12/19/2012
A PSYCHOLOGIST'S THOUGHTS ON SANDY HOOK:
Our first response to the Sandy Hook tragedy should be silence. "Weep with those who weep." After that, we can speak a word of hope, a word about the eternal truths, as President Obama did so beautifully.
But after a reasonable time of mourning, we need to ask ourselves two questions. How could this have happened? And how can we prevent it from happening again?
Because this tragedy involved guns, the media have been focusing on it relentlessly 24/7. They hardly covered a similar massacre in China that involved the use of knives. I don't think Sandy Hook is about gun control. Had the young man's mother secured her guns correctly, this wouldn't have happened.
The school did not have an armed polices officer at the entrance. If it had, the tragedy would not have happened. The simple practice of putting police protection in place, it seems to me, is a much more effective way of securing the future safety of children that more gun-control legislation.
The young man was mentally ill. Our current mental health system made it impossible for his mother to civilly commit him to an environment in which both he and society could be safe.
In the 1970s, the ACLU in concern for patient's rights, pushed for laws that made civil commitment almost impossible. The mental hospitals were emptied and closed, former patients were now "the homeless" and when they couldn't function "on the street", they were incarcerated in prisons rather than returned to mental hospitals. Those laws need to be changed.
The young man was also without his father. It is no accident that nearly all of the perpetrators of massacres, going back to Columbine and before, came from divorced parents. Fathers provide a unique contribution to the upbringing of their children that mothers cannot. Fathers are not redundant. Boys without fathers can grow up to be productive citizens. But its harder.
Something is awfully wrong in a community when it is easier to break the solemn vows of marriage than it is to break a rental lease. We need to promote a marriage culture, which emphasizes the importance of raising children more than of promoting the pleasure of two adults. To that end, we need to replace the "no-fault" divorce laws--also a product of the 70s--with laws that are saner and more child-friendly.
And finally there is the culture itself. We cannot for long continue to be a culture that defends innocent, dependent little children like the Sandy Hook kids, if we turn our gaze from other children who are more innocent, more dependent and smaller. Of course I am referring to children in the womb. This schizophrenic mind-split will eventually become unsustainable. We will either resolve it by defending both, or by defending neither.
I hope it is the former.
