Massacres: Florida Students to Foreign Villagers

Of all human experiences, the worst is losing a child.  Two dozen parents of Parkland School in Florida experienced this ultimate horror last week when a disturbed youth used a military grade weapon to mass murder 15 students and two teachers.  Student outrage there and nationwide is entirely understandable.  Repetitive bloody, deadly school shootings must end.  Perhaps this slaughter is the straw that breaks the back of the NRA-funded Congress. Maybe this one will prompt changes in government policy loopholes that permit easy gun access to almost anyone. Don’t, however, get hopes up. 

Even enacting and enforcing the strictest gun laws will not end Americans’ mass killings, according to evidence. Two less discussed factors would need to be addressed: 1) the unrelenting U.S. culture of violence and 2) our detachment from fundamental principles that are essential to diminishing the demented desire to slaughter others at will. These two elements will sustain Americans’ culture of bloody violence regardless of any strategy to limit access to guns.  Why? Our capacity to slaughter others is not limited to guns. Ever more powerful, affordable and accessible means of mass murder surround us.  

Imagine Timothy McVeigh’s lower death toll had he used an automatic weapon to attack Oklahoma City federal building.  His WMD of choice was a fuel oil/fertilizer explosive mix filling a rental truck.  McVeigh killed 19 children plus 149 adults.  Even without explosives, an average truck or automobile can mow down dozens. One ISIS member demonstrated this in 2016 in Nice, France, killing 84 and wounding over 300.  Any school or public gathering is prime targets for any mentally impaired or vengeance-seeking driver.

George Lakoff identified two basic human problem solving types.  The first is “direct causation” a solution that immediately comes to mind. When liberals hear of a gun killing, they think “Take it away.”  When conservatives hear the same, they think, “Shoot the shooter!”  Regarding ‘illegal’ immigrants?   Conservatives say “Build a wall!”.  Liberal’s demand we “Protect their their human rights.” Lakoff believes knee-jerk type thinking and effective actions requires deeper thinking he calls “systemic causation.”  Inevitably, addressing systemic flaws in our laws and culture will offer more effective comprehensive solutions.

Unfortunately, most Americans are disinterested in examining systems that have for decades, provided elements of freedom, comfort and security.  Since the 2008 glitch in our economic system, however, more Americans see a rigged system that is not in their favor.  Historically and globally, the economic system has never been rigged in favor of everyone.  Living conditions have improved for most, yet still billions of people suffer daily from the terror of, war, genocide, hunger, infectious diseases and natural disasters, mostly rooted in lethal poverty killing and displacing tens of millions of innocent people a year. 

Over 15,000 children under age 5 still die every day from easily preventable malnutrition and infectious diseases. Most Americans rarely hear about this. And when we do, we rarely care enough to act.  Few opportunities exist for those actually in the crosshairs of these problems to escape lethal and debilitating injustices that our national and international system of laws monstrously causes or ignores.

So how are those deaths and suffering linked to student deaths in Florida, Chicago, or Baltimore?  Or the Las Vegas concert mass shooting, for which no motive has been found?  The answer isn’t guns?  A powerful case can be made that it is our nation’s culturally acceptable disconnect from each other that is largely reinforced by an illusion of separateness and exceptionalism drilled into our brains each time we celebrate our ‘Independence’ each 4th of July -- with bombs bursting in air and rightfully honoring those who sacrificed their lives and fortunes giving birth to our federation.  Our lethal mental error is thinking we are independent, different and exceptional because of it. In believing the US is better than other nations and their unfortunate people if our drone strikes accidently kill their innocent children by the dozens or our ‘shock and awe’ military campaign results in massive ‘collateral damage’ it is acceptable because we are protecting our own freedoms and security.  We ignore the first two paragraphs of our actual Declaration of Independence referencing the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” and the “Truths” that we should hold as “Self-evident”.  Since our nation’s founding we have ignored them.  And the unprecedented cost in American lives and treasure will continue to rise until we codify them into every legal system but most importantly our way of thinking.

Martin Luther King once said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”  We falsely believe our borders and our laws make our lives more valuable than theirs.  And other lives don’t matter if my life sucks.  We make no mental connection between the Florida shooter’s sick mind and our absence of real concern for children dying of preventable diseases or being dismembered by errant US drone strikes.  But some American soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and even some directing drones strikes from Florida military bases, beg to differ.  PTSD is not their mental problem.  It is a normal and natural reaction to our profoundly dysfunctional culture.

How many returning US soldiers have murdered themselves, their loved ones, or strangers due to their up-close and personal war experiences. We are all to blame.

School violence is not new.  While working as a high school teacher at Cherry Hill, New Jersey in the late 1970s, a troubled student detonated a bomb in a locker near my classroom.  The explosion rattled our skulls and our minds.  The first thought?  “Why would anyone do such a thing?” The second thought?  “They had issues.”  In hind sight we refused to see them or address them for that troubled soul.

Foresight is what we need now.   When shocked by events local or global, and struggling to figure why people do ‘crazy’ things, my mentor suggests viewing every person’s action as either “an act of love or a request for love.” Instead we just blame them.  We assume their mental problems are beyond help. We are wrong.

What in our mind/culture gives us consent to avoid people who different from us or stir our discomfort?   Peer pressure in today’s teens can discourage befriending an odd ball.  For adults it is our discomfort with divisive partisan views or differences in our religious, ethnic, or patriotic beliefs that separates us from workable solutions and forming a more perfect union. The lethal and destructive consequence of this ‘independent’ mind set should be “Self-evident”. 

Our mental separation from neighbors, odd family members, other nations, and especially our natural environment’s life support system - does not bode well for our species’ health and wellbeing.  The exponential global growth of our technological capacity for mass murder is irreversibly attached to our flawed mental construct that believes we are free and independent of the needs and the will of all others that we share this planet with.  This will be our undoing. 

Humanity evolved within highly socialized tribes. If our minds fail to understand that we now exist in a global tribe and not groupings of independent people and nations every aspect of what we know as civilized life is endangered.  Not just school safety, our elections, our nation, and our freedoms. Everything.  Everything we need work smoothly and sustainably as individuals or nations is made up of systems and structures that are all interdependent on the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God”.   As we celebrate ( ‘worship’?) Independence Day this July 4th, this is the singular ideal we must honor.  All people have the unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Independence is an illusion. We must now fight for liberty and justice for all, or prepare for unprecedented murderous chaos.   If that happens, a gun may become your best friend.

If you are still unconvinced…please read on.  

Our nation’s culture of increasing personal disconnect accelerated by smart phone addiction, selfies, endless entertainment, and mindless distractions will occasionally be interrupted by something important - like a mass shooting, an recession, a flood or a terrorist attack.  You will either become more interested in root (systemic) causes and addressing those, or you will turn more inward with despair, fear, and possibly hopelessness.  

Before that, remember that nearly 40 million Americans have no access to affordable health care and 1000s will likely to go bankrupt each year attempting to pay medical costs of intentional or accidental gun-shot victims, many who are faceless because they were not shot at a school. 

Our minds are limited as to how much death and suffering we can think about.  We cannot, however, limit our anger and advocacy to massacre emergencies.  We must work to understand our culture that glorifies violence yet ignores 50 young girls kidnapped from their boarding school recently in a Nigerian village by Boko Haram extremists, or the 5.5 million children and youths trapped for sex and slavery by human traffickers in the U.S. and elsewhere.   We must work mentally to understand the bravery of a Black Muslim off-duty Maryland Police officer murdered this week coming to rescue his next door neighbor who fear for her life from her estranged husband.  The armed officer was shot in an ambush at close range 5 times with a shot gun within steps of his own front door.  Multiple police attempts to find and disarm the suspect in the days leading up to the attack had failed.

Enraged, heartbroken students and parents who are preparing #MarchForOurLives on March 24 will be insufficient unless their preparations include teach-ins about America’s culture of violence, separatism and exceptionalism. Hopefully they will teach others that the terrorizing teenage deaths at U.S. schools is no more or less tragic than the 6,000 teens who will be killed this year texting while driving, the 5,000 teen deaths from driving while under the influence of alcohol, the thousands who will kill themselves from loneliness, cultural pressures, or lack of love and attention needed to meaningfully connect to others here, and the millions of children and parents suffering, displaced, and killed abroad from poverty and wars that are too often the result of US military involvement or lack of our humanitarian involvement.

My hope is that #MarchForOurLives protesters learn that guns do not divide us;  but our personal perspectives on guns do. 

Hunting and target shooting were major parts of my youth.  My father taught me (unintentionally) the greatest value of guns: self-defense.  He was a big, strong, illiterate and bitter man after the loss of his first son in a tragic drowning incident he could have prevented; He was a good man if providing for one’s family was the primary measure.  We never wanted for food, clothing, a warm bed, or entertainment.  We did however, deeply desired freedom from frequent physical beatings and verbal abuse.   His intolerance for anyone disagreeing with him or not immediately and perfectly performing his orders, and occasional death threats were terrifying.  As I grew more capable of enduring physical and emotional pain inflicted on me, my motivation turned to stopping the torment and bruises that he inflicted on my heroic mother. My gravitational attraction to guns in his unlocked gun cabinet grew.

Fantasies of murdering my father continued until I dreamed I actually did it.  I awoke crying.  Yet that didn’t stop my mind from imagining multiple lethal ways without using a gun to bring an end to his life and final peace and security to my Mom, sister and myself.  I’m proof that a motivated mind and a human body’s fragility and vulnerability are virtually unlimited.  This realization helped me earn a top grade in a college ROTC task shortly after the 1972 Munich Olympics terrorist attack.   Our assignment was to imagine ourselves as terrorists conjuring plots to attack the US.  I aced it.  I’d joined ROTC to avoid the Vietnam War draft and quit as soon as the war ended.  Studying biology and various global life threats after that my only shock on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, was that most Americans were shocked it had happened.  I had feared a massive terrorist attack and mentioned the threat of the suicidal airliner attack a few years before the Trade Towers fell.  Studying technological capacity and threat motives it became self-evident that ‘peace’ would not last. Without global justice, any ‘peace’ was just a period of reloading. And every tool and technology can be weaponized.  That is it the user’s heart that determines how it will be used. 

We can never effectively limit the technology available to any murderous passion.  But, we can dramatically reduce the human desire to commit mass murder, both here or abroad.  Our culture must be fully committed to everyone’s wellbeing.   We pledge liberty and justice for all but don’t codify it or demand it.  Justice and the protection of human rights are core principles of our Constitution but they are too often not enforced.   It’s no mystery that every major religion’s first principle is the Golden Rule, and the local and global consequences of failing that wisdom.

Hopefully, youth-inspired #NeverAgain actions will focus on transforming out nation’s inherently flawed government, economic and healthcare systems and structures that to this day fail to codify the fundamental principles used to justify the birth of our nation.  

Every 4^th of July we celebrate the document that offered those self-evident truths flowing from the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God”.   Perhaps its finally time we make “Life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” and “Liberty, and justice for all” our primary goal. 

Chuck Woolery, former Chair, United Nations Council of Organizations

and Deborah Dupré, Human Rights Reporter (rtd) onTwitter @DeborahDupré