More mental health services won’t help. Gun control won’t change it. Fetishizing guns is not going to get us there.
Screaming about stigma, the rights of the mentally ill, the over-pathologization of Americans, the Second Amendment, white males, piss poor health insurance parity, Narcissism, Sociopathy, societal decay and soul sickness won’t stop it.
Blaming rhetoric, our media, Rachel Maddow, Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, Richard Nixon, or Donald Trump…doesn’t matter.
Assaulting the character of millenials, the parents of millenials, the parents of the parents of millenials, and screaming entitlement is not getting the job done.
Blaming the wealthy, the poor, neglect, abuse, our society’s soul-crushing, oppressive tendencies toward judgment, the uneducated, the religious elite, and/or the liberal elite…are leaving us high-centered in the vast desert.
Prayer, meditation, lighting candles, magic, vigils. Make us feel better. And some people say they fill a windsock. I’ll keep my thoughts to myself.
It’s a ream of paper loose on the wind. Set a paperweight on it.
When a mind breaks, it breaks. When someone decides death is the answer, none of it matters, and if you are in the way, there’s little that can save you.
If the people you love, even more than yourself, find themselves in the way, you can’t shelter them.
But guess what, we CAN improve access to qualified mental health services. We CAN change the way weapons are procured. We CAN check our rhetoric. We CAN fight the various fights–against stigma, over-pathologizing, abuse, poverty, wealthy entitlement, and fair, equitable access to services for all.
We can pray. We can calm our broken hearts. We can hold our loved ones. We can gather. We can be better humans. Every one of us can be better.
We CANNOT stop a person from acting on the decision to open fire into the community, once they’ve lost their heart and mind. Unless we’re in the exactly right place at the exactly right time, and luck is on our side, we cannot.
These are two different things–the things we CAN do to build a better society, and the things we CAN’T do. When we mix what we CAN do into a big soup with what we CAN’T do, we’ve made something like cement, and we won’t be getting anywhere any time soon.
We CAN ask our leaders to enact changes that make sense AND honor the Second Amendment. We CAN push and push and push, unrelentingly, until these happen. We can push our leaders to try harder, dig deeper, and work together.
We really can.
And even then, we can’t convince an individual with Sociopathy and Narcissism that they need help. We can’t. It’s part of the disease. They think we are the disease.
We can start to understand that Sociopathy and Narcissism are real. We can take Domestic Violence more seriously. We can be much more careful in how we look at domestic violence.
And we can be careful with one another. Every day.
Mind your rhetoric out there, and hold your hearts.
