Sick at Heart

I have puzzled since yesterday to find something relevant to say regarding the horrific shooting that took place on December 14. I am from Connecticut and have been in Newtown a fair number of times over the years. This is meaningless, but somehow brings it a little closer to home. As a parent, as a teacher and administrator, and as a human being, I am sick at heart. Nothing I can say or do can possibly make sense of this or make it better in any way.

What I can do is to focus awareness on my own reactions and thoughts as a person and as a Buddhist.  

My first and continuing reaction has been one of pain, my own (I have been in tears at various times since the news first broke) and that of the many, many people directly affected by this tragedy. I have practiced Tonglen during my meditation, breathing in the pain of all these fellow humans and breathing out loving-kindness. I have no illusion that this will benefit any of them in any way, but empathy is all I can offer at the moment.

As a Buddhist, a particularly vexing part of this is how to react to the young man who did this. I want to be angry with him, to hate him, to call him monster and evil as many have done, and put as much distance between him and me as members of our species as I can. But if I truly espouse the philosophy of loving-kindness that I try to live by, then I cannot deny our shared humanity and must find whatever compassion I can. I am struck by the fact that the horrendous pain he has caused can only have come from some terrible pain of his own. Whether as a result of mental illness or his warped interpretation of experiences he has had, the need to cause such needless pain to others, particularly children who could have in no way wronged him, can only have come from a place of unremitting pain within him. This in no way excuses or even explains the terrible choice he made that we will never fully understand. But it is the shared experience of the pain all of us as humans have known that makes it impossible for me not to feel compassion for that part of him. As I have stated before, as human beings, we share the greatest accomplishments of our species, showing us our almost unlimited potential, as well as the most heinous acts of depravity committed by our kind, showing us the depths to which it is possible to descend. Both ends of the spectrum, and everything in between, are encompassed in our humanness. It is only in accepting this reality that we can truly find compassion for ourselves and for our fellow beings. I abhor the actions the young man chose to take in his madness, but if I am able to deny his humanness and attempt to relegate him to some sub-human strata, then I myself am lost, and my philosophy of loving-compassion is utterly without meaning.

I would be remiss in not also sharing my belief that we, as a society, have contributed to the creation of the milieu in which violence has come to be not a last resort, but a viable option for expressing our displeasure with how believe the world has treated us.  Our young people, particularly our young men, have been reared on terribly violent video games in which aggression and violence are the path to "victory", but also in which we are able to create mayhem and murder against our "opponents" in a virtual world with no real-world consequences to befall us. In the virtual world we do not hear the pitiful cries of our victims (except in disembodied, artificially produced voices) nor do we see or smell their blood, nor need to consider the anguish of their loved ones. We (and I do not hold my self above this, being a James Bond fan all my life) seek out the rush of adrenaline provided by violent clashes in which the good guy vanquishes the bad, as opposed to the warmer rush of endorphins provided by a peaceful loving encounter with another person. We watch (and again, I am an addict) television shows in which the most gruesome of scenes are laid out before us as the FBI or police struggle to stop a killer not unlike the man in Newtown. This is not to say such things should not exist....as humans we have enjoyed such violent spectacle for centuries (Titus Andronicus springs to mind). Rather, it is to say that we do not take into account the possible reactions of those people for whom the violence becomes the stuff of their fantasies, fantasies in which they are somehow vindicated for the wrongs they believe the world has done them. We turn away from the strange people around us, leaving them ever more isolated to wrestle with their inner demons.

In the end, we will never have the answer to why this happened...and realistically, it doesn't matter. What matters, as my youngest son said, is that it could happen. The political maneuvering around Second Amendment issues has already begun. I understand that many people are fearful and need the sense (however illusory) of protection that gun ownership affords them. I understand that some people enjoy the sport of hunting, and I know many good people who fall in this category. However, all of this aside, NO ONE NEEDS TO OWN AN ASSAULT RIFLE CAPABLE OF FIRING MULTIPLE ROUNDS PER SECOND except a member of a SWAT team or a soldier in a combat zone opposed by soldiers similarly armed. Yet, in our headlong rush to preserve our "second amendment rights", rather than make laws based on reason, we have made it possible for ordinary citizens to possess these instruments of death (for in fact they have no other purpose whatsoever), something almost every other industrialized nation has chosen to prohibit.

Banning such weapons will not, of course, guarantee that such horrific acts will never be repeated, but it will make it a great deal more difficult to cause the level of destruction we have seen far too many times.

When all is said and done, the only thing we can do is to live each day well, try not to harm any living being, and offer peace and compassion to everyone whose paths cross ours. It seems not to amount to much in the greater scheme of things but it is far more significant than one might think. If each of us made the choice to do this, the level of violence we all must endure cannot help but to decrease.