THE WORLD BREAKS US ALL

 

The world breaks all of us sooner or later. 

The tragedy is not that we are broken but that so few are mended.  Yet if we are loved, we heal and become stronger in the broken places.

A gold plaque hangs next to a bullet hole in the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis., where a lone gunman killed six worshippers and injured three others last August.

It is engraved with the words, "We Are One."

 

"It frames the wound," says Pardeep Kaleka, son of former temple president Satwant Singh Kaleka, who died in the massacre.

 "The wound of our community, the wound of our family, the wound of our society."

The small community of Newtown, Conn. will pull together, the wounds binding them closer than they were before.

The question why? is asked of course.

We are a broken people, shards of our fragmented psyches slashing at others as we pass them by on our lonely journey.

Why children? is asked.

Those who are haunted by their loss of innocence often lash out at those who still possess it.

Mass murders are getting worse people cry.

There were more mass murders of innocents during 1929:

the gang wars of Prohibition where movie theaters, restaurants, and public streets were not safe.

"There is no pattern, there is no increase," says criminologist James Allen Fox of Boston's Northeastern University, who has been studying the subject since the 1980s, spurred by a rash of mass shootings in post offices.

The random mass shootings that get the most media attention are the rarest, Fox says. Most people who die of bullet wounds knew the identity of their killer.

Society moves on, he says, because of our ability to distance ourselves from the horror of the day, and because people believe that these tragedies are "one of the unfortunate prices we pay for our freedoms."

Grant Duwe, a criminologist with the Minnesota Department of Corrections who has written a history of mass murders in America, said that while mass shootings rose between the 1960s and the 1990s, they actually dropped in the 2000s. And mass killings actually reached their peak in 1929, according to his data.

Ban guns is the cry.

The bloody years of Prohibition apparently have taught us nothing.  The damage is done.  There is an ocean of weapons floating across the states. 

Better to restrict the sale of ammunition, making of weapons really expensive clubs.

But we focus on the wrong things as we always do.

The future is purchased by the present.  What do we do that reduces these bouts of bloodshed?

There are two categories of people.  Only two.  The invalids and the nurses.

Let us be nurses, binding the sprains before they become breaks.

We teach everything in our schools but what is needed to live a healthy life.  Let us train our teachers to be aware, to spot blemishes in psyches before they curdle into venom.

Let us teach in our schools how to live a functional life mentally and emotionally. 

We teach how to tackle on the football field. 

Let us teach our students how to tackle the emotional opponents all students face.

Man will always find a weapon. 

Take one away.  He will find another.  Fill an empty bottle and fill it with gasoline and a lighted rag. 

There will be less victims.  But One child slain is one too many.

Don't hide the weapon.  Heal the mind.