cab67
cab67's JournalTook my daughter to kindergarten this morning/why this is personal
She'd been a bit difficult this morning. She dawdled at getting dressed. She resisted efforts to feed her breakfast, get her to brush her teeth, and do other parts of her morning routine. She really wanted to play - and when she did, it was with a toy ukelele that drives her mom and me to the point of insanity.
So I was feeling a bit frustrated and grumpy when I drove her to school. (It's raining, so she couldn't ride her scooter.) She hopped out and started to cross the street before I could help her across.
Once in the school, I got back in my car. Then I noticed it -
The name of the school, right over the front doors.
That's one of the first things they show you when reporting on a school massacre - the name of the school, whether on a sign in front or over the door.
And it occurred to me that I had no business being frustrated with my daughter.
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None of the elementary or high school shootings has ever directly affected me. None has taken place in a town where I lived (though I did often pass through Uvalde en route from Austin to the Big Bend area in grad school), and no one I know has ever been directly impacted.
But I can't say that for college shootings - and it's why these K-12 shootings feel personal regardless.
On November 1, 1991, a graduate student at the University of Iowa killed four people in the physics building (Van Allen Hall), then walked over to an administrative office in a different building and shot two more people, killing one and leaving the other paralyzed. He then shot himself.
This was during my third year of graduate school at UT-Austin. I was in my office putting together a poster presentation for an upcoming meeting. (This was in the days before Photoshop and Illustrator, so I was cutting printed photos with scissors and pasting them to the posterboard.) It was fairly late at night. NPR broke its program to announce the shooting.
I got my BS at the University of Iowa, and I had taken some physics classes. So this was very jarring news.
I spent the night unable to sleep, worried that one of the professors or TA's I knew in the Physics and Astronomy department was one of the victims.
The following morning, I grabbed the newspaper - this was before online news was really a thing - and read the article.
None of the victims in Physics and Astronomy was someone I knew. So I kept reading, and my whole being stopped still when I came across the name of the secretary who'd been wounded - Miya Sioson.
I knew her.
We'd taken some classes together. I went out with her roommate once in sophomore year, though I actually had something of a crush on Miya. We were friends.
By all accounts, Miya had a good, meaningful life in spite of her full paralysis below the neck. She passed away a few years ago, but not (so far as I can tell) from anything related to the shooting.
This really affected me. It still does.
Many people will tell you that there are moments when everything seems to stop, and they remember every detail. When it comes to this particular event, there are two such moments - the one where I first heard the announcement on the radio, and the other when I saw Miya's name in the newspaper.
Not looking for pity or sympathy or anything. Nothing really happened to me, at least physically.
Anyway - that's all.
regret about previous post/question about mental health care and political views
First - earlier today, I posted a comment suggesting that we withhold judgment on the officers in Uvalde who appear to have done little to nothing useful for 40 minutes while the shooter was in the school.
I stand by the sentiment I shared - that we should be careful in calling people cowards without knowing the full facts of the situation. I also stand by my argument that many of you missed this point. I never, at any time, said the officers were courageous. In fact, I never said they weren't cowards. I merely said that I didn't know, and that I could envision situations in which officers might hold off before charging after a shooter in a school building.
A lot of you took exception to that. I still think some of those who did failed to really understand my point, which was not about defending the police or declaring them faultless, but about learning what actually happened before armchair-quarterbacking what other people did. I've seen the same videos and read the same news articles, and I didn't think they carried enough information to really form a solid opinion. Maybe I'm overly careful about such things, but I've had friends who became police officers, which gives me some sense that not all of them are overtly racist nutjobs who just want to shoot things up. (Though too many clearly are!)
Anyway - I do regret that some of you were angered by what I wrote. And I have to say, having done some more research, my views are starting to move closer to the "these cops are worthless" end of the dial and a bit further from "these cops were being careful and deliberate."
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Second - I have a serious question about the mental health angle of this discussion.
I do not, in any way, buy into the argument that the central issue of these mass shootings is mental health. I accept that mental health is a serious part of the problem, but so is the easy access to the kinds of semiautomatic firearms that allow people, mentally ill or not, to kill large numbers of other people in a short amount of time. No one needs an AR-15 to protect themselves or their families, the whole "tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants" schtick only works if the tyrants aren't better armed than you (and if the "tyrants" really are tyrants in the first place), and one can hunt or target-shoot with a rifle less capable of causing mass casualties.
That being said -
I'm not a fan of relying on anecdote, but when it comes to the relationship between household politics and mental health treatment, anecdote is all I have.
My 12-year-old nephew has very serious behavioral problems. He's been expelled from multiple schools for violent behavior, including his kindergarten when he stabbed a teacher with a pencil. He's also injured his mom (my sister), with whom I have very little contact for a list of reasons I'd rather not discuss here. And on top of that, he's had multiple suicide attempts.
No one seems to know what, exactly, is going on with my nephew. His diagnoses change more frequently than the seasons. It's ADHD. But then, it's not - it's dissociative personality disorder. Then, it becomes Asperger's (which I don't for a minute believe). And then it's back to ADHD, and something else after that. Is it an organic mental health problem? A personality disorder? A developmental problem? Who knows?
Why do we not know? Largely, it's because of his parents. My sister has never really held a job that carries health care benefits, so he's never had any sort of consistent psychiatric or psychological treatment. I suspect a lot of it comes from my sister's "research" on the internet.
his father - a gun-nut who wears a hat from the "National Gun Rights Association," which I think exists because some gun enthusiasts decided the NRA was too pinko - refuses to get him any sort of treatment on his own. Not wanting him "labelled" and all of that. Nothing that a little discipline won't fix. And he refuses to get rid of his guns, even though the number 1 predictor of whether someone contemplating suicide will succeed in that decision is the presence of a gun in the home.
My sister and her ex are both WAY over on the political right. Trump was tolerable, even if he wasn't quite right-wing enough. That their side of things opposes every sort of government action that would make mental health treatment easier to find and more affordable never seems to cross their minds.
My nephew did spend a brief time in an in-patient facility, so he's been seen by actual psychiatrists at least once. But he wasn't there long, and I doubt any follow-up instructions were respected. (From what I heard, he was in the facility at the order of a court following some sort of violent outburst.)
I lot of my friends are parents, and they're all open to getting help for their kids if they need it. Very, very few of my friends are Republicans, and those that are tend to be either (a) old-school New York-type Republicans who are actually conservative and not right-wing, or (b) high school acquaintances who found me on Facebook. So my sample is very low - but based on that small sample, including my sister and a couple of people who somehow completed a high school education without actually learning anything, right-wing people are less likely to get help for their children.
Is what I'm observing based on a skewed distribution of examples, or is there really something to this? Because this could be important - the people calling for better mental health screening might be the least likely to see the need for it under their own roofs.
Honest question here. I could be dead wrong about this. I don't work on humans - I work on crocodiles. They have only two emotions - indifferent and enraged - and their behavior is pretty much the same regardless. So my ability to actually make pronouncements on human mental health is very minimal.
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