Seeking Answers

It appears that attention is given to a problem after a tragedy occurs. We have witnessed a series of mass shootings/murders and once the furor died down, the problem was forgotten.
There are many questions that require answers if we are to find a solution to the problem. I don’t think the problem is going to disappear.

I thought of my school days. There was no security needed. There were no school shootings. A murder was a rarity and highly publicized by newspapers since there was no TV. As children we were taught to respect our elders. We didn’t use first names for elders, but gave them respect by addressing them with Mr. or Mrs. Policemen were called “Sir”. As we became adults, we addressed our boss with respect using Sir, Madam, Mr. or Mrs.
In seeking answers to today’s problems, I wonder if there is some connection with the break-down in respect/authority. We know that familiarity breeds contempt. Could lack of respect be a cause?
As kids we were familiar with guns. We went hunting. We were taught about gun safety and caring for the weapon. We practices marksmanship. Automatic weapons either didn’t exist or were illegal for hunting. Blasting away at a target with multiple rounds is not marksmanship. Hand guns were used by the police force. I knew of no one who had a hand gun in the home. Security was not an issue.
Then there was the draft. Every young man was called up to serve a minimum of two years in the army, or he/she could enlist in another branch of the service for three or four years. In the service young men were taught discipline. It wasn’t a matter of choice. For those who lacked a father or didn’t have discipline in the home, they got it in the army. It served them well in life. Before one can give orders, they must first learn to take them. Since there is no longer a draft, but a volunteer army, could that play a role in how kids are raised today?

Many things have changed in the last 50 years. How have those changes affected our society? Have we adapted to the changes in a positive or negative way? If the past is to be seen as irrelevant for today, then that would include many of the laws of the past. How can past laws govern today’s society? Do you not think it prudent to examine our laws as they pertain to conditions existing today?

I was surprised the other day, when I did some research, to find that the mass shootings are not so new as we seem to think.

What has apparently changed is our awareness and concern.

The problem has not been forgotten. Steps are being taken by those who have the immediate means to do something about it.

We have all been changed by our knowledge of what happened. The questions are being asked, and solutions are being discussed.

As I said the other day, as writers we have the power to help. We can focus our stories on characters and plots that can help to promote the change - which ultimately must come from a change in heart.

Changing the laws is a short-term solution. Developing the empathy and sense of responsibility toward the people in our communities is the only thing that will have a long-term effect.

Seeing to it that the sources of power are more evenly distributed, that no one is excluded or ostracized, that everyone has means and knowledge enough to lessen the need for violent responses - those are the answers that will make a long-term difference.

Fifty years ago, life was not so different from that of a hundred years ago. A hundred years ago, the Industrial Age was still in its early stages. Many people were still living in the Agricultural Age - and age where success depended on working with the natural world rather than being in opposition to it. The daily lives of most people still reflected that era.

In an agricultural community, the need for a group concern for the conservation of resources was strong. Children needed to learn, early on, that compliance was a vital part of survival for the community.

Compliance had not been a strong trait among hunting societies, which depended more on the ability to function independently and the willingness to take risks. It was another way of life that relied on an understanding of the natural world, a complement to the planting traditions that grew out of it.

There was an acceptance of the reality that life feeds on life, that one must kill in order to stay alive. There was a strong respect for life, and a sense of humility in the face of that knowledge.

The main aim of Industrialization has been to conquer nature - and that's an important word here: conquer. We have been at war with the world we live in and upon. As this era has progressed, the distance from nature has increased, and respect for the land and its resources has declined.

The means of living have shifted further away from a contact with the natural world. More and more families moved into the towns and cities where the jobs were. Instead of growing and hunting our own food, we used the money we earned at those jobs to buy our food from the producers and manufacturers. Our awareness of the facts of our existence faded, and with it, our reverence for life. The old need for the conservation or resources, which was necessary, then, to have food available during the lean times, turned into a compulsion for hoarding, and money replaced the trade of goods. The growth of technology carried us even further away from life as we had known it for centuries - even millennia - and, even as we ascribed to democratic freedom, the differences and distances between the people who had access to those means and those who had not became more pronounced.

Mass murderers are nearly always men. Sorry to get a bit Freudian here, but a gun is often seen, psychologically, as an extension of a man's "power tool."

The early hunters weapon was a spear. His god was "up there," seen as the sun, or in other climates, the thunder, lightning, and wind.

Planting societies saw their power source as the earth itself, giving birth to the sustenance of life, the life-giving god-dess was right here, under and around us.

In our archetypal thinking, progress meant defeating nature with technological advances to control "her."

I'm not saying this progress was "bad." In the beginning, it was probably necessary - Nature can be cruel and unfeeling. Living off the land was not an easy thing. Tools like plows led to tractors and other manufactured products and gave a bit of balance to society, but today, things have become so out of balance, and it has been happening so quickly, that we are left without meaningful symbols and myths to help us. And matriarchy, taken to extremes, is as problematic as patriarchy. Our new myths need to address the need for balance and an image of a whole earth and sky.

At the same time, we won't find the answers by going backwards, or by looking at the past in an idyllic way, because the reality is that it was not. Some of us lived in relatively safe communities with strong illusions of security, but too many of us were disenfranchised, and that number has been growing, and with it, the resorting to violence as the only means of satisfaction.

For today, we need to be aware of the necessity for a change in the way we think and act. We need to study, and discuss - openly - and work toward finding and implementing solutions that have been thought out and talked about.

And we need to get back to living our daily lives, doing our jobs, fulfilling whatever purpose we have for being here right now, and recognizing that this latest tragedy has changed each of us forever. We are not forgetting, we are embedding this new awareness into our psyches - as a group and individually.

It's time to get busy, get back to work, and just do the stuff we are supposed to be doing, each of us in our own unique way.

We sold our shotgun yesterday. No more worries about the wrong person getting hold of it.

All we have left is an old 22, single shot which we keep disabled with the firing pin removed. We have no ammunition for it either. We feel safer now.

I still worry about the prescription drugs and the rage they can evoke.
Probably there should be warnings to steer clear of firearms to those who use them.

We should do everything at once: gun control, mental health help, clean up the
violent video games, movies and use no violent discipline.

Our children need to be our first priority.

Change must begin with us.

Don,
If every gun owner were like you, there would be no problem.


A big difference--When I was a child, no one had assault rifles.

12/19/2012

It's true what ABe said, Pres. Obama wants to ban

the heavy weapons and heavy amo .... Let's see if

they really do it , otherwise they'll have hell on their hands

and the hell will be the parents of these poor children. I

remembe years ago my niece when she was 7 or 8 called my

Mother Marie, My mother turned and said: : I'm not your friend,

I'm your grandmother, don't ever call me Marie again." That's how

I was raised , the person was called Mr., Mrs., Aunt, Uncle...Even

if they were friends of the family.

Cheers..Joe..

Whatever became of PacMan and the other fun video games?
Kids should have fun movies and not murder and mayhem.

Children are very impressionable.

Don, I think you and I must be blood related. We both have Old Codger Genes.

Today I saw a news report on German TV. A reporter visited a site in Virginia where a man has built an underground bunker. He’s preparing for the end of the world. He has food to last seven years along with an arsenal of guns and ammunition. The reason given for the weapons is that those who survive will be seeking food and he needs to protect his cache. For those who have paid to be housed in the bunker, it will cost them $1000 per week for food. More nutty info, however the reporter said that “Predicting the end of the world is as American as Hot Dogs.”

I applaud those who decorated Christmas Trees. They obviously believe they will be around on December 25th.

Some Americans are berserk?

How could the news so effectively fool us? They had some people thinking
Nancy Lanza was a teacher, a nut, irresponsible and everything evil.
Now they are in reverse.
Strange. very strange

She collected assault weapons.

Barrack Obama,

President of the United States of America

Today, Mister President, I heard you say that more than anything else right now this nation should have a new sense of perspective. I agree. However, what we don’t need is a knee jerk perspective that is unreasoned and preys on the public’s sense of shock and outrage over the Sandy Hook shootings.

New laws might be needed, but we have to be careful in passing laws that regulate honest citizens, and don’t do anything to make it harder for a criminal to obtain a weapon. By it's very nature, the word criminal means against the law. It seems logical to me that the current laws on the books are more than sufficient to make such a shooting as the one in Sandy Hook against the law. What happened there, and in Columbine and Aurora were against the law, that is to say the laws that are already on the books. Isn’t it reasonable to think if we have laws expressly prohibiting such attacks, and they didn’t stop the attacks, that a hundred new laws, or a thousand, will not act to stop future attacks? That is a sense of perspective, I think, that makes perfectly good sense. Perhaps new laws are needed, but what will the new laws say that the old ones don’t?

There is a good argument for banning assault weapons, fully automatic weapons, and large capacity magazines for assault rifles. Not so much with handguns, because by their nature they are not all that accurate anyway, other than in the hands of a very practiced person. There is also a good argument to be made for instigating a full background check when an individual purchases a weapon at a gun show or over the Internet. However, in that respect, someone should do a comprehensive study on the amount and kind of information that is available on a paid Internet search, and how long it takes to obtain that information. The original waiting period on buying a pistol was due to the length of time it took to perform a detailed background search using old-fashioned paper records and phone calls. If today’s Internet search reveals the same information in 30 minutes or a couple of hours, then that should be a reasonable waiting period. After all, it is the information that is important, right, and not how long it takes to obtain that information. If a complete background check can be done in minutes, shouldn’t that be all that is required?

We need to first start with a fresh outlook and a better sense of perspective about what to do over the decaying mental health issue that has been going on in this country since the 80s. And we need to get a better sense or perspective about how we can go back to the days when parents instilled a sense of morality and fair play in their children, and taught them that actions carry responsibilities. We need to rethink our current system of not allowing teachers to use corporal punishment, and parents that do not teach their children to respect the rights of others, instead of just giving them anything and everything, and teaching them that they are entitled to always feel good about themselves and that winning isn’t important. It’s not Got that needs to be back in schools, nor it is the pledge, it’s the moral principals we were taught along with the morning prayer and the reciting of the pledge. It’s the knowledge that if we did something against the rules we were held accountable for our actions, and the teachers had the right to punish us for those actions. It’s the knowledge we were taught that told us that just showing up for a sporting event isn’t enough, we have to show up wanting to win, and being dissatisfied when we lost. And when we learned that lesson about a sporting event, we were also learning it about life.

And we have to remember that several generations of kids grew up playing with cap guns and watching cowboy movies where the bad guys lost and the good guys won, and both sides, good and bad, had a code of honor they lived by. There were no video games where body count was what counted, or where we could kill the same guys day after day after day, and tomorrow they’d be back for more. In real life the ones we kill don’t come back for more tomorrow, and when children’s brains are so desensitized to violence and bloodshed by being exposed to it every day, what do we expect them to do when they become angry or upset over something in real life?

Yes, Mister President, we need to look at many things using a fresh sense of perspective, and perhaps that fresh sense of perspective can best be found by revisiting some of the old fashioned values parents in the 30s, 40s, and 50s instilled in their children.

If you can do that, I don’t think you’ll have to worry so much about the senseless attacks going on in the numbers they have since we let those values slip away from our children.

Perhaps we truly are reaping what we have sowed.

Other countries don't have a problem--why do we?

Abe F. March wrote:

For those who have paid to be housed in the bunker, it will cost them $1000 per week for food.

Where does he intend to spend the money?

Al Stevens wrote:

Abe F. March wrote:

For those who have paid to be housed in the bunker, it will cost them $1000 per week for food.

Where does he intend to spend the money?

Good question.

You're right. For some, having money is the goal. Where they intend to spend it doesn't seem to matter.
In any event, this is December 21st. I got up this morning and I'm still alive. From what I can see, the world is still intact. If this were to be my last day on earth, I would want to say thanks to all of you for your friendship and look forward to our meeting again, whenever, whereever. We are all part of the universe and connected.

I looked up. No meteorites yet. I looked east. No tsunami. I looked down. The ground isn't shaking. But the stock exhange hasn't opened yet.

Wall Street will probably crash.

The Mayans never said, or thought, that the world would end today. The end of the world is a western concept, based on linear thinking, especially about time. It is a misperception based on our prophetic expectations.

For the Mayans, time was and is cyclical. Time is not a line, but a circle. For them, today is the last day of an era; tomorrow merely the beginning of a new one. Today is the Winter Solstice - the first day of winter. Did the temperature suddenly turn cold last night? (Well, actually, here is SA, it did, but that is just a coincidence.) On the Spring Equinox, will it suddenly turn warmer? Is there a dramatic difference between December 31st and January 1st?

Even the term, Apocalypse, does not mean "ending." It means "revealing." In that sense, we are living in apocalyptic times. More of the media lies are exposed every day. Our old perspective of "Reality" has been crumbling as a newer one takes place. We are "Shifting" into a new mass perspective that is, and will continue more and more, focused less on the individual and more on a sense of community; cooperation over competition, heart over intellect. Today, for the Mayans, is the last day for the old worldview; tomorrow, the first of the new, but we won't see any dramatic changes anymore that we see dramatic changes in the weather as we move from Fall into Winter.

Thanks for the information, Ann. Many read into things what they want without any research.

Ann said:

More of the media lies are exposed every day. Our old perspective of are "Shifting" into a new mass perspective that is, and will continue more and more, focused less on the individual and more on a sense of community; cooperation over competition, heart over intellect.



I wish it would happen faster.

Keep wishing and working for it. You do make a difference.

Abe F. March wrote:

Thanks for the information, Ann. Many read into things what they want without any research.

Lifelong learning is the best way to stay useful, Abe, and having a purpose keeps us young - at least in spirit.

Annie

NRA calls for armed security guards at schools. Might be a good idea. What think you?

It would provide jobs as well as protect teachers and kids.

And our harmless gun owners such as LC and the two Dons wouldn't have to worry about losing their guns.