I’m loading the dishwasher, the boys are outside catching giant grasshoppers for a bug circus, and the radio announces the five o’clock news.
I rinse a plate, an exercise in futility since the waffle syrup has pooled and shines hard as a transparent penny. The water rolls off into the sink – and then I hear the words.
Another school shooting. Young children. Ten girls wheeled out on stretchers, airlifted, chaos.
How do I describe such moments, by now, sickly familiar to each of us? They hang in the air, low balloons, and we wait for them to fill with information. Answers. Hope. And then the reporter speaks, fills in the blanks, peppers us with the details and any hope falls to the ground. Leaden.
Last week it was Bailey, Colorado.
Now, Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania.
I am not a psychologist or psychiatrist, and don’t need to be to say that people who take others hostage, bind them, and shoot them are not stable. I’m stating the obvious.
What is not obvious is what we can do about it. A look at the big picture might say that we, as a culture, have come to glorify violence to such an extent that we can barely shock ourselves anymore. It is in almost every movie, on all of our most popular TV shows, in our music, on our computers, running through the marketing strategies that target our children, their toys, their ears and eyes and money.
A look at the big picture might say it is too easy to get your hands on a gun.
But, these men were mentally ill.
In one case, we know little girls were lined up and shot because a man was mad at God and having disturbing dreams.
People who think they have a direct and divine mandate from God to hurt, discount, and disenfranchise other human beings are mentally ill. And though most mental illnesses are personal and private, full of valiant effort and struggle that does not turn outward – just like most physical illnesses – a very, very, few mental illnesses can bring the sufferer to the point of lashing out, hurting others, killing others.
This has always been so.
The mind, like the body, can fall ill.
So how do we protect ourselves from, as I heard it put the other day, “crazies in the streets?”
The inclination is to cloister, round-up-yours and others-just-like-you, turn your shoulders stiffly, keep the scary guys out. Lock up, hunker down.
The supposed adage of the West is rugged individualism, take care of your own, pull yourselves up by your bootstraps.
I don’t buy it. Never have.
It is exactly the wrong thing to do.
We need to let others in. Social networks and communities of people who talk to each other and help each other can keep people square and steady. Then, should someone rock off balance, should someone need food or shelter or medicine, or treatment for mental illness, someone else just might notice, call for humane help, and perhaps avert a breakdown in the making.
Sometimes people can’t go it alone, and we ignore that fact at our own peril. Our mental health system –what there is of it – is sorely under funded and badly broken. More and more public education about mental illnesses is needed, and the stigmas associated with such illnesses finally obliterated. Nearly all of the mentally ill are of no danger to us. We need to be able to see them without turning away. Then, we just might notice when someone is becoming a real danger, we might just be able to get some help.
We ignore our mental health system at our own peril. We continue to use polarization and the fanning of hate and intolerance as weapons to win elections and sell viewpoints and products at our own peril. The anger brewing all around us can be quelled, but not by fear and turning away. It requires something much harder – inclusion, community, respect.
We are all in this together, and ignoring that puts us all in peril.
