The Fearful Face of Failure

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As the detectives piece together the life of twenty-one year old Dylann Storm Roof, who had a boyish face, but a heart filled with hate and failure, the media projects their usual Anti-Agenda which is saturating our society:  the Anti-gun, the Anti-Confederate flag, the Anti-Racism, the Anti-Islam or Islamophobia, the Anti-Gay Rights, and whatever other Anti-Villain it can find to blame, except the Anti-Sin focus.   Little is said about the failure of our society to see in early education the dangerous mental conditions developing in many of the children influenced by negative factors in our society and addressing them early, as the faces of failure might be taking shape.

The gap that is being increasingly created by focusing on the externals, while neglecting the internals, is a projection of the fearful face of failure. Masses of students in the public schools are failing because of ineffective families, obsession with violent videos, drug addiction, and the lack of positive purpose that can come especially when the Christian message of new life in Christ is ignored or attacked. But it is better to fail at doing right than to succeed at doing wrong.  But for many their only success is to delight in accomplishing something wrong.  Dylann’s life was shadowed with the fearful face of failure, and his only success was to do something dastardly wrong.

Roof’s birth parents are said to have divorced before he was born and he and his elder sister bounced back and forth between homes in central South Carolina.  Dylann’s connection with his father was in a dysfunctional family in that his step-mother and his father also went through a violent divorce after a physical assault on the step mother. The father had been continually verbally and emotionally abusive to her during their ten year marriage.

But Dylann’s step-mother was very concerned about him, especially as he reportedly withdrew from family and friends in recent years.  Then he dropped out of high school in tenth grade after she left, and he was totally under the guidance of the father, who was most distressed that Dylann would not work, had dropped out of school, and was obsessed with playing violent video games.

School records give some hints of Roof’s chaotic life and show, as he attended seven different schools in five years, a disastrous educational experience. His inner life was much like his middle name, “Storm”.  He failed his first year of White Knoll High School and restarted the year only to leave halfway through for another school. He then transferred out of the second school and finally totally dropped out of school.  On the surface he had seemed to be just an “average kid” who was neither popular nor disliked, and he even had black friends at school and his list of Facebook associates includes many African-American faces, but underneath there was a storm, like his middle name, brewing.

Roof created a website called the Last Rhodesian, a reference to the white-ruled African country, which fought a bitter civil war against black majority rule before it became Zimbabwe. In photos posted to the website, Roof is seen wearing a jacket with the flags of Rhodesia and apartheid-era South Africa on the breast of his jacket.  But while his white supremacist views were in the open – he talked about starting a new civil war and posed with the symbols of apartheid South Africa – no one seemed to have taken him seriously or predicted he would kill. In fact, Roof‘s father gave him a .45 handgun for his 21^st birthday or gave him money to buy it, and I’m sure he would never have thought how the son would use that gun.

The website features a manifesto where Roof wrote he was radicalized via the Internet following the Trayvon Martin case. Roof wrote he researched “black on white violence,” which took him to the website of South Carolina-based hate group the Council of Conservative Citizens (formerly the White Citizens’ Council).  After all the media coverage of the Trayvon Martin and Freddie Gray situations, Roof had begun ranting and saying that black people were “taking over the world.”  Hate devoured his life!

According to one of his cousins, Dylann was enraged and “kind of went over the edge” when a girl he loved spurned him and chose an African-American. (“Dylann Roof Raged When Black Guy Got the Girl,” New York Daily News, by Tobias Salinger, June 22, 2015). Here we can observe another stoke of failure hitting the life of Dylann Roof.  This psychological trauma along with the addiction to drugs and his obsession to violent video games display how this fearful face of failure displayed itself.  If fact, his roommate Dalton Tyler told ABC News that Roof was “planning something like that for six months.”  The cruel act was simmering, waiting to explode!

From research supported by the Psychology Department at the University of Missouri–Columbia, “Violent Video Games Promote Violence,” The Report Card, December 26, 2012 it says:  “Two studies examined violent video game effects on aggression-related variables. Study #1 found that real-life violent video game play was positively related to aggressive behavior and delinquency. The relation was stronger for individuals who are characteristically aggressive and for men. Academic achievement was negatively related to overall amount of time spent playing video games. In Study #2, laboratory exposure to a graphically violent video game increased aggressive thoughts and behavior. In both studies, men had a more hostile view of the world than did women. The results from both studies are consistent with the General Affective Aggression Model, which predicts that exposure to violent video games will increase aggressive behavior in both the short term (e.g., laboratory aggression) and the long term (e.g., delinquency).”  This was evidenced in Dylann’s life!

The issue of the effect of video game violence on young people came into the national spotlight in 2011 when a California law banning the sale of some games to minors was brought before the U.S. Supreme Court. The 2005 California law was never enforced due to legal challenges. California had asked the court to treat violent and sexually explicit video games as apart from First Amendment protections, much like obscenity. The Supreme Court, however, deemed California’s law unconstitutional in 2011. Writing for the court, Justice Antonin Scalia described the bill as “unprecedented and mistaken” and likened the violence in kids’ games to that in commonly read children’s fairy tales.  The slaughter in the Charleston Church was not a fairy tale!

There was the drug use factor.  When Dylann was arrested, it was discovered he had Suboxone on him, which is often used to treat addictions to opiates, and he didn’t have a proper prescription for the drug. Suboxone proves that the antidote can sometimes be just as addictive as the drug it’s trying to wean users from taking. What role Suboxone played on Dylann’s psyche remains to be seen. But although High school classmates described Roof as a quiet person, it was also brought out that, he liked to use prescription drugs, including Xanax. Dylann’s drug use was more than that, since he also had a history including cocaine, LSD and methamphetamine.  So without question drug addiction or at least drug abuse were part of the problem that contributed to Dylann’s sense of failure.

There is that a fearful face of failure. But the glorious good news of the gospel is as Philippians 4:13 says: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” Dylann’s face was stone cold in the photos I’ve seen of him.  His family was in the Lutheran Church, and I understand he was a member of that church.  But it is a sad picture that he missed message in the teaching of Christ which is to “love your neighbor as yourself.” Maybe in the midst of the proper family support and guidance, the obsession with violent video games, his abuse or addiction to drugs, and in his broken romance that in his failures, he was so caught up in it all that he developed a delusion of grandeur, trying to compensate for all of that, so that he could not see he was really just nailing another failure into his stormy life.

It is a sad picture, but the great lesson and beauty of it all is the great forgiveness and reality of the Christian spirit that is shown from the saints at historic Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.  It is a testimony much like that given in Acts 7:54-60, as Stephen was stoned to death and cried in prayer to God, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit…and Lord, lay not this in to their charge.”   The Christian witness, Stephen, was not stoned with drugs as Dylann was, for he looked to Eternal Stone, that Rock of Ages, and so did the saints that died at the Emmanuel AME Church. The fearful face of failure is not the end of the story, but great lesson being taught is that in Jesus Christ–“in all things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.”  (Romans 8:37).

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by Joe Renfro, Ed.D., Educational Columnist, Radio Evangelist, Retired Teacher and Pastor, 5931 West Avenue, Lavonia, Georgia 30553,  706-356-4173, joerenfro@windstream.net

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