Commentary: A new year is underway, and it is a safe bet that 2016 will bring moments of happiness and moments of grief. How's that for prognostication? There will be much to say in this column and across all media about unhappy events in this new year.
During 2015, the word "tragedy" got an awful lot of use, bearing at times some awkward loads. Public officials, when called upon to address terrible events for the public, consistently use the same word to describe just about every emergency, including natural disasters, mass shootings, vehicle accidents, or corruption scandals.
"Tragedy" has a peculiar origin, originating as a hybrid of the Greek "tragos" (meaning goat) and "oide" (song). The name for a poem or drama with an unhappy ending, "tragoedia" in Latin, literally means "goat song." To this day, there are unresolved arguments about this. It is thought by some that tragedians were performers who competed for goats as festival prizes, while others think it is derived from satyr plays in which actors dressed as goats. Whatever the real story is, today the overuse of this word gets my goat and here is why: many events described as "tragedies" have material causes, causes that can be found in our systems and social relations, not in the flaws of individuals.
The shooting of Tamir Rice, the young boy playing with a toy gun and shot dead by police sworn to protect his safety, like other controversial killings by police, is often described as a tragedy, not because the word is convenient but because it has a particular purpose. When a grand jury exonerated the officers, Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty demonstrated that purpose when he said: "The death of Tamir Rice was an absolute tragedy. But it was not, by the law that binds us, a crime."
"Tragedy" is employed to obscure the nature of what happened. It was not a sad, unavoidable accident that the police officers did not take a position at a distance from the child and attempt to establish contact with him so he could drop the toy gun and live; that, instead, they recklessly drove up to him like characters in a Hollywood action movie and simply blew him away is not tragic. If these decisions were lawful, if it is so permissible for police to execute people, it is not a tragedy but a threat that must be defeated.
The flight of tens of millions of refugees from the middle east, northern Africa, and other areas rendered uninhabitable by war can be described as tragic, yet the refugee crisis is a consequence of war, not some unavoidable natural event. Millions more are forced to relocate annually due to the consequences of rapid climate change. Many of the nations turning these refugees away, to the point of sinking their boats, are the nations that created these crises and benefit from them. Crimes against humanity are not "tragic."
Trains that derail on neglected infrastructure, including trains carrying crude oil that become "train bombs" on impact; mass unemployment when capital refuses to invest or lend; austerity policies that lead to humanitarian crises in Europe and the Americas, including the U.S.; students forced to forego higher education because tuition is unaffordable while college administrators continue to enjoy six-figure salaries; the incitement to violence in political rhetoric joined with liberal access to battlefield weapons as a right - we need to stop calling these events tragedies. They are crimes.
In 2016, let's leave tragedy to playwrights and focus on replacing policymakers and systems that are not serving us.
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Algernon D'Ammassa writes the "Desert Sage" column for the Deming Headlight and Sun News papers. Write to him at DesertSageMail@gmail.com.