As we move away in time from the tragedy at Sandy Hook, I read a lot about what should be done about schools where children are obvious targets for anyone wanting to make them targets. Because children are vulnerable, we want to do something now…after the fact because, we, as a well wishing nation, failed. Without malice intended for anyone, we want to lock the door after the horse has gotten away.
I think more than anything else, sense and sensibility has to govern us here. Knee jerk, I told you so, peace platitudes, and the get tough attitudes just look ridiculous at this point. When you look at the big picture of what happened, you see that the crime was committed out of youth, mental illness and anger.
So how do you stop mental illness and anger? You don’t. So what do you do to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. You can’t.
What happened at Sandy Hook is a byproduct of our culture or what’s left of it, and here’s what I mean:
Look at our entertainment. We listen to one comedian after another who pulls our very foundations apart and we laugh hysterically. Religion, family, marriage, home, children, schools, courts, are all made fun of day after day until we are so numb to it, we have lost a sense of righteous balance. Our television shows are crime, crime, crime, and our sitcoms are poisonous towards the same things the comedians are lambasting. We tune in day after day to hear the metronomic insidiousness of what amounts to hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.
Our music follows suit.
Our heroes follow suit.
At the same time, when the hate manifests itself outside our favorite tech unit, we are all shocked? Really? What should surprise us is that more Sandy Hooks don’t occur.
We are desperate to give our criminals a hundred chances…to what? Play it again, Sam? We can’t stand our poor limited power to understand what justice might be about. We despise punishment of any kind, and we have decided that what we used to call correction and admonition is great as long as we are not called to correct anybody or admonish anyone…ever! That’s because we can’t be honest about crime, offense, or bad behavior, because in the great new scheme of things, it really doesn’t matter…until it kills 26 people…then it matters…for a while.
A great and responsible culture leads…because it’s a great culture’s responsibility. But that doesn’t mean giving over the power to lead to those who say they will do it for us or “buying professionals” to do it. Responsibility begins in every American home with every American. A fully responsible grown up has a duty to care for himself, his family and his community – that’s what it means to be a grown up in America!.
And that means teaching our children the same lessons of responsibility even if it means saying “no” to popular culture of hate, crime, and the love of negative behavior. Even if it means saying “no” to our friends and relatives who indulge in things that continue to crush the culture…even if it means publicly saying “no” when called to do so.
Last week, six hundred and fifty thousand people came from all over the country to march for life in the freezing weather to say “no” to abortion. It was ignored by the news media. This March for Life was not about death, crime, or negative behavior. It was about a particular love for life…and the media response was to ignore it. That says a lot about what we as a nation are willing to accept docilely about the culture. It’s legal to starve the elderly to death in six states, yet the hue and cry about killing animals can not be silenced. It’s OK to kill some but not others…and we can learn who’s a target and who is not from the media. Is that good enough for you?
Can we really stop Sandy Hook from happening again by say, putting guards in our classrooms? Is that the answer? In some places perhaps that’s what it will take. In all places? I doubt it. Are more guns in more people’s hands going to stop anger? Probably not. What we can do is make a concerted effort to remind ourselves of the foundation of goodness most of us were instilled with from very early childhood and promise ourselves that if it’s not going to lead to goodness…then we should probably leave it alone. It means reflecting on what is good and what is not. It’s a simple policy, an easy, grass roots way of taking charge of self. That includes what we allow into our homes on TV, in movies, in music, video games and people who are vulgarians who only want to smite what is left of what we believe.
By letting others, and that includes the media and the government have the final say about our children, our homes, our rights, what we are doing is putting down our responsibilities at the feet of our keepers and returning to a kind of desperate childhood that makes us less human rather than more human.