Because of this tragedy, those experiences have been taken away from so many families, and when I focus in on that fact, I have a hard time coping with a sadness that starts to spiral out of control.
There may not be an obvious connection here, writing about this event on a parenthood blog that mostly focuses on the struggles of trying to become a parent or being one. But despite all the ink spilled and bytes consumed and punditry blathered on television stations, I believe there's something missing from the national conversation: the role of community and shared responsibility. As any group of people living in community, we need each other and we have a responsibility to care for each other. Part of the reason we started this blog is because we felt like too many people suffer alone. Women (and their partners) suffer miscarriages without telling anyone. Or others find they can't have children and quietly go through the process of adoption (or they decide not to have children at all). But no one talks about it. Communication that might generate conflict and awkwardness and pain is avoided. Is that the kind of world we should live in? Where we suffer alone and assume no one else can (or is willing) to share our burdens? As my family and I have been through our own struggles with a miscarriage, a traumatic birth and subsequent mental health battles, we decided to stop suffering alone.
For me, that's what connects this blog to what happened in Newtown.
I have a hard time believing I live in a world where someone bursts into an elementary school and systematically shoots and kills children.
As a new dad, I don't know how to process this. As a human being, I don't know how to process this. I am grateful that my daughter is only six months old, and I don't have to figure out how to tell her about this kind of evil in the world just yet. Not yet...that qualifier terrifies me. I never want her to know that kind of evil and pain, but I know it's inevitable.
It feels like there are no sacred, safe spaces left in this country. Schools, temples, malls and movie theaters. Why have these communal spaces become arenas for shooting tragedies? What does it say about how we build and sustain communities? Have we as a country lost our willingness to engage in meaningful community building? Are there safe community spaces? Where do people come together in meaningful ways to share their lives, experiences and responsibilities?
I will leave the political debates, specifically about gun control and mental health care, for another time, for others to argue about in another space. But I wonder: Would it make a difference if our communities were stronger? Would things like this happen on such a scale and with such frequency if we lived more intentionally communal lives -- where we had responsibilities to others that extend beyond our families? Where we know our neighbors, where villages really do raise children? I don't know much about Newtown, other than at least portions (especially where the killer lived) seem like a classic bedroom community. There is plenty of urban violence in this country -- awful shootings that also often involve children, for example -- but I wonder about the impact on our society of communities where we don't know our neighbors. Suburbs and subdivisions seem to experience a disproportionate amount of these mass killings.
As we sift through the horror of Newtown, there will be plenty of conversation about mental health services and gun control -- and rightly so -- but I wonder if the real question is the loss of dense, community-driven connection in this country. As far as I can tell from media reports, no one really knew Adam Lanza very well, nor his mother, who owned several guns. Their house was on a huge plot of land, and their neighbors didn't really know much about them. Their subdivision (what a depressing word, by the way) clearly does not structurally lend itself to communal, shared responsibility. This is a (broken) family that lived in functional isolation.
(Quick aside: though I do not own a gun, I have no issue, generally speaking, with guns or others' choice to own them. I grew up around guns, took a hunter safety course as a teen and even participated in target shooting competitions as a kid. I was taught how to handle and respect the weapons in my home, and I respect the rights of people who choose to own guns.)
In truth, I live in a city that has ten times the density of Newtown, Conn., but I don't know my neighbors very well, either. In this country, we no longer seek out the company of people who live in proximity to us. We drive out of our way to connect with people who agree with us -- who share our predetermined, demographically assigned values. Or we just shut out everyone else entirely.
My wife and I joined Park Hill United Methodist Church partially out of a sense of lost community. We'd had several friends who'd moved away and we had encountered some personal loss that we were struggling to make sense of. We needed a community, and, thank God, we found it through a church that's only two miles from our house. Every week, we invite members of the church into our home. They come, they hold my daughter, play with her, they engage in fellowship with us, and we feel connected in a way that we haven't ever really experienced before in our nine years in this city.
Why is that? It shouldn't be this hard to connect and engage with your neighbors and build community.
Was Adam Lanza part of a community that cared about him? That shared his struggles? That felt a responsibility to take care of him as a neighbor or friend? This young man didn't have access to (or at least didn't take advantage of) mental health services he needed -- that's clear -- but did he even have a community of people who cared about him at all?
Have we lost our sense of community in this country? Have we lost our sense of shared responsibility?
There will always be tragedies, but I have to believe this particular kind of tragedy doesn't have to be. This isn't a natural disaster or an act of political terrorism. This is a shooting. In an elementary school. A sacred space. What fixes this? I don't want my daughter to grow up in a world where tragedies like this happen. I don't want her to grow up in a world I have a hard time believing even exists.
Can we rebuild a sense of community, shared responsibility, service, compromise and dialogue in this country? That's what has always made our country great. How do we repair the parts of this great society, this American Dream, that have been broken?
What fixes this?
