Sorry to report, there’s no making sense of the senseless. No matter how grandiose the excuse for senseless behavior, it’ll never be enough to curry favor with anyone with an ounce of sense.

Did you ever notice the news reports when a horrific crime’s been committed? After they give the victims’ names and the actions that caused their harm or death, you hear this line: “Police are looking for a motive.”

That means they’re looking for a reason and reasons are more plentiful than dandelions in spring, and just as useless. Let’s just call these reasons what they are: Senseless.

If police arrest a guy for robbing a liquor store, it’s usually not a senseless crime. He wanted money. That was his motive. But when we witness a crime whose impetus puts us in a quandary, we lose our mind searching for a motive. We just have to make sense of what happened. Even if we arrive at a reason most can agree on, what have we learned? A vague piece of information that doesn’t prevent senseless crimes from happening again.

Finding the motive doesn’t bring back the dead, it only gets us into the morass of a madman’s head.

I’m less interested in his motive and more interested in the means that can be dealt with. Did he use a gun, a knife, a baseball bat or a car to inflict harm? That gives us a piece of information we can work with, not endless pieces of an erratic mind.

Do you think it’s of any comfort to the victims families that the perpetrator was diagnosed as being fed from the wrong breast by his mother and that’s the “reason” he went off the rails? Does that motive help police or psychologists prevent similar, senseless crimes in the future? The answer is an emphatic “No!”

Spending so much time searching for why a senseless act was committed will take us to our wits end, but won’t prevent it from happening again.

I guess my real message here is not about crime, punishment or derangement. It’s more about focusing on how vs. why. One gives us factual data, the other is just pie in the sky.

Trying to make sense of the senseless will drive you crazy and the only motive you’ll come up with will be extremely hazy. “How” will move you forward, but not “why.” It’ll only take you backwards and give you endless reasons to cry.

All the best,

John

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