Fort Hood

I have been contemplating whether or not I wanted to blog on the Fort Hood incident. Mainly because it is a very controversial issue, but as you can see I have decided to go through with it. This incident is not only so very complicated and controversial it also holds a place in nearly every single topic we have discussed in our social psychology class. We have the self, prejudice, stereotypes, religion, in and out groups, on and on right down to aggression.
So here we have a Major in the United States Army, who is a psychiatrist, that helps solders work through their personal issues concerning the war, who happens to be a Muslim, that shoots at, wounds, and murders multiple American soldiers that are preparing to be shipped off to the war. The big question here is why? Or maybe the big question is how does this happen? Was this man just sick of his job and could not handle the stress he faced on a daily basis and just snapped? This seems kind of a ironic since he was a psychiatrist. You would think that a man with that kind of knowledge would have the intelligence to seek outside counseling before it went this far. Was he a victim of prejudice and stereotyping? This is possible, there is a lot of hostility toward the Muslims within our country, but he was a Major, that holds some degree of authority in the military. Can you really bully around an authoritative figure? Was he working with the enemy and this was an act of terrorism? Now this would be a nightmare for the United States Army, how could that even make sense or be possible? Or this could be complete stereotyping by our society and the media is just printing what will make them their top dollar. Could this be an evolutionary situation? Maybe this man was happy to serve in the military, and he did fine work, but the more his job pressed on to fight against his own people it became one or the other. How can he help eliminate his primary choice of reproduction? Imagine being one of the very few white person(s) in a military, working with a strong couple of majority races and killing nothing but white people? Eventually you might face a question of who are you? Where do you belong? This could lead to a serious psychotic snap.
There are so many factors in this sad situation that could lead you into so many directions and we may possibly never really know what this was all about or how it came to be. Or we could learn a thousand things from this tragedy. There will be people studying this for years and years to come. Look at how these actions will impact the way Americans will see Muslims. In one of the blogs I read, (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/science-small-talk/200911/fort-hood-fallout) by Dr. Sam Sommers Ph.d, a social psychologist, he talks about illusory correlation. The tendency to overestimate the associations between groups and the actions that are distinctive. Basically, he is saying that now people associate every Muslim as being a killer. Proposing that this act has awakened the fears that have settled since 9/11. The article also quotes the New York Times " When a white guy shoots up the post office, they call it postal, but when a Muslim does it, they call it jihad"
Anyway you look at this situation psychologists and sociologists have their work cut out for them.