He must have been crazy

This is not likely to be read by many, or any.

The shooting at the school in Connecticut on Dec 14 will bring a predictable response from the public sphere.  We will mourn, of course.  The thought of what that children experienced - all of them - is wrapped in with after thoughts of what the parents, family's, friends, staff, neighbors, and close public will endure for the short, mid, and long-terms.  We suffer for them and with them.

As we mourn and as we react, we will begin to "problem solve".  Conversation will (actually already has) move into "why did this happen?"  followed closely by "how can we prevent this?".  Inevitably it will lead the politically polarized US public to stale, meaningless arguments such as gun control.

The Problem

There is a greater problem among us that I suspect will not even be addressed.  The young man who did this represents the deeper issue.  He is a disaffected person who sunk to this, whose delusion, desperation, despair, and dysfunction all exploded in an event destroying hundreds of futures.  He had something unsolvable that backed him into a corner.  (Probably) only he perceived it and was driven by demons or voices or urges or emotions or illness or all or some of those.  They  combined to create a deadly brew leading to the decision to do this thing.

We Ignore Them

He is the problem our culture and society cultivates and refuses to address.  He represents a culture that, while walking among us, are seen through and sneered at as the lazy youth who could lift themselves out of their morass if they would just get to work.

They have always existed.

We Have Solutions We Refuse Them

Today we, as a collective public culture, reject spiritual solutions for them.  Truth of truths is, these are lost young people who need the mercy of God to perform miracles in their broken lives to put them on the track He designed them to be on.  While this is a fact, our society has relegated this thought to "you believe what you want and I'll believe what I want" in our attempt at fairness, equality, and tolerance.  Instead of embracing what the real, proven cure is - spiritual life - we encourage them to reject it by our own public eye-rolling at the very mention of God and His solutions in the public square.  Just like St Peter said, quoting prophets himself "The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone, and a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense.  They stumble because they disobey the word..."

Are you rolling your eyes?

By abdicating the miraculous nature of God, we take on the responsibility to solve the problem of evil ourselves.  And we even abdicate that.

This person clearly had "issues".  We can blame him, and we must, for he is guilty of evil.  But, if we reject the spiritual definition of evil because we are smarter than that, then what?  His evil has a source. What is it?

Is he crazy?

We Ignore Crazy

Of course he is crazy.  He lived crazy in a society that treats crazy as though it were a choice.  We expect the majority of crazy (more gently defined as mentally ill) people to "get over it" and make choices that crazy people can't make.  We collectively expect someone to give them a pill to take, and then expect them to take it, and expect the problem to be solved.

We don't care for them when it counts, before they are in the corner he was in.  We treat children as little adults, we fail in the developmental process as we park children in institutions like schools and daycares so we can go out to earn to pay for the schools and daycares.  When parents are bad we tear the children away and park them until the courts can be sure the parents got treated fairly and then look for a permanent "family" solution, often after we've broken the chain of developmental support required  for a healthy brain to be wired for healthy adult living.

I know a number of young adults, all in their 20's, who have expended all of their life's capital in their transition from child to adult.  They have wasted any educational opportunity because the institution cared more about test scores than them.  The wasted their freedom to choose by stupidly crossing legal lines with drug use, shoplifting, driving illegally, fistfights, or drinking into stupidity.  They have no career choices because the few opportunities they had to succeed in the work world they destroyed by not being disciplined enough to struggle to earn, save, and accumulate experience and assets.  They quit out of frustration coupled with stupidity, leaving a trail of references that made 'next steps" impossible.  Nobody mentored them because they wouldn't listen, or no one had the time.  They are left, in their 20's, with no ability to get a job, have a place of their own, or persist as the majority in the day-to-day struggle long enough to develop a mature career with experience, training, and education that lead to success.  Instead, they can't take the first step because they have wasted it all before they were 25.

Who are they?

They Are There - Do You See Them?

We see through them and blame them for their troubles.  Are their troubles their own fault?  Yes...by all means, they have made choices that lead to the place that they are in....but....the place they are in is a corner that has no way out.

So some of them explode.

Like this guy.

Look to the Future

Is this him?  Is this how he got to this point?  I don't know, but I can be sure that we as a society, as a culture, cultivate more like him as every day passes.  No amount of regulation, law, gun control, school security, police oversight, cameras, alarms, or jails will solve this problem.  The only thing that will solve this problem is for us to return to being a society that loves our children - all of them (including the broken, the ugly, the stupid, the poor, the least) - and take responsibility to nurture them not educationally, but humanly.

I believe the best way to do that is to raise them as children of God to become men and women of God,  each of us guided by a healthy adult relationship with God that yields to His truth rather than our reason.

Given that America is not likely to do that collectively, our culture chooses instead to take on our own shoulders what God has promised because we reject Him.  So - ok - then we must realize that from the day of conception children are humans that are on a biological, neurological, and behavioral developmental track that requires certainty in it's mapping.  We can't skip steps or put kids on hold.  They develop - good or bad - no matter what we do.  If we choose God or ourselves, we must realize that responsibility or expect a growing population of cornered young people who will occasionally explode.  If we outlaw guns they'll explode with knives.  If we outlaw knives, they'll explode with clubs, if clubs, then fists.  They will explode because we have infected them.

And that is what I think.