Working Through the Madness

I am hurting. Deep hurt. Deep worry. Yet, I walk around and pick up toys, I kiss boo boos, I make meals, I laugh at jokes, and I stare in agony at my children while I love them with every ounce of my being. Oddly, I am feeling more impatient with them than I should be. I want them to quiet down, sit still, and just let me look at them and let me think about what I need to do next. My impulse it to find a quiet cave somewhere, take my children inside and never come out; Take them deep within the earth and shower them with love and knowledge and only reemerge when they are grown men, kind, compassionate, sensitive, and wickedly smart, ready to change the world.

I know I can’t do that. I do know. I know that someday they must know about the world they live in, but it can’t be today. Today I cannot tell my 5 year old son that bad guys really do exist and that we cannot always keep our children safe from them. When I went out with the boys today I kept looking into the faces of the people I passed. I mostly got smiles and nods and warm responses and it wasn’t until I had been doing it for several minutes that I realized I was doing it. When I became conscious of it I also realized that I was telling myself over and over again, “There are good people in the world. There are kind people in the world.” I wasn’t scared to be out, I don’t think that was it; I didn’t expect everyone I passed to be a gunman, I didn’t expect the store to suddenly become a crime scene. I realize now that what was scaring me the most was that my babies are growing up in a world that I cannot control. There are bad people who do bad things and I want to know why. I want to know how these young men, men who had their entire lives in front of them, could commit such horrendous acts. What could have possibly happened to these boys that made them into murderers? How could a 20 year old boy look into the face of 20 children and shoot them point blank? I cannot even begin to imagine how it is possible.

I am so much more afraid of my sons becoming men like that than I am of them being gunned down. Our culture is violent. Our media is violent. Our sons and daughters, but mostly our sons, are playing video games where the goal is to kill as many human beings as possible in the shortest amount of time. They are playing games where murder is glorified. They are watching, with the help of our cutting edge technology, the blood they spill cover the screen and they are laughing, cheering, and congratulating one another. Parents are buying these games for their sons; they are looking the other way while their sons spend all of their waking hours in front of these games. Yet we all ask why. Why would a young man do something so horrific? What could possibly have led him to these actions? What, indeed.

These young men were clearly ill. I am sure that there is much more to their story than video game violence and lack of gun control. I know that of the millions of boys out there playing violent video games, few if any will ever commit such atrocious acts upon real human beings. Yet the world we live in has changed. The culture we have allowed to dominate our country is creating men that are doing horrible, unspeakable things. We can’t pretend not to notice the alarming frequency with which we are being devastated by mass shootings that we tell ourselves are inexplicable. There have always been mentally ill people. There have been guns for more than a thousand years, but this kind of violence is new, this is different.

I found a timeline of mass shootings since Columbine in 1999 (http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/12/14/1337221/a-timeline-of-mass-shootings-in-the-us-since-columbine/?mobile=nc) Eight of the shootings have been in the past year. There were a total of 328 deaths, not including the gunmen, and 242 injured. In this particular timeline, sixteen of the thirty gunmen were between the ages of 18 and 32. Ten of those sixteen were between the ages of 18 and 22. The article quotes that “The rate of people killed by guns in the US is 19.5 times higher than similar high-income countries in the world. In the last 30 years since 1982, America has mourned at least 61 mass murders” (http://thinkprogress.org). Here’s another timeline on motherjones.com identifying 61 mass murders since 1982: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map?page=2 and a map of the shootings with details for each: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map. Another source shows that there have been 16 mass shootings since January 1, 2012, defining mass shootings as “multi-victim shootings where those killed were chosen indiscriminately. The tragedies took place at perfectly random places—at churches, movie theatres, soccer tournaments, spas, courthouses and, now, an elementary school”, leaving at least 88 people dead (http://www.thenation.com/blog/171774/fifteen-us-mass-shootings-happened-2012-84-dead#). That is just in the last year. 16 shootings and 88 people dead in the year my oldest son turned 5, the year my youngest sons turned 2.

I don’t have the answers. I only know that I want my sons to know the value of a life. I want to give my boys a foundation that helps them to navigate this crazy world with grace and goodness. And, I am scared to death of the things that boys are doing to entertain themselves in their most formative years. I have often talked about walking a line that allows balance in our parenting, picking our battles, and fighting for the things that are most important, but this battle seems too important. Walking a line on this one is far too precarious. I need to stand firmly on one side of that line and defend against the other side as if my life and my children’s lives depend on it. And I will. I will fight for them and for all of the children. I will fight for the men we are producing, the next generation of leaders, the next generation of fathers. I can only hope that we will all fight for our children and for their future.