Building a Nonviolent Culture After Newtown

[xchrom]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/12/17-1



The December 14 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn. that left 28 people dead — including 20 children — has sent shock waves through our society. It penetrated the elaborate defenses that we as individuals and as a culture have erected to live with the internal contradictions of the bargain we have made to both oppose and embrace violence. Occasionally reality exposes and trumps the cognitive dissonance of this uneasy but deeply embedded arrangement.

This is what happened to me Friday when I heard the news about this massacre. As someone who spends a lot of his life grappling with violence of all kinds, I find myself increasingly inured to its horror. When the news breaks, I’m usually concerned and even upset, but my mind typically goes into analytic overdrive, instantly dredging up models and frameworks to unpack and explain it and, perhaps, to think through possible solutions. This time there was none of that.

I burst into tears even as the announcer pronounced the words “20 children.” Twenty children? I think of the twenty children that troop into my three-year-old daughter’s school when I drop her off in the morning. Bundled up for winter, wearing little backpacks containing their lunch bags and notes for the teacher, they are eager and energetic but also vulnerable and small. Here there’s a different bargain: You will protect and nurture me. We adults try to add obligations on the child’s side — you will be respectful and on your best behavior, you will listen, you will go along, you will make us proud, you will fulfill the dreams that we never got to — but that’s just wishful thinking on our part. This contract, in fact, is one-sided. Because they are vulnerable and small and (no matter what they happen to do to tick us off) innocent, all the obligations are on our side. Our job is to keep them safe and to give them half a chance to flourish.

The image of a man moving from classroom to classroom and methodically gunning down children at point-blank range brings this obligation to protect and nurture into its starkest relief. Is it possible to meet our side of the bargain (as parents and as a society) when our culture is designed in such a way that such violence is not only possible but appallingly likely?

[derby378]

1. There's a little boy about 18 months old...

He's my biological nephew, and he's about to celebrate his second Christmas with the whole family. We'll fuss over him to a fault, I know, but we just want to show James all the love and nurturing we can. He has already learned how to flirt.

This is the closest I may ever come to being a parent. Ginny couldn't have children, but that was okay with us because we had each other. Our "kids" turned out to be our menagerie of cats and birds.

I couldn't be prouder of little James. That kid's going to be far out, and I want him to have every chance at a happy, peaceful, and fulfilling life.

My heart may be hardened to many things, but I cried for those kids at Sandy Hook on Friday night. I can't even imagine the pain those parents are going through - and as a still-occasionally-grieving widower, that should mean something.