Well, It Has Happened Again

I remember standing under the covered drive at Southwest Memorial Hospital waiting for the rain to let up so I could walk to my car. As I stood there I was speaking with fellow chaplain Bill Nash about the crazy drivers up on highway 59 and how I was a little apprehensive about getting out there with them. Bill looked at me and said, “yea, that scary alright. But, you know what scares me more?” Me, “What?” He then said, “What scares me is having spent all day working in the Psychiatric Ward (he and I both worked there) with the mentally ill I get off work, come down here and see those same people running loose.” I replied, “I agree and they’re driving those cars on that highway I have to get on in a few minutes.” All he said then was, “Yep” as we stepped out from under the portico to head to separate parking areas.

Folks we need to get serious about the mental health of our people and I offer the following as something to consider.

Well, it has happened again.  A eighteen year old former student entered his school armed with an AR-15 semi-automatic weapon shot and killed 17 people and wounded a number of others. He ultimately surrendered to the police without any resistance at all. It was almost as if he were saying, “Well, you finally noticed me.”

Immediately the champion’s of the Second Amendment begin saying, “Guns do not kill people; people kill people.” And they are absolutely correct. People died not because an AR-15 decided to run on down to the local school and start going off.  Truth is people died that day because a person in his twisted mind decided for reasons we may never be able to understand got up one day and decided to kill them.

On the other hand, the Gun Control faction begins to cry out that we need to control more strictly the availability of guns. If it hadn’t been so easy to get his hands on a AR-15 not so many people would have died that day. That is probably true as well.

It is this very argument that is keeping us from discovering the causes of these kinds of events and until we know the causes we cannot apply any cure let alone the specific cure. Now I do not expect anyone to listen to what I am about to say because it reeks of common sense and you and I do not want to accept our culpability for being where we are as a society.

I am old enough to have a first hand experiential view of the process that brought us to where we are on this issue and for that matter a lot of other issues. Back when I was 19 years old and even younger you rarely heard of a mass slaying and when you did it was rarely committed by persons under the age of 20.  Oh, to be sure we have had them. I have not forgotten about Dean Corll & Elmer Wayne Henley or Jeffrey Dahmer. But these were the exception not the rule and differed from these shooting sprees in significant and profound ways.

So how did we get here? I begin by saying that I lay virtually all of this “modern trend” of mass

killings on the general deterioration of our society. When I was a child we held up a largely idealized standard of what the family unit was to be. We had Ozzie and Harriet, Leave it to Beaver, Father knows Best, My Three Sons and even Dennis the Menace.

I know, I know . . . . they weren’t the reality. But that is the whole point they weren’t the reality they were the ideal. They were the goal we sought for our own families.  We weren’t deluded . . . . we knew our families were flawed. But they provided a modicum of social structure that made it possible for us to adjust to society in general.

At the same time the erosion of the American family is part of the problem. It is not the totality of the problem but it is a part. You see it was in the family unit, even when it was functioning poorly, where we learned much of our early socialization. We learned about authority and it’s role in our lives; we learned about responsibility as we discovered our place within the family; we learned about give and take, caring and sharing, helping and supporting each other; self-discipline had a chance to develop and as we matured decision making skills were added within that microcosm of society . . . . the family unit.

All of those individual microcosm interacting with each other formed a society where everyone knew their roll and how to basically coexist in a peaceful way. That interacting of families formed communities and those communities formed a nation so that wherever you found yourself you were able to “fit in.” Some places might have been strange to us but in most cases we knew how to adapt. We also know that within our society, just as in some families there were elements that just refused to integrate and in some case reintegrate.

Then we entered the “New Age.”  The age of “latch Key” children and absentee parents. This marked the takeover of family responsibility by the schools and government. As poorly as families may have functioned they did a far better job of socialization than do the schools and government.

This degeneration continued until in our day we have large segments of society who don’t even know what gender they are.  What I am saying is that the first stage of our trip to a degraded society was the deviation from the nuclear family and its traditional roll of families in our society.  There is something to be said about families being at home together and eating around a common table.  Society is only as good and strong as its individual families because the family provides a learning sphere where basic morality, responsibility, self-discipline etc. can be  modeled and learned.

In my mind the second issue is the over use of drugs to control behavior. Because the home has been neutered by our society our children have been placed under intense pressure. A few children grow being kept by a loving grandparent or other family member but most are growing up in what I call “baby camps” (day care).

My point is our children are institutional babies. They spend their whole life under the influence of people who may be kind and caring but cannot provide the nurturing environment need to develop balanced children. Instead, it develops regimented lives that are designed to fit the demands of the particular institution in which they are raised. Then come along that 1% who don’t fit the regimen, they are a little different, they are socially awkward.

These children spend a lot of time being disciplined for their behavior and acting out. Soon they are put on the alphabet soup syndrome. They get diagnosed and prescribed some sort of behavior modifying drug such as Ritalin. Then a teacher and the school counselor recommends they see a doctor as they seem to be showing signs of some kind of anti-social deviation or have become uncontrollably disruptive.

I am convinced that the excessive use of psychotropic drugs to control children's behavior whose full impact we do not understand may be playing a roll in the way things go around inside of the child who is taking them. Are their children who need them . . . .absolutely!

But among children 0-17 years we have 8,389,034 kids on psychiatric drugs and 1,080,168 are five years and under. We have 4,404,360 kids on ADHD Drugs and 188,899 of these are five years old and under.  We have 165,279 kids on antidepressants and 110,516 are five and under. We 830,836 kids on antipsychotics and 27,343 are five and younger, and 2,132,625 kids on anti-anxiety of which 727,304 are under five. That’s a lot of kids taking some sort of mind altering medication.  I don’t remember a handful of kids when I was growing up who ever took anything stronger than aspirin and an occasional antibiotic.

My point here is that we know that Ritalin alone has the following “negative effects:”  nervousness, agitation, anxiety, sleep problems (insomnia), stomach pain, loss of appetite, weight loss, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, palpitations, headache, vision problems, increased heart rate, increased blood pressure, sweating, skin rash, psychosis, and numbness, tingling, or cold feeling in your hands or feet. All th other drugs given to our children have their own set of negative effects as well. Truth is, we have no real understanding of what these drugs do in a child’s developing brain.

Another ingredient in our social pie that is at crises stage is a lack of real social interaction and “real” personal  friends.  They don’t get it at home, they get little at school, and they get none through social media. I recently heard a group of about 40 or so 15-17 year olds be asked to raise their hand if they had anyone in their life that they would call their “best friend.” Not a single hand went up. Social media is taking the place of socialization. No best friends, no group with which to hang, . . . . just a phone, wifi, and Facebook.  In real life when a friend dies we weep on Facebook we just “unfriend them.”  Social media is fun but unless you have some level of self-discipline and at least a few of people whose real presence you prefer over their electronic identity you will find yourself alone and maybe very lonely.

Finally, we live in an age when rage is everywhere. Again social media has become the place where we vent our frustrations and anger with others and their views. Violence and vitriolic language shows up on everyone’s time lines. Add to this the impact of computer games of the worst kind where the dead don't stay dead; and the failure to develop skills in our enforcement authorities to recognize mental health "red flags" and our mental health industries incompetence with it comes to treatment.

Now take this mixture and throw in the lunacy of not insisting on fire arm specific training; age/maturity appropriate weapons. A15 year old shouldn't be able to buy any kind of fire arm and if one is bought for them either they are their dad must take the safety course for that weapon. Some how we need to remind the NRA that individual minutemen never owned any cannons. Those Minutemen sure would have made short work of the British if they'd only had a few AR-15's.

Something must be done about availability and I believe if we really try we can solve the conflict between the second amendment and the proliferation of military styled weapons. Personally though, I think that cat is already out of the bag. With over 300 million registered firearms I'm sure a big old chunk of that number is made up of AR-15's.

My friend Bill, remember Bill, I mentioned him in the beginning of this missive, well, Bill was good
at spotting what officials call "red flags" and insisted it could be learned and was teachable. He and I often discussed this and could never agree or even come up with method that didn't open the door to the loss of everyone's valued civil liberties or unnecessarily inhibiting suspected people who prove to be fine or responded well to therapy from future discrimination because we have required them to go through some sort of psychological evaluation.

Will we solve the problem this time? Not likely. It is too far embedded in the fabric of our culture and our national conversation is dominated by voices on the extremes. I am afraid we have already gone too far down this road. The toothpaste is out of the tube and I fear there is no putting it back without great patience, effort, pain and some loss. Emotions blind us to reason and sacred cows prevent us from separating our fiction from the facts. In short, we really deep down don't want to make the significant social and personal moral changes required bring peace to a nation divided six ways to Sunday.

Personally, I suspect short of a Divine intervention things will only progressively get worse. I think a really good dose of the Old Time Christian Gospel which is able to create a new kind of person out of the person we are and do it without drugs of any kind. I just don't think our present society is apt to be up for that given its present attitude toward Christianity.  As Lincoln proclaimed a new birth of freedom I wish I could declare a new birth of morality and ethics. But alas I must yield to Scripture and acknowledge that only God can make that new society and thereby bring peace. There will be no Utopia until "we all get to heaven" but until then perhaps we can be a little kinder, a lot more watchful and start extending a hand to our brother who is weaker.

αὑτ  εἰς ἕνα καινὸν ἄνθρωπον ποι ν εἰρήνην