Waiting in Imagined Fear

It is not a new subject. We have been through this numerous times in the past 19 years since Columbine in 1999. After the latest school shooting in Florida I was taken back in my memory to the two early incidents that had an impact on me. Beyond those directly involved, we are seeing that many are being affected. For those who are not at the scene, I wondered, "What does imagined fear do to a soul?"

Columbine. April 1999.
It was nearing the end of my daughter's senior year in high school. Living in a smaller Wisconsin city where school was often the center of the community and my daughter being a senior the events in Columbine seemed way too real.

I thought about my daughter sitting in school, in a study hall in the commons area right inside door 1, the main entrance. I thought about members of the church who worked in or near the office, right across the commons or my best friend, one of the band directors down the hall. I thought of all the young people I knew, through our daughter, the church or community activities.

Then, within a couple days, there was a threat made to the school just as has happened across the country in the past two weeks. I knew that student as well.

The school made a couple of immediate decisions, including changing the location of graduation. It had been held outside at a local park for years. People would bring their lawn chairs and enjoy the wonders of spring along the river while the students marched in graduation. It was quite a celebration for the students and the community. Now it would be held in the school gym, more formal, but safer to protect. Some of the seniors protested but to no avail.

Red Lake Shooting. March 21, 2005
Six years later short a month I was in southern Minnesota working as a chemical health counselor in the local schools. A 16-year old on the Red Lake reservation in northern Minnesota took his grandfather's police weapon, killed his grandfather and grandfather's girlfriend then went to the school and continued the murders. He was wounded in a shootout with police and then committed suicide in a vacant classroom.

The shooter was only a year or two older than the students I worked most closely with, and had lived in our district for a short period of time. In the odd way of coincidences, I also knew his mother. My office was about fifty feet from the main entrance, the only unlocked door, of course, into the school. I often sat in there working with my office door open. The days after the shooting I became very aware of the proximity of that entrance and how quickly someone could get to my office. I vaguely remember having discussions with other staff, but we never really went into any detail that I can recall.

The students seemed naturally subdued for a few days. None of them ever mentioned to me that they knew the shooter when he was in our district, although they may have. All kinds of thoughts ran through everyone's minds I would guess. It's easy to become a sitting duck in many of the buildings in any school district.

I would call this "imagined fear." It is fear of the unknown that can easily come with an awareness of powerlessness, loss of control, the unplanned events that "can't happen here!"

Reaction as a pastor and counselor
I first thought of this after Columbine when social workers and others reflected some of their feelings on what had happened. They missed clues, they believed progress was happening with the two shooters when the youth were faking it. It was still a rare event in 1999 so even the best trained social workers didn't know what to look for. (By the way, in many ways they still don't. But that's another post.)

As a pastor in the community as well as an addictions counselor working with adolescents and a close friend of two guidance counselors in the school system, I wondered with them over coffee how we would know. We didn't have any answers, just as the counselors in Colorado didn't either.

In Minnesota I worked closely with the school counselors and staff. I was officially working for the county and was part of the school social work group. While the Red Lake incident did not have the larger impact of Columbine, we all shook our heads wondering what we miss on a regular basis. Since we all worked with severely "at-risk" youth we knew that just about any of our students could potentially break and cause such a disaster. It is not as easy to identify the future shooter as many would like to believe.

Rage, extreme anger, being bullied- these are all triggers and potential symptoms of school shooters. But these youth are also very, very good at masking it- sometimes by becoming bullies, sometimes by extreme introversion, sometimes by just being damn good actors. Every counselor or social worker in any school is painfully aware of this. It may be the nightmare for many that they miss the cues of suicidality or a shooter and the unthinkable happens. I have never had a shooter, but I know the pain of missed signs of suicide. I would guess the missed murderer is even worse.

Don't attack the counselor or social worker who misses it. Even though signs and the understanding of causes are clearer now than in 1999 or 2005, they are still variable. Plus, we don't know how many we DID prevent without ever knowing it was a possibility. There, I believe, we have most likely done more good than we will ever know.

Safety and Security Reflections
I was also aware then and still am in many ways of the impossibility of security and safety. Looking back at the four schools I worked with in Minnesota, they were all active places. At times of the day there were people entering and leaving the main entrance- people like myself, the social workers, shared teaching staff who traveled from school to school as needed; parents bringing forgotten papers to school or picking up a student for some appointment somewhere. Sure, having one main entrance to watch helps, but that does not prevent a mass shooting with multiple casualties.

An armed teacher would not be in the same position as an armed guard or patrol. The teacher is hopefully more focused on a day-to-day basis with teaching. They are working with some significant number of students on a regular basis. They are lecturing, proctoring, helping with homework, watching for misbehavior in their own classroom. If they are doing a good job as a teacher, they are not in a very good position to respond as quickly as they would need to if an event occurred near them.

It is already tough enough to be a good teacher. We can't also require them to be a good armed guard. Many don't want that job. I wouldn't. Improved security is important, of course. But we should probably expect that an armed guard at a main entrance to a school may well be the first casualty, not the last.

Students today
Malcolm Gladwell wrote the famous book The Tipping Point which essentially laid out that before any significant change occurs, there has to be the point where a critical mass of people say, "Enough!" For some reason, at least as I write this at the end of February 2018, we seem to have hit that point. Why the students of Parkland, FL, have reacted this way when others haven't to this extent will be something for social scientists to ponder somewhere down the road.

It is not that they have been fed by some left-wing, anti-gun conspiracy. It is not that they are more liberal than any of the students in the other places. They survived what their friends and teachers did not. Instead of survivors' guilt sending them into a dark frenzy of self-questioning, they shouted, "Enough."

When these students responded, so students in schools across the country were reminded that they, too, have been living in fear of such an attack. As a nation, since 9/11 we have all lived with such a fear of terrorists. The government in all kinds of overt as well as subtle ways, has been reminding us of that threat for seventeen years.

Maybe this last school shooting, an act of terror if not terrorism in the usual sense, was a tipping point to deal with those fears. Here is something that we might be able to do something about. More of us are getting killed by "shooters" than terrorists. Students in schools, worshipers in church, concert-goers having a party, workers in offices. Terror-inducing scenes.

People are tired of being afraid. People are sick of fear. People want to be able to do something that might have an impact on the culture of mass shootings we seem to be in the midst of. (That, it should be noted, is also why gun sales increase after each shooting.) Nothing will be 100% effective at stopping mass shootings. No one should ever believe it would. What the students of today are saying is that they are tired of being on the front lines of a war they never signed-up for. They want to have a say. They want to throw off the fear and do something.

Courage is not something that means we are fearless. Courage is, as an old, trite phrase used to say, is simply "fear that has said its prayers." What that means is that to act with courage is to know that there is strength in action, with confronting what is causing our fear. Courage is doing the next right thing to make a difference. There is a generation out there, a whole school generation since Columbine, that is now saying they want courage, not fear, to be their guiding principle.

We should listen and then be willing to truly sit down in dialogue to find out what is possible. We need to stop throwing ideology and patriotic misunderstandings at them. We need to support them and perhaps in so doing cast off our own fears.

Never the Right Time

Again, we are told that this is not a time to be political. We should honor the dead by not getting into the arguments.

We are told that guns don't kill people; people do. [But certain guns allow more people to be murdered by killers like this one.]

We will be told that we need to make sure there are enough guns on the ground to protect us when guns are around. [There were plenty of guns on the ground in Las Vegas last night.]

We will be pushed and shoved and brow-beat by Second Amendment fanatics who will insist that guns are our only answer. That's what the Founding Fathers wanted. [That is a very risky idea considering how different the world was- and is.]

Therefore nothing will be done.

Oh, wait a minute, we can pray.

Well I for one will pray.

• I will pray for the victims and their families.
• I will pray for the brave men and women who helped in a moment of chaos and crisis.
• I will pray for the police and investigators who will be sorting through this mess.

And

• I will pray that our nation, supposedly "under God" will see the error of its ways in defending weapons of mass killing. This is following Christ?
• I will pray that the NRA lose its iron-grip on the nation's lawmakers.
• I will pray that Congress will see the incredible insanity of allowing silencers as legal on these kind of weapons. The carnage last night would have been even more horrific if the killer had used silencers.
• I will pray that the Second Amendment fanatics will understand the importance of people's lives and see the EQUAL importance of other parts of the Constitution that preserve rights to free speech, to vote, a free press, freedom of religion.

 We do not need to ban all guns. I accept the right to "bear arms." Banning all guns isn't the answer. We do need to be more realistic about the constant pressure toward complete deregulation of all kinds of guns. We do need to understand that rampant gun ownership will not make us safer and may even make us more susceptible to mass acts of violence. We do need have a real(!) dialogue without name calling and bullying.

So yes, I will pray and pray fervently for all these things.

- and I invite anyone reading this who is fed up with the carnage that is the gun insanity of the United States to join me in those prayers.

Just a Question

I was just reading about the petition that had started online to allow firearms to be brought into the arena where the GOP convention is to be held. The Quicken Loan Arena bans firearms, which according to the petition leaves the people in the arena at the convention as "sitting ducks." So to show that more good guys with guns is the way to go, they want to be allowed to bring firearms into the convention.

It caused some squirming on the part of GOP candidates, but the Secret Service bailed them out. Simply put the Secret Service said that isn't such a great idea! (I am waiting for someone to say that it was Obama's idea and he ordered the Secret Service to make such an anti-constitutional statement.)

But that leads me to a real conundrum that could conceivably show up one of these days. Someone, somewhere is bound to realize that there are those in the country who should not be allowed to own guns. They are terrorists, even though people on no-fly lists are still allowed to own guns.

What will be the response of the NRA and other 2nd Amendment extremists when the suggestion is made that Muslims should not be allowed to own guns?

Just asking.

In the Face of More Violence

No, I don't expect ever to have it stop. Violence is endemic in human nature. It probably goes back to some of those primitive parts of the brain that protected us when we were, well, primitive and constantly in danger in the pre-civilized world. Self-protection can often include having to fight back in some form or another.

But violence as we see it happening way too often is not a form of self-protection. It is anger and fear, hatred and judgment and often just plain uncaring reaction and deep mental illness. Two stories in the recent week exposed this.

The first was the latest mass shooting in Colorado Springs. Some "Una-bomber"-type loner decided to take issues into his own hands. The guy was crazy. Period. He was enticed by whatever demons were in and around him to want to kill people. Perhaps he was fed by the anger and hatred currently swirling in our political system. It was an act of domestic terrorism.

Most acts of terrorism are the acts of crazy people enticed and spurred on by leaders who are also crazed by their ideologies and angers. Leaders like Osama Bin Laden gathered followers to do his crazed work for him. The Taliban does it. The KKK does it. They increase fear and anger with half-truths and no-truths. They spread lies based on their own blindness to other people's beliefs.

Yes, we also have religious leaders and politicians who do that. They would deny that they want the kind of violence enacted in their name that sometimes happens. Yet, Trump encouraged and supported in his own sideways way violence against a Black Lives Matter protester and enacted his own mocking personal violence against a reporter. They will all deny to their dying days that they support this kind of behavior. I believe that they believe that. I also believe they do not understand the results of their actions and words.

The other event took place in Biloxi, MS, at a Waffle House restaurant. From the Sun Herald:

About 1 a.m. Friday, [a man] lit a cigarette in the restaurant in the 2400 block of Beach Boulevard. Police said she [the waitress] was enforcing store policy when she asked [him] to put out the cigarette.

Police believe [he] pulled a 9mm handgun and shot [the waitress] once in the head. She died a short time later at Merit Health Biloxi.

Read more here

Not an act of terrorism. A senseless act of violence.Maybe drugs and/or alcohol were involved. (I would bet money on that!) He reportedly suffered from a Traumatic Brain Injury a number of years ago.

But this is the kind of incident that raises the gun issues more than the guy in Colorado. I am not in favor of getting rid of guns. That would be a waste of time and energy. But I am in favor of finding ways of reducing the senseless violence wrought by guns.

A "good-guy with a gun" could not have stopped this. The waitress carrying a gun herself would not have stopped this. These are the senseless acts; the great loss of innocent lives as these happen over and over.

Again and again and again I ask the same question- why can't we sit down and discuss these issues instead of standing on ideology that in the end spurs crazy or sick or troubled individuals to commit crimes of violence and death. These incidents are far more likely to happen than some Syrian refugee doing an unspeakable act.  These scare me far more.

I eat in restaurants, shop in malls, sit in coffee shops, walk in office buildings. Those are the places where things like these happen. That is the fear engendered by the news that is based on a greater reality than the refugees. Yes, we need to have proper controls and immigration guidelines, but we also need more sanity in the "gun debate."

That is always part of my prayer for the safety of our country!

Mental Health or Terrorism?

• A 20-something white kid wraps himself in a Confederate flag and spouts white supremacy- and kills people in a church.
• A 20-something Middle Eastern kid wraps himself in ISIS ideology and kills Marine recruiters.
• A 20-something white kid in Colorado with no apparent ideology walks into a movie theater and kills people.

Is it terrorism or is it mental health?
Is it true ideology or is it illness.

 

We don't seem to know how to answer that. All of the above cases- and countless others from Sandy Hook to Columbine have one thing in common- the clear presence of mental illness. There are events that are clearly terrorism-based. There are attacks against the event promoting images of Mohammed, the Middle Eastern soldier attacking his base, the shoe bomber, September 11. These are terrorism. As were the Oklahoma City and Boston Marathon bombings.

 

But most are not.

 

Someone out there has no doubt done the research and can tell me how many of the attacks are truly acts of terrorism and how many are the acts of individuals who may be attracted by extremist, violent ideology, but who are acting out there own violent illnesses and racist or religious ideologies and prejudices. These are often loners, perhaps even bordering on anti-social or psychopathic loners.

 

They are encouraged by the attention it gets and want to go out in a blaze of glory, taking their "enemies" with them, even if those enemies are other students, innocent bystanders or kindergarten kids. These are not sane individuals. These are terrorists in the broad sense of the word- people who are spreading terror. But they are not terrorists in the world-wide sense of that word.

 

They are fed and watered by our news media's need for big stories. They are nourished by a gun culture that even sees the answer to the violence as more guns and more potential for violence. I saw where one small town even tried to pass a local law that the head of every household should own a gun and know how to use it.

 

I would have been asked to leave that town as I would have refused.

 

Allow people to carry guns into movie theaters and these maniacs won't get away with it. But as the old saying is re-interpreted: Build better laws and protections against maniacs and you will simply promote better maniacs.

• What we need is a serious discussion on our culture.
• What we need is reasonable laws that help curtail gun violence and gun registration.
• What we need is a group like the NRA to be the group that starts putting together serious, thoughtful regulations and guidelines that can have an impact, not the mindless, unquestioning antipathy to any and all attempts to make sense of this insanity.

 

We are not having that. We are seeing people on both sides of the issue making extreme- and at times extremely stupid- statements that are meant to engender fear, not dialogue; disagreement and not unity.

• What we also need is an improvement in insurance coverage for mental health issues.
• We need better ways of identifying and treating those who may be in the midst of mental health crises.
• Finally, we need a greater awareness that mental illness is a disease that needs to be treated on a parity with other illnesses.

This will not eliminate mass shooting like we have seen, but it may reduce their frequency and give us a more healthy and open attitude in the country about how to deal with this serious issue. Stop the name-calling; stop the anger-inducing rhetoric; stop our unwillingness to face the issues. We can do this!

A Last Minute Post

Well, last minute in the sense that I am actually writing this just prior to posting it. Most of my work on the blog is, by nature, done ahead of time. That way it doesn't become a rush to get something written and posted at the last minute before midnight.

But because of scheduling up ahead of me over the next 10 days, I knew that if I waited to post these thoughts, it might be "old news."

So I decided to post this one today. That way it really is current events.

• It's about that lion in Africa and the Minnesota dentist who paid $50,000 to have it lured from a sanctuary so he could shoot it with a bow and arrow then track it for 40-hours in its agony and then kill it.

• It's also about the Cincinnati university police officer who has been arraigned for murder in a traffic stop gone bad.

• It's about the insanity of the alleged Planned Parenthood videos that purport to show that the organization is a venal, baby-killing group out to make money from fetuses.

• It's about the presidential [sic] candidates calling Mexicans rapists and accusing the sitting president of leading Jews to the ovens over a nuclear arms deal.

• It's about denying climate change because it will hurt business and profits to do otherwise and the hell with the health of the planet.

• It's about having to have 30+ women claim to be raped by a well-known celebrity- and even then saying it didn't happen until his own words describe exactly what they have claimed.

It's about our human tendency for hypocrisy, prejudice, narrow-mindedness and the belief that I am right and everyone else is wrong. (Myself included).

What got me started was seeing the incredible world-wide and national reaction to the lion killing. The reaction was far beyond that for any of the other killings we are hearing about. The reaction to a lion (and I AM an animal conservationist!), even a "famous" and protected lion, raises more anger than much else that is REAL news. Every time three is a mass killing somewhere in the country we are told to pray and NOT politicize. Yet every killing like that does have a political side to it. We are told to remember that all lives matter, not just black lives, even when it is the black lives that seem to be of far less value in how, when, and where they are killed.

Yes, all lives matter, and THEREFORE,

• all black lives matter, and when they are being killed in traffic stops or as the result of incredibly far-fetched traffic stops, THEY matter and we need to pay attention.

Yes, all lives matter, and THEREFORE,

• the lives of billions on the planet matter when we are facing potentially catastrophic changes to our environment that will put those lives in severe jeopardy.

Yes, all lives matter, and THEREFORE,

• the lives of the Israelis and the lives of millions of others in the Middle East matter enough to work hard at preventing nuclear weapons from continuing to proliferate and putting all of them at risk.

Yes, all lives matter, and THEREFORE, why do we ignore the cries of

• women who have been raped, 
• veterans who have been denied health services, 
• poor people who can't get health care, 
• police officers who are under incredible pressures and need better support, stress assistance and training for their difficult jobs, 
• bullied gay youth, 
• the mentally ill who are seen as crazy and to be held in contempt, 
• prisoners in overcrowded prisons that are filled with non-violent offenders incarcerated because they possessed marijuana
• the immigrants who, like most of OUR OWN ancestors are here to build the American dream and rape and pillage?

I could go on. I can rant on this for hours, but all I will do is get myself all worked up and feel like I am helpless and powerless to do anything about it. I had to get it off my chest, now, when it is news.

• Pray for peace
• Work for peace
• Uphold peace
• Make peace a reality 
• Live peace each day

We all matter- let's act that way and not just say it as a way to reinforce our ideology or put down someone else's life.

Let's live today as if each person we meet has a life that matters and then treat them that way.

Darkness Amidst the Light: Light Beating the Darkness

Dec. 28- Liturgical Calendar date of The Slaughter of the Innocents

 It is now 14 days since the tragedy at Newtown's Sandy Hook Elementary School. Two weeks of mourning, questions, fears, and a seemingly endless news cycle broken only momentarily by Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

Time to make real what President Obama said at the vigil on that Sunday evening: This has to end.

That means some sensible gun control discussions and debate. Let's forget the hysteria. You know it well. I know it well. We need assault weapons in private ownership like we need to return to using quill pens and oil lamps. NO, it is not a way to protect ourselves from the government, as I heard one legislator say. Are you freakin' insane, I wanted to ask? Having hoardes of private citizens own assault weapons to "protect from our own government" is not a constitutional right. That is NOT a "well-regulated militia." That is anarchy, which by definition is not well-regulated. Arm the principals of the schools? You may very well lose a lot of good principals who don't want to be part of a gun-culture. Put armed guards in every school? Columbine and Virgina Tech had those.

And will we put armed guards at every mall, place of worship or beauty spa in the country? Will we become an armed camp with guns in the hands of every Tom, Dick, and Harry? How scary!

Cars don't kill people, drunk drivers do. That is just insane to even post as a reasonable thought. It is why we have laws ABOUT drunken driving, what you could call "Drunken Driving Control." When Minnesota got tough on drunken driving, for example, DUI arrests shot up AND deaths from drunk driving dropped. Note that no one outlawed cars- or even drinking. Just putting the two together.

Why should it be harder to get good mental health care than to buy an assault rifle? Why are background checks for gun ownership so difficult? We do it for teachers and counselors. Is owning a gun so much of a right? Freedom of the press is just as constitutionally protected, yet we say there are times and places when there is such a thing as privacy and confidentiality limiting some of that. Why are firearms so sacred?

Perhaps in that last word is part of the problem. They have become sacred- a holy grail- inviolable- more important than human lives. They have become a god. There is the real, profound issue that no one can talk about. We have set up a false god that controls us. The power of the gun. No, not the gun lobby. The power of the gun. It is devouring our nation in its primal scream to survive.

I am not a gun owner. I don't believe I would ever own one. Protection? I wouldn't be able to use it for that. I would be so afraid of over-reacting and shooting someone I love by mistake. It happened locally here just a few weeks ago. Accidental deaths by guns may be more than were killed at Newtown.

I am not against gun ownership any more than I am against people owning cars or driving cars. Let's not over-react in either direction. But let's be sensible and reasonable about it. High-capacity weapons and clips controlled or banned; assault rifles made for the single purpose of killing people banned; background checks required. These are reasonable.

Is this politicizing the deaths on Connecticut? Yes. It was politicized the minute the shooter walked into the school. It is an issue of how resolute we can be to both protect lives and rights. We have to be able to do both. We remember the freedom of speech measurement- you can't yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater. That limits free speech just as libel laws limit it and the freedom of the press. Democracy is a delicate balance between rights and protection; freedom and life.

We can do it. We are a bright and caring nation. Let's use our ability to overcome the barriers to discussion and sane legislation. Too many ore people will die if we don't.

Protecting the Schools?

NRA: Armed Security in Every School

Actually, it does make a little sense. Kind of.

But it does not address the issue. The real issue.

Gun culture. Gun worship.

Armed security in every school?

Sure- until the next mass shooting

at a mall

or a place of worship

or a beauty spa.

I'm tired of the debate. It is time for action.

I will have more reflections on this next Friday. Until then let's refocus on peace. For all.