In The Aftermath of the
Violence
This
morning, the television news programs were filled with political pundits and
would-be wise men, all searching for easy solutions to something where there
are no easy solutions — weapons bans, tighter weapons control, harsher
penalties for violent crime, making school buildings more secure, more care for
the mentally ill (assuming one can identify who is mentally ill). As usual, the
national hysteria, the national neurosis rages, the national breast-beating;
and as usual nothing will get done. Before anything else, America, as a nation,
as a people, needs to look deep within and realize the culture of violence that
dwells there. Nothing will be done, nothing can be done, until that culture of
violence, that ethos where bloody murder is the commonplace, is realized and
changed within each heart – within each family. I know all too well. I’ve been
cleaning up the messes of that culture all my life.
(Twenty children and six adults killed in a massacre at the
Newtown, Connecticut elementary school were all shot multiple times, many with
a rifle, wielded by a lone gunman, on December 14, 2012.)
