I've stared at the blinking cursor trying to decide if I wanted to write about the tragedy that took place in Newtown, Connecticut yesterday. And I am left with emptiness. What can I say? I am devastated and heartbroken over the senseless loss of life that took place early yesterday. 20 children, most of them kindergarteners, lost their lives. and another handful of adults who were tasked with protecting them.Not to mention the family of the gunman: His mother. His father. His brother.
And the gunman himself.
Yesterday, too many lives were lost. And thinking about the senseless act, it makes me heartsick.
So now, I write. And my readers (if there are even readers in the first place), will probably question what place this post has in a blog about prejudice and discrimination? And at first I didn't see a link, I was just compelled to write. To share my thoughts. And to think through my fingertips.
And then it came to me. This has everything to do with prejudice and discrimination. Prejudice and discrimination begin with the simple act of labeling. We all label things as we see them, it makes it easier for our pattern-oriented brains to understand the world around us. The problem is when we create labels and classify things but fail to see beyond the labels and classifications that we have applied.
In the next few days (and even right now, less than 24 hours since the shooting), we will hear people try to apply all sorts of labels to the gunman who stormed into Shady Brook Elementary School. People will label him as sick. People will label him as a psycho. People will label him as a murderer. People will label him as all sorts of things. In this post I have even contributed to this labeling problem by calling him the "gunman," instead of by using his name. And right now, while all of those labels appear to be true and appropriate, we cannot forget that they are labels that make it convenient to forget to be compassionate toward one another.
I am not suggesting that these labels aren't appropriate. And I am not saying that we are wrong in using them. I want to use all of those words, plus a bunch of foul four letter words that slither off my tongue and maybe even create some new combinations that might make my mother blush. This man committed an atrocious crime, doesn't he deserve all of the horrible names that people would sling toward his memory?
Part of me says yes. And another part of me says no. The emotional part of me screams YES! The rational, academic says hold on a sec...
The gunman, or rather, the "gunboy" (because he wasn't even old enough to legally drink yet and was in those awkward years between teenager and adult when you aren't quite a child and not quite a man), was more than just a combination of labels that describe the acts that he committed in New Jersey and Connecticut. And we would be doing ourselves a great disservice to forget that in our rush to blame and shame. I don't know all of the particulars, but I feel pretty safe in assuming that he was a loved baby, that as an teen someone truly loved him, and he was probably capable of tenderness and love in at least one area of his life. He had hobbies. He had passions. He probably had about a million friends on facebook, and a dozen friends he saw regularly. He was more than just a gunboy. He, too, was someone's child.
In the next few days people are going to come out of the woodwork claiming that he was mentally ill, or that he was psychotic, or a sociopath. And while these labels are all fine and dandy, what do they really accomplish? They don't undo the loss of life. They don't protect lives in the future. They don't keep this kind of crap from happening again in another sleepy, unsuspecting community. These labels serve to placate US. Those who sit on the sidelines with no real stake in the game. The families will be left to grieve and mourn on their own, while the labels only serve to comfort US.
If we don't get past these labels, we cannot get to the root of the problem. OK, so he might have been sick. Short of institutionalizing everyone who is mentally ill (which I would never advocate for as our history has already proven this to be quite problematic), what could we have done to prevent this from happening? This is not just the issue of one gunboy going into a school and killing a bunch of children. This has been an ongoing issue that has been increasing in frequency for decades. Something is wrong in our culture that is allowing it to happen. So what is wrong?
Some are going to say it is guns, actually a lot of people are going to say it is a gun problem. They'll say we need more. They'll say we need less. They'll say a million things. But again, that is the easy label. We look for blame. We want to make it easy to understand. Because if we focus on the guns themselves, we don't have to look in the mirror and consider how we contribute (either knowingly or unknowingly) to the problem ourselves.
Yesterday, we were all members of the Newtown community. Yesterday, we were all part of the problem. Today, lets all be part of the solution. We each have a responsibility. It is time to say enough lives have been lost. It is time to look in the mirror and ask the tough questions.
What can I do to help solve this problem?
Enough is enough.
