The Rest...of the Story

Radio listeners of a certain age will hear in their heads the voice of the late Paul Harvey and his signature just-before-the-water-breaks pregnant pauses. He had an entire series called The Rest of the Story.

As we mourn the victims of the Georgia massage-parlor shootings, especially the Asians, there is a tendency to bundle this in with the dramatic increase in hate crimes against Asians, even to draw a direct line to the utterances of our former President. But in this particular crime, there are also other threads to pull on.

The current convention is to focus more on the victims and less on the accused, so that he won’t be glorified. But motives and circumstances leading up to crimes like this are also important. For example, this young man is said to have sought out rehabilitation for his sex addiction. He reportedly told police the shootings were his way of eliminating temptation.

As humans, we have to learn to take responsibility for our actions. But what level of guilt compels someone to act out in a violent way? Guilt can prompt an individual, especially an addicted one, to try to get rid of this nagging feeling by blaming it on the perceived outside cause. He had reportedly been a customer at one of these massage parlors.

What was he struggling with, why, and how? What moral and religious orientation was he raised with? How big an issue is sex addiction? Do we take it seriously, or treat it as a joke? Does this fellow have an “Asian thing” when it comes to sex? What is the special attraction of an Asian massage parlor, sometimes included in the names of such businesses?

And last, but not least, there’s that element that is all too familiar, in America, anyway: the gun. Should anyone, even if, or especially if, they are having a “bad day,” be able to buy a gun on that same day, as reported in this case?

Violence against Asians is not new. It has been going on for centuries, and is another chapter in our country’s sorry racial history. All I’m saying is that while there are many commonalities in crimes like the one in Georgia, there are also special issues involved, and we would do well to consider the rest of this sad story as an opportunity to learn more about them.