When I was 11 years old, my mother was the victim of a violent crime. She was shot-in the head-by a mentally ill 16 year old boy. She was working at a convenience store in a small town in central Florida, LaBelle, where my dad (a PTSD-ridden Vietnam Vet) had gotten a job teaching high school history and economics.
In many ways, LaBelle was a small town the way Newtown, Connecticut is a small town-except not nearly as affluent. When I lived there in the early 1980s, there was 1 elementary school, 1 middle school, and 1 high school. At last census, LaBelle had less than 5000 residents, and its claim to fame is the annual “Swamp Cabbage Festival”. I remember how excited we were when we got a Burger King-because there was only one other restaurant in town (White’s). We also had one grocery store, and had to drive to Lehigh acres, 25 miles away, to go to the closest department store-Kmart (but I really loved the smell of all the orange blossoms in the winter on the way there). I spent many, many hours of my young life “exploring in the woods” by myself or with my friends, even as young as 8 years old (we moved there when I was in 3rd grade). I spent many more hours swimming with friends, unattended, in the community pool on the main road outside our subdivision, and within sight of my mother’s convenience store (where, inevitable on summer days, we would go and beg her for candy and soda and play the Pac Man machine). By all accounts, we lived in a safe, small town, where everyone knew everyone.
In 1985, my mom was working her usual long shift when a 16 year old boy entered her store with a pillowcase over his head. He wielded a gun, and demanded the money in the safe and cash register. My mom gave him everything she had access to, but he was nervous and told her to go into the storage room with him. She went, and said there were a few minutes where he seemed like he wasn’t sure what to do. He raised the gun and pointed at her face, about 5 feet between them. She turned her head and braced for the impact of the shot. Because she turned her head he did not deliver a lethal shot in her face. Instead, the bullet embedded in the back of her head, entering through the side, and although some bits of it could not be removed because of their position near her brain, she survived (well, at least until she died from cancer 9 years later).
I remember that day like it was yesterday. I was in 5th grade at LaBelle Elementary School. My Aunt Debbie came to get me out of school-in the middle of lunch. She told me something bad had happened. She told me my mom had been airlifted by helicopter (nearest hospital that could treat her was about an hour away) was at the hospital, and that she had been shot.
If you know me, you know that my mom was my lifeline in my weird, emotionally detached family (with even weirder family dynamics). I had started attending Baptist Church with a friend at age 6 when we lived in Clearwater, FL, and when we moved to LaBelle, I quickly started going, alone, to Grace Baptist Church, which was a short 5-10 minute walk from our house. I needed the security and sense of belonging available to me there. I did Vacation Bible School every summer we lived there, and spent three hours every Sunday there. I got saved one Sunday (it was one of the most powerful emotional moments of my life-even now) without any (biological) family present-at the ripe old age of 8. I was baptized in water, surrounded by my new church family (but not my biological one) one Sunday. When the minister went to dunk me under he put his hand over my nose and, always the avid swimmer and control freak, I said “I can do it”, and he whispered kindly, “I’m supposed to do it!” (and winked at me). After the baptism, I was convinced my parents had to get saved…no easy feat for me to accomplish in my family, but as always, I rose to the occassion. I couldn’t stop worrying about the salvation of their souls-uncharacteristically I cried and begged and pleaded until they got saved (which they definitely did to shut me up). It didn’t occur to me that we were unusual-I never noticed how we never hugged or kissed each other, or how we never said “I Love You” in my family; my evening visits with my mom, when she tucked me in and we talked about our day and life (until I moved out at age 18), were sacred to me. They were our only tender, loving alone moments…having her in my life was what saved me-I am convinced of that.
When she was shot I was devastated. Just the year prior I had watched my beloved grandfather (my very best friend), who I spent every waking second I could with and who lived just a quick bike ride away, die of bladder cancer at home. At 11, I had seen just about enough of death and the ugliness of the world (I was also abused as a young child) to make me renounce God. And so I did-bitterness and disillusionment turned me from the church instead of drawing me into it. Never fear-that didn’t last too long-I found my spiritual heart three years later when I discovered the Tao Te Ching and the poetry of Rumi in a new age book store when we moved from LaBelle. Ever since I have found solace in eastern philosophy and eventually joined the Catholic Church, and my family and I are happy members of the amazing charitable, compassionate, and tolerant community of St. Gertrude.
So, I know from the vantage point of a child what it is to worry that a parent would die from a gunshot wound. Luckily for me she didn’t. But I don’t know, as a parent, how to reconcile the death of a child from a violent crime. I cannot stop watching the news, and weeping over the photos of those children in Newtown. I can’t stop thinking about my oldest child and that she is the exact age of those children murdered. I keep asking myself “how do you keep going when your child is lost?“ I can’t stop thinking of the mentally ill boy who did this and the mother who tried to protect him by keeping him home after a short stint in high school, who undoubtedly loved him too. The entire situation weighs on me, as it does on every person I have communicated with about it. It defines tragedy.
Our system is broken, our families fragmented. We don’t know each other anymore, except through the internet and video games where we can kill people who are so well animated they look real, without batting an eyelash. Television regularly shows violent images and glorifies the savvy and violence of criminals, and I think most people have no idea their kids are watching it, or maybe how much it affects them when they watch it. Many parents are so busy working long days and disconnected they either don’t see the warning signs or chalk up emotional distance to adolescence. And even the ones who desperately try to get help, who know their child could turn on a dime, get absolutely zero mental health support because our country’s infrastructure for mental health SUCKS.
So, what’s the answer? I’m on the wagon with banning assault rifles or semi-automatic firearms. They have absolutely no place in society. Their only purpose, as far as I can tell, are to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible. This conversation is way bigger than gun laws, though. It’s about where we are going as a global community. It’s about mental illness in combination with mass isolation and the convenient, false sense of humanity that comes with our technology. I mean, we are all too bothered with the effort of making a phone call that we often defer to texting these days-even voice to voice communication is often too much effort in our packed daily existence.
These kinds of tragedies were exceedingly rare before 1982, even with looser gun laws and less protected schools-but has happened 62 times since. The status of metal health services and the stigma around mental illness seems to be generally equally as inefficient before and after this period. One site succinctly notes, “The history of mental health services in the United States is one of good intentions followed by poor execution; of promises to deliver better services for less cost; and of periodic revolutionary change with neither the evidence to support the new programs or the financial investment to see if the new approach could be effective if carried out adequately.” What has changed, though, is the infiltration of pervasive violence into American culture, and a growing detachment from our interconnected lives.
Most places don’t have a “community-raising-families” mentality anymore, where everyone is looking out for each other and the children of friends and neighbors. Mentally ill people can hide inside their homes and neglect their children, almost to death, while they play violent video games or role playing games online; or they can communicate with and get egged on by violent groups on various web sites. People, children, can learn how to make bombs, how to plan strategic assaults, and research the best assault weapons 24 hours a day-from the comfort of their own bedrooms. Then they can go watch zombies graphically get their heads cut off or bashed in with rocks and hammers or clever criminals execute mass murder or violent crimes on television, or watch slick, well-produced movies that glorify hit men, car thieves, or other criminals who murder, blow things up, get shot, and unrealistically survive to live another day. And children and innocent people are murdered every day in acts of violence...and we sit in our false coccoon of safety, and may or may not give a passing thought to "those poor people".
Somehow it locks our attention when we relate, so intimately, with a scenario like Newtown. For me, it's that I have a six year old daughter-the same age as those who perished. For others it's that they are teachers, or are married to teachers. Or maybe it's because we are parents, and the horror of this feels like it's our own nightmare played out in real life. Somehow watching the suffering of others throughout the world doesn't feel so real to us when we see it on TV, or get mailings from international humanitarian organizations asking for help. Some people find the suffering of others (on a fundamental level, like human rights, hunger, disease) much more real, like my friend Roxanne, who spent years among people who die from not getting $3 worth of medicine for simple infections. For her and her family, who lived, worked, and prayed among the suffering, the sorrows of the world are a lot more real than those of us who have never stepped outside a relatively benign middle-class american life. I had the opportunity to talk to her about the shooting, and we discussed how ugliness has a place in this world, just as beauty does. We both explained what happened to our children so we could be the ones to answer their questions and tell the story. Some places, violence, disease, hunger, and suffering are basic realities of every day. We have these problems here too, but not on the massive scale as third world countries.
Somehow it locks our attention when we relate, so intimately, with a scenario like Newtown. For me, it's that I have a six year old daughter-the same age as those who perished. For others it's that they are teachers, or are married to teachers. Or maybe it's because we are parents, and the horror of this feels like it's our own nightmare played out in real life. Somehow watching the suffering of others throughout the world doesn't feel so real to us when we see it on TV, or get mailings from international humanitarian organizations asking for help. Some people find the suffering of others (on a fundamental level, like human rights, hunger, disease) much more real, like my friend Roxanne, who spent years among people who die from not getting $3 worth of medicine for simple infections. For her and her family, who lived, worked, and prayed among the suffering, the sorrows of the world are a lot more real than those of us who have never stepped outside a relatively benign middle-class american life. I had the opportunity to talk to her about the shooting, and we discussed how ugliness has a place in this world, just as beauty does. We both explained what happened to our children so we could be the ones to answer their questions and tell the story. Some places, violence, disease, hunger, and suffering are basic realities of every day. We have these problems here too, but not on the massive scale as third world countries.
Inexplicably, every time a mass shooting happens, we walk around wondering “how could this happen?” I just told you how it’s happening. So, now we can’t claim ignorance-now we are negligent, RESPONSIBLE, if we continue as we were. WE are creating this culture of violence by doing nothing, accepting these events as "the way things are now", and hoping that somehow things will get better without having to do anything to make it better. If we don’t wake up, more innocent babies, their selfless teachers, or people going about their business at malls and movie theaters will be murdered en masse by people just like this school shooter. If we don’t start trusting our gut that someone isn’t quite right and keep assuming someone else will report a person who appears unstable, or if we do report them and that person isn’t actively taken in to the mental health system for treatment-then we are responsible for what comes next.
Assault weapons should be taken out of the hands of American citizens, and a healthcare infrastructure should be created that supports mentally ill adults, children, and parents who know full well their children are capable of doing the worst we can imagine. And for those of us that fill in the spaces in between-we should turn off our computers, put our cell phones away, and pay attention to the people we are accountable to. We should know who they are-what their hopes and dreams are, what they are afraid of, who and what they love, what they are watching, writing, and doing... We should conversations-real ones-with friends and neighbors. We should know and look out for the people around us-and the kids around us. We should be aware. We should be kind, and cultivate the compassion that comes with personal relationships with others-and teach our children that. That is how they come to value individuals. To value life.
