narratives. We shouldn’t wish to see the same kind of national finger-pointing and scapegoating we saw toward evangelicals after the Atlanta shootings and toward Muslims after 9/11. Yet, it would be nice for the nation not to turn our eyes so quickly away from the unimaginable horror in Wisconsin.

This Christmas, many families in Waukeska are mourning the loss of loved ones. A family grieves without their little boy. Grandchildren lament Christmas without their grandmothers. Brothers and sisters are without their siblings. Parents stare at an unexpected grave. The unexpected quiet of Christmas shattered by violence.

Perhaps I’m more sensitive to the narratives coming out of Waukesha, having lived just across the border in Illinois for most of my life. My late Uncle Brian, a pediatrician, served the people of Waukesha for decades. It’s a place knit together by faith, family, and a love for the Green Bay Packers. This community will never be the same.

It’s not too late to remember the tragedy that hit this great American small town. Christians know that the One who made them has not forgotten them. Every drop of innocent blood spilled on this earth cries up to our God of justice. And in the midst of our celebration of the first Christmas, also marked by evil and violence, we take hope in the fact that the child born in Bethlehem came to defeat the horrors of a broken world.