We Need To Talk

     On a scraggly old green sheet of lined notepaper from an ancient, middle school pad I still had for some reason--the one with the flower stickers and the rainbow-colored peace sign in the center of the cover--I'd begun a list of statistics I wanted to share with you. They all pertained to my hot-button issue at that moment: Economic Inequality. That was early on Friday morning.
     Now that torn sheet sits here like a relic of some idyllic time unknown today, a time when twenty families in Newtown, Connecticut could send their first-graders to another day at school perhaps not totally without worry, but without the discussion of death and gun violence. Maybe their biggest fear was strep or the flu striking right before the Holiday Break. Perhaps the early-morning discussions leaned more toward hand-washing regimens than stop-and-drop drills.
     As a parent of people who were not so long ago in first grade, who carry those middle-school notebooks today, I worry that there might have been an argument, a stupid turn of phrase on the ride to school or at the bus stop that on any other day could have come to a brain-settling conclusion. And I let my mind go to thoughts of anger: What right did anyone have to take what Brother Dr. Cornel West refers to as "the precious children"? Were they there when Mom worried herself foolish over a 105-degree temperature? Were they there when Dad was sure that cut needed stitches, and after soon consternation he was proved to be scar-saving and right?
     Whenever a child is lost to an accident or a homicide isn't followed by suicide, I wonder if these parents confront the guilty party in court with details of the child's birth, illnesses and injuries, parties and presents, first words and last friends. Do those who survive to face trial ever completely understand what care was taken in those precious years? Will they ever know, will any of us ever know what we've been robbed of in the futures that will never come? The answer is no, of course not. None of us can know what anyone involved in such tragedies is feeling unless we ourselves have faced such trials of the judicial system and of the soul any more than we can have any idea of the god-awful pain these Connecticut parents are having to confront. I doubt it's an understatement to presume that an entire generation of a small New England town has been knocked from its trajectory, that a town is forever changed.
     I look over my list of previously imperative figures such as 93% of new income created in 2010 went to the top 1% of earners and it pales in comparison to a new figure scrawled in the margin: From 2008-2009 almost exactly twice as many pre-schoolers were killed by guns than police officers. Re-read that last sentence and survey yourself for horror. I wanted to rant about the fact that as recently as the 1970s, back when my green sheet of paper was new, the average U.S. CEO made 30 times what the average U.S. worker makes, a number which has risen for the CEOs to nearly 500 times the average U.S. worker's pay. Now I want you to know that Florida Governor Rick Scott signed a law saying that doctors, specifically pediatricians, can no longer ask whether or not guns are safely stored in the home along with the usual seatbelt, tooth-brushing, and sunscreen inquiries. Supposedly some NRA-member constituents were "offended" by the question. I suspect many of them were also named ALEC.
     Just like the languishing Violence Against Women Act, gun violence/prevalence in this nation is a sacred cow of "not okay to discuss". It's wrong to turn tragedies into "politcal fodder". It's personal. It's freedom. It's liberty. I'll tell you what's personal: kids. Our children should have the freedom to be happy-go-lucky and the liberty to feel safe at home and at school. How can we proudly use the legislative process to guard them in the womb and out of it from secondhand smoke but allow them to experience secondhand gun presence everywhere? National Parks, political rallies, houses of worship all permit concealed (or not) carry in some states. But when exactly will I be able to ask to be seated in the non-firing section of a restaurant?
     One common caricature in this country is that of the gun-totin', pro-life individual. Setting aside that car crash of ideologies, a question remains to be answered, and it isn't a pretty one: Were these precious first-graders simply six and seven years plus nine months too old to be a political cause?
     Everyone, no matter their politics, religion or lack thereof, nationality, color, or gender identity is appalled by what happened in Newtown on Friday morning. No one is untouched by the trauma of the surviving children nor the heartbreak of the parents of the lost. And at no one group should blame be leveled. But we, as a collective society, should be aware of our words and attitudes when it comes to assessing the world around us. We can joke about "idiots" while at the same time making it clear that they are human beings just like us and that they deserve to be alive in this world no matter how much they may raise our blood pressures. And the very last thing we need to do is to criminalize anyone with a problem or a lack of resources to deal with a problem. Historical evidence tells us that whenever economic disparity increases so does violence. Times are hard and nerves are frayed and some among us cannot deal with their daily round alone. They need to know they are part of something and that they do matter: They have something beyond a parting "shot" and a final "notice" to contribute to us all.
     We do not need metal detectors in elementary schools, we need mental detectors in our healthcare system. Let's not bring more prisons to our communities, let's expand charities in our hometowns. People in pain do not need to be profiled, they need to be known. I think I've shared here before a quote that always stops me cold: "My biggest fear is to die without anyone having really known me." I'm sure I read that (or some reasonable facsimile) in the preface of Sarah Ban Breathnach's 1995 book, SIMPLE ABUNDANCE, but I long ago gifted that edition to a dear one and my current volume has an updated, special 10th anniversary preface in place of the one I recall. The newer preface, ironically, deals largely with keeping one's wits and wisdom during economic downturns. (Her seventeen-year-old meditation for December 14th just happens to be on the difficulties of the Christmas holiday on those who have experienced a recent loss.)
     And that's where I stop thinking. I mentioned this to my husband who replied, "You can't go there." He's right. I cannot, hope I'm never able to, and I have no right to go there. "There" is sacred emotional ground. I catch myself when I think of the already wrapped presents under already decorated trees, of the innocence of a greeting yet to come, of an otherwise innocuous seasonal commercial. The bland now seems somehow profane.
     I once wrote of a character so in denial over the sudden passing of her most special soul that she ran around the neighborhood collecting the next morning's papers as if she could undo death. She couldn't, and neither can we. Crazy people will do crazy things, we tell ourselves. But we can ask our representative government to take up the question of the right to possess certain types of items that have the capacity to kill dozens in seconds. And we can vow to know each other a little bit better. We can stop answering homicide with capital punishment, death with death. We could ask for less guns and more healthcare. We could make imprisonment a less lucrative business. The island nation of Japan took on their gun laws, taking many guns off its streets, and now has an average of 2 gun homicides per year. Japan's population is half that of the U.S.
     Of our 34,000-plus gun deaths per year, over 18,000 are suicides. Most people who attempt but don't succeed in killing themselves never try it again. Few who attempt it with a gun get a second chance. Not too many hours apart from Newtown's tragedy, a man walked into a Chinese elementary school and stabbed twenty-two kids with a knife. All the  Chinese children are wounded, but they are all alive. Twenty American schoolchildren never got that chance at recovery.
     I don't presume to know why this latest in a string of mass shootings occurred and nothing said within this column beyond the statistics should be taken as a pronouncement of any abiding understanding of the events. In the coming days we may learn more facts that go to motive and we may not. This shooter may have taken his reasons with him. Everything I've addressed here may have a grand total of squat to do with this crime, but we need to talk about it. We protect our kids from so many things, we cannot go PC-silent for the fear of bruising someone's feelings or sensitivities. There's no rug strong enough to sweep this amount of pain under forever.
     Maybe my green sheet of paper now gone soft with age did contain an accidental point after all. Our nation and her people have wounds from difficult times to heal and policy questions to attempt to answer. They may rise and converge at some points and the conversation will get dicey. Let's not back away from those danger zones of nomenclature and ideology, let's use those moments--finally, this time--to minimize the zones of danger for us all.