The other night after my teammates and I finished our hockey game up at the arena, several of us changed and gathered at the bar for a Christmas drink. It’s that once-a-year moment when most of us, who have little to do with each other except share Sunday night adult recreational hockey, sit down in the lead up to Dec. 25. We hadn’t been sitting more than a few minutes when the talk shifted to the topic that’s been on everybody’s mind all week.
“Unbelievable, eh, that shooting in Connecticut,” one of the guys said.
The drinking at our end of the table stopped. So did stories about the lack of snow this fall, Christmas tree decorating or plans for the holidays. Suddenly, those frivolous things were eclipsed by shaking heads and a recounting of the images of that elementary school in not so faraway Newtown, Conn., its broken doorway, scattering children and adults, ambulances and swarming SWAT teams.
For a second, I wasn’t sure where the conversation would go next. Talk of the young victims? Speculation about school safety? Or the big one, gun control? Pro or anti? To my surprise it was none of those.
“What kind of guy would take his anger out on kids?” somebody said.
Here was a bright 20-year-old single child, Adam Lanza, with good grades at college – A’s in computers and American history, B’s in macro-economics – but a loner. Yes, a classmate at the state college called him “quiet… super smart… so much younger than the rest of us,” according to an Associated Press report in the U.S. The same story pointed out that his divorced mother, who’d taken him to shooting ranges, was “a survivalist… preparing for society’s economic and infrastructural collapse.”
I’m not a psychologist, but wouldn’t a picture of a withdrawn boy, endlessly playing Tour of Duty, prematurely familiarized with high-powered firearms by a paranoiac parent raise a little suspicion?
A couple of nights after my conversation with hockey teammates about the how’s and why’s of Newtown, I bumped into a neighbour and her college-age son. Again we did some head shaking at the murders of 20 Grade 1 children and six school staff. We acknowledged how many thousands of communities across North America are about the same size as Newtown, Conn. The conversation edged toward blame and causes. My neighbour said the problem was parenting. Her son, aged 21, commented that things are different for his generation – different attitude, different pressures. He thought part of the solution is mentoring.
Later that night, on radio, I listened to Craig Scott, who’d survived the shootings at Columbine High School, in Littleton, Col. In 1999, he’d found himself in a classroom where a dozen of his classmates (including his sister Rachel) were gunned down around him. In the years since, he’d ventured out across America to speak of kindness and compassion, trying to understand the values of his generation and its association with violence. He doesn’t recommend institutional change, that is, laws that come down on his peers.
“I’ve met a lot of the Adam Lanzas of the world,” Scott told the CBC. “Laws don’t change people’s hearts. (This) is a cultural and spiritual issue.”
On the one hand, I disagree with him about the intervention of law. In Canada, where we value “peace, order and good government,” I believe we have found a comfortable balance between regulation and common sense. We have chosen to outlaw capital punishment, drunk driving and for the most part public access to automatic weapons of war.
Where we have lost our way, I agree with Scott, is how to make better contact with the current generation of 20-somethings. Is the answer better parenting? Mentoring? Or, as I pointed out last week, more effective listening? Probably all of these. What’s abundantly clear, I think, is the need not to blame from a distance and then ignore. The answer is to get involved.
This week, as a very hectic semester at the college where I teach drew to a close, I had to face that challenge myself. Last Friday, the same day as the Newtown shootings, as I marked furiously to meet the grade submission deadline and dealt with some students’ angst about passing, I came across an email marked “very important.” In the note, one of my students wrote about health, family and worries about failing. Not unusual, until I read the line about “dealing with feelings of suicide.”
It’s not the first time I’d received this kind of note. From previous experience, I’d learned not to dismiss it. I immediately called in the college counsellors. I answered the email saying so.
At this moment, I don’t know what effect our response is having. But in the wake of Friday’s events, and with Christmas days away, I can only hope offering a helping hand might be better than dismissing it out-of-hand.