A difference between fame and infamy

Robert A. Hawkins, the 19-year-old who killed eight people in an Omaha shopping mall Wednesday before killing himself, said in his suicide note that he went on the rampage to “be famous.”

Instead he will be remembered, briefly, as pathetic. He was a disturbed, depressed and alienated young man who apparently thought he could make people care about his existence by committing an act of violence. He got noticed. But that notoriety is just going to be a brief flash, soon cooled and forgotten.

The victims of sudden, unprovoked violence are the ones we remember, honor and mourn. The perpetrators, with their anger or misplaced sense of glory are not faces that stay with us.
Friday is the 66th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The images you see in the news-paper and on television today are those of valiant sailors on burning ships or innocent civilians whose lives were forever changed by the attack. The Arizona Memorial is a shrine to victims, to bravery and to loss.

Robert Hawkins had it all wrong; we don’t memorialize those who pull the triggers.