Newtown, CT and the American Tradition of School Shootings

Christmas may have provided a break in the mourning for some in Newtown, CT.  That’s good.  Too much mourning is not a good thing.

But the first thing that bothered me about the Reuters article was their description of Newtown as “mostly Christian.”  I am not a terribly ardent Zionist, but I will admit I was proud of the Israeli response to the tragedy.

My heart goes out to those of any other minority religions, for I do not know who or how they are, or if their international communities have reached out to them in any way.  America is neither Christian nor homogeneous.  Failure to live up to the “freedom of worship” part of the Franklin D. Roosevelt and Normal Rockwell Four Freedoms is just another way we have failed, as a nation, to live up to expectations.

My heart goes out to anyone who has not felt support from the religious

community that is relevant and helpful to them.  Anyone who has felt prosecuted or excluded for not being Christian.  The non-Christian parents who have lost a child do not cry less nor hurt less.  I hope that nothing is going on to make them hurt more.  I hope they find the peace they seek, and that their beliefs help.  America is far too sectarian.  I see no ecumenism in this place, which I strongly suspect is the most religious country in the world.  I would hope that if there is one way this thing can be positive, it would be a pulling together of souls that supersedes religious sectarianism.  I hope this is happening.  I have no way of knowing if it is.

Let’s return to the idea of school shootings and mourning.

Although we tend to want to think of them as isolated tragedies, school shootings are now an American tradition, whether we like it or not.

It is meaningless to look at the individual shooter psychologically because this is a social phenomenon.  One that is devastating, although thankfully not frequent.  An attempted analysis written by a — Jewish surnamed — Harvard academic psychiatrist takes the academic point of view.  It is detached and thus ultimately, namby-pamby.

It is true that if you review the classical psychiatric literature, like this author clearly has, you can learn that school shooters are adolescent males who tend to isolate themselves and be withdrawn and possibly to have been bullied.  At least the author has recognized that this description fits most adolescent males, the overwhelming majority of whom will never do anything anywhere near as horrific as a school shooting.

Helping adolescent males feel as if they belong seems like a tough proposition at best.  I avoided adolescent males as best I could during my psychiatric training because I knew they needed “limit setting.”  This was simply not part of my life or world, let alone my skill set.  Some kind of building of the superego, some kind of ideals to live up to that are abstract, yet internalized.

When I put it that way, it seems so impossible it is a wonder anyone accomplishes it at all.  Maybe few do.  Maybe this accounts, at least some, for how peer values overrun ideals enough to get adolescents started on felonious careers.

One of the paradoxes here is that the mourning for the kind of tragedy we are talking about may pull a community together.  Maybe, somebody who lives through the community mourning process is less likely to replicate it – even as an adolescent male.  I mean, my cursory review suggests that these things don’t happen one on top of another in the same place.

The above is, of course, rotten research.  Nobody wants more data, certainly not me.  I will absolutely not link to places that suggest ways people can
“help,” for these never seem to be more than variations on a very simple theme about places where you can send money.  I suspect some parents are facing surprise burial expenses, but anything else is born of the great American materialist distortion – namely, that money fixes things.  At best, here, it might assuage some kind of bad feelings, like a parental equivalent of survivor guilt, a feeling of “I still got my kids.”  It is okay to hug them tighter, but I wonder about the “let’s send money” impulse.  I have grown cynical enough to wonder
about “middle” people and how much money they get.

I have never quite left behind the look on the face of my dear Father-of-Blessed-Memory who played organ free — or for the most minimal of token benefits — for charitable causes, only to learn others took some sort of “cut,” and laughed at the organist.

The best overview of the adolescent boy problem comes not from an academic, but from a woman columnist.  She has got to be spending every waking hour of her spare time studying developmental neurology.

There are no easy answers.  In fact, there are no answers.  Adolescent males tend to be rebellious and scary in groups; but our worries here are precisely those who isolate.  I have no recipe book to make them part of heterogeneous groups.  Only a vague memory of a very clever book that a very clever preceptor told me many moons ago was all I — or anybody — really needed to know to “get” child psychology.  I don’t remember it well enough to even give a reference.  The idea was that misbehavior was on the rise because children were being told to get out of the way and their contributions given no importance.  Conversely, in pioneer days, even a kid who held a piece of wood while dad nailed something was “useful.”

I do not know how to apply this.  Maybe the mother of some socially noteworthy male does — someone who is neither an ideologue nor an academic.  Oh, it may be useful to see a study on if and how mothering techniques overwhelm vague genetic tendencies that affect tremendous amounts of adolescent males.

Mothering and fathering continue to be above research and reality.  I have not seen much good stuff.  I have seen a lot of bad moves that have made me wish a license were required for parenting, too often the result of a thoughtless impulsive act.  This situation is almost as horrible as the fact that parents may feel guilty about things genetic or environmental over which they have no control whatsoever.

Giving birth is a social responsibility I declined long ago.  I have actually had people tell me I made a terrible mistake by thinking too much about it.

I stumbled upon an editorial that says don’t hate the parents of the shooter because they died, too.

The world seems to have trouble understanding the complexity of life.  It is full of phrases like “dumbing down” and dominating commentaries — including mine — about newsfeeds.  Prayer and other indirect evocations of the deity are easy because you say it is done and it is done, with an assumed total soul investment.

Learn, America.  Take responsibility for the collective actions of your communities.  Learn about your communities.  Visit alien places of worship; in groups is good.  My husband always tells how his white bread and mayonnaise church visited a local black one in rural Kansas, learning the latter had more
expressive music.

Make every person feel like part of the human race, let alone the family.  Every father should get up off his bottom and put aside for a moment the computer and tell the got-vampire entity who is his adolescent son that he once, too, felt alienated.  Maybe it was for wearing his hair too long or something equally trivial.  Try.  The school shooting you prevent may be in your own home town.

Just be human.

I suppose you can work out your relationship with God privately, and in your own time.

Merry Christmas.

Happy New Year.

Happy life on earth.