By BOB FUSELIER
Los Alamos
Every now and then, Hollywood produces a movie or series that not only addresses a societal problem but also provides the answer as well. Such is the case with the series Waco: the Aftermath. I have to confess that I would’ve never watched the series had I not been a background actor in it. It’s nice to see what results from a project in which one has a role, no matter how small that role may be. Of course, there’s also those self-centered motivations as well: Did I mess up? Did I look ok?
Waco the Aftermath deals with both the siege by the ATF and FBI of the compound in Waco, Texas known as Mt. Carmel (which was the home to the religious group known as the Branch Davidians) and the following trial of a few of the survivors of the traumatic event that ended the siege. It’s a TV series “based on a true story”, a story where the historical truth is, at times, hard to determine. It doesn’t purport to be a documentary, but it does an excellent job of giving us a good look at the humanity, both good and bad, of those who found themselves in the middle of this terrible ordeal.
It’s historic in the sense that this siege, along with the event known as Ruby Ridge, sparked a movement that led to our government taking a good look at how its use of violent tactics to settle events such as Ruby Ridge and Waco are no longer given, and should never be given, carte blanche acceptance. It also led to the events of January 6th, 2021.
The legalized violence used by states to maintain order has historically been seen as necessary and its use wasn’t and/or wouldn’t be questioned. Our governmental system is a great experiment in the ability of a people to self-rule. While our Constitution has placed numerous restraints on the use of power over the populace by guaranteeing many rights to its citizens, our history is not free of that abuse.
It has been through non-violent opposition that many of those abuses have been exposed and brought to an end. We have learned from our failures, and it is my hope that we will continue to learn. However, we can only learn if we are able to take a deep and humble look at our failures with the intent to fully understand how they came to be. This seems to be the intent of the series Waco: the Aftermath.
While the series does a good job of representing what was known at the time of the event and what was learned afterwards, it does use some artistic license with the characters and events. Such is the event of the series that inspired this essay and involved the FBI hostage negotiator, Gary Noesner, who was played by Michael Shannon, giving a speech at a memorial of the Waco tragedy. Regarding that scene, Noesner later wrote in a post on Linked In, “I did not speak at the two year Waco Memorial Service at Mt. Carmel as depicted, although the speech given by Michael Shannon is also consistent with my prior public statements.”
It is that specific speech that holds the answer to so much of what we face today. Shannon, playing Noesner, is asked to speak at the memorial by one of the survivors of the siege. He does so with the humility that can only come when one takes a long, hard, and honest, but compassionate, look at his or her past failures.
He begins by stating that, although many in the audience and many other Americans might believe otherwise, no one at the FBI came to Mt, Carmel with the intent of killing people. “None of us wanted that. So, if we didn’t want it to turn out this way, and neither did you, then how could it, when nobody wanted it?”
He continued, “A religious friend of mine proposed once that maybe it was evil that made it happen. And I suppose he was right, but not necessarily in the way he meant it, because I believe that the whole idea of evil, it keeps us from seeing a thing clearly.”
He then defines the common, underlying problem and its true origin. “It blinds us, because the evil is never on our side. It’s always the other guys. I think what’s closer to the truth is that we were scared, and you were scared. And then we called you evil and you called us evil, and then we both stopped seeing each other and communicating. And that’s when the tragedy came.”
Shannon as Noesner continues, finding the commonalities that take the us vs. you of the Waco incident to the we vs. the problem, “And now, it keeps me awake at night worrying that if we cannot find a better way to remember that, that even though we might disagree or be on opposite sides of a thing, we are all fallible people. I make mistakes and so do you. We’re more the same than we are different.”
He finishes with what he believes is necessary, “A great divide opened here among us, and I’m here today to push against that divide. And I hope that each and every one of you can help me in that effort… or I don’t know what will happen.”
Shannon’s words echo what sixty-five years of life have taught me. All I learned from those experiences, all I’ve learned from the core meaning of the writings that make up the Gospel message, all I learned from the core messages of most religions, all I learned as a veterinarian from my interests in behavioral medicine and neuroscience, everything I’ve learned in my life, especially my failures, is summed up in that speech. We have a choice: we can succumb to our fears and start seeing those with whom we disagree as being the hated “other” or we can open our hearts and minds to that which allows us to see the commonalities we share with all, both our strengths and our weaknesses.
Live is difficult; there’s no escaping this truth. In the end, all we’re left with is a choice: Do we choose to react through fear and anger and hatred to the difficulties and challenges of life that have been and will be laid at our feet in the form of tragic conflicts, or do we seek to understand the true causes of these challenges and “our” roles, not just “your” roles, in them? One choice offers possibilities, the other a never-ending cycle of imitative violence.