Monday, October 5, 2015

Begetting Monsters

C.S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory said that we never pass an ordinary person on the street; everyone we meet is in the process of becoming either a saint of indescribable beauty or a monster of unimaginable horror. The monsters are winning. 

The horror last week at Umpqua Community College in Oregon was the latest in a string of school-shooting horrors, although this one had the added twist of singling out Christians for execution. As survivors pick up the pieces the volleys have started in the media about doing something to prevent this from happening again. Unfortunately, there is no magic wand to wave that is going to change this in the near future. We do need to focus more clearly, however, than most seem to be doing at the moment if we are ever going to begin turning this terrible problem around.

First, for the short term, while I understand the revulsion against guns, it is important to recognize that both guards at our airports and the Secret Service guarding the President have them and for a reason - they are there to stop people intent on doing harm. Period. Children are indeed priceless so shouldn't we at least afford them the same level of protection? If any person coming to a school, student or otherwise, had to go through an airport-type screening with emptied pockets, backpacks, etc., and then through a magnetic scanner, with armed guard backup, I suspect that the incidence of these tragedies would rapidly decrease. It has in Israel where they have to contend not with psycho loners acting out, but trained terrorists.

A standard objection to such an approach is cost. Well, then I guess children aren't really priceless, as we so glibly claim. Then there's "privacy." Really? Would you rather continue having a long line of dead and maimed students or a momentary inconvenience? We do not live in a perfect world and while school should not be like this ( and wasn't when I grew up), we have unfortunately arrived at a place where being Daydream Believers will not change what is.

In the longer term, there are two problems that need to be effectively tackled: mental health treatment and fatherless sons. 

The Roseburg shooter had already flunked out of the Army and been refused participation in a tactical weapons school because he was "too weird." All of this might have raised some red flags. In the case of the Sandy Hook shooter, his mother pleaded for mental health treatment from the state and got nowhere. An example that is closer to home - a friend taught in the early primary grades and had a first grader who was already effectively out of control and violent and said so. First grade. This kid already needs serious help but what he will probably get is band-aids, if that, and he is a potential Roseburg or Sandy Hook shooter in the making. We as a society must absolutely become better at identifying and effectively treating sociopathic children.

Which brings us to the second factor - fatherless sons. Dr. Thomas Williams, a research fellow at Notre Dame, has an excellent article on this phenomena in Breitbart as something that the President and most others have missed:

"As University of Virginia Professor Brad Wilcox pointed out in 2013: 'From shootings at MIT (i.e., the Tsarnaev brothers) to the University of Central Florida to the Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy in Decatur, Ga., nearly every shooting over the last year in Wikipedia’s ‘list of U.S. school attacks’ involved a young man whose parents divorced or never married in the first place.'

Wilcox has noted the overwhelming social scientific evidence connecting violence and broken homes, which suggests that boys living in single mother homes are almost twice as likely to end up delinquent compared to boys who enjoy good relationships with their father.

Another researcher, Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson, has written that 'family structure is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, predictor of variations in urban violence across cities in the United States
.' ”

www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/10/03/barack-obama-ignores-obvious-yet-another-fatherless-killer/


The sad truth of the matter is that in American society today, children are disposable if they interfere with one's personal "happiness." This is manifested in unrestricted abortion, parting babies out for a price, divorce, neglect, abuse, etc. etc., etc. We should not be surprised that young men in particular, as they enter the testosterone-filled years of the teens and twenties, react with an inchoate rage and desperately reach out for ways to seek meaning to their empty lives. In over-broad terms, young white men seem to withdraw into a fantasy world of violent video games which some of them act out at a later date. Young blacks seek a tribal identity in a gang and shoot those in other tribes or innocents to prove their "manhood." This is not to demean single mothers, many of whom do the very best they can under exceptionally difficult circumstances. The vacuum produced by absent fathers, however, begets potentially lethal dysfunction and pathology, the swings of which get wider and wider with each passing generation. This is a societal and systemic issue that if unaddressed will destroy us. 

So mourn the dead and grieve with their families and the survivors, which is only right. But we also have to demand and support costly short term solutions while simultaneously beginning a national journey of again realizing that each of us is not the center of the universe but are all subject to the Golden Rule. It is not all about me.


2 comments:

  1. Well said and I agree. but--> How does a mentally ill 26 YO male collect 13 guns? Jay

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  2. We'll have to wait and see the facts that come out, but thus far I haven't seen that he had a police officer hold or other mandatory referral for a mental health evaluation.

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