“Just Making Chaos,” Says State While Making Chaos, By James Reed
A country club in New Hampshire US, was turned into the sort of scene you only see in bad movies and worse real life: one dead, several wounded, a man firing into a room and punctuating each burst with the rallying cry "Free Palestine!"
What followed was the official performance every citizen has come to expect when reality inconveniently resembles motive: a civil servant in a suit declares that the killer wasn't driven by hate, he was merely, quote, "trying to make a number of statements to create chaos in the moment."
Translation: somebody murdered people on purpose, but don't you dare call it what it looks like. That would be reductive. Politically incorrect, in fact. Better to treat the event like a weather anomaly: sudden, inexplicable, and inconvenient for the narrative team.
This is the bureaucratic comfort trick, the language of moral anaesthesia. When a man sprays bullets and yells a political slogan, the preferred therapy is to diagnose him with spontaneity. If you shout "Allahu Akbar" or "fascist pigs must die" while committing atrocities, the new ruling doctrine insists you were only experimenting with chaos-design. Intent? Motive? Too 20th century.
Here's a thought experiment in reverse: if someone staggers into a courtroom and shouts "I am innocent!" while slitting a file folder, are we to infer a search for closure? If a vandal paints "HELL NO" on a wall, do we ask whether they were expressing interior turmoil or simply redecorating? The answers are obvious, unless one's job depends on pretending they aren't.
Our institutions have become experts at alchemy: turning clear, ugly facts into gentle abstractions. Murder becomes "an incident." Political slogans are "statements." Rage is "chaos." The burly, inconvenient edges of motive are softened and boxed so that no one on high has to look bad, feel called out, or change policy.
It's cold comfort to the family of the dead when motive is dissolved into philosophy. It's even colder when the same people who will leap to classify "misgendering" as a hate crime pivot smoothly to declaring a shooter's shouted politics an emotional hiccup. Some behaviours remain prosecutable; others remain narratively neutered.
If authorities insist on a mental model where mass violence is merely a fashion accessory for chaos, then let them enjoy the luxury of their sanitised language. The rest of us, the ones who count bodies, who clean the rooms, who bury the neighbours, will keep calling things what they are. The grim, stubborn truth is simpler than their sentences: people died. Someone chose a slogan and bullets. Chaos was not made by accident.
We need fewer euphemisms and more answers. We need officials brave enough to name the motive when the motive is there, and honest enough to admit when the absence of motive is itself a problem. Until then, we'll be stuck with their tidy little metaphors while the real violence keeps doing the messy work
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