Grace Ross: It Really Does Take a Village

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Grace Ross, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

Grace Ross, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

All my love and best energy like so many others is with the people of Newtown, Connecticut right now. Given how completely thrown and in shock we all are – so many of the folks I know, distracted by this deep sense of loss and overturning of our sense of reality. I cannot imagine what it is like for the folks who live in the community, let alone those who lost a child personally.

I was saddened to miss the hastily called vigil in Worcester – mostly because of the desire to connect with others as we mourn the unthinkable.

Attention will turn, of course, to what we could do as a society to avert situations like this. The mapping of gun deaths is chilling in the increases across the United States; they parallel the market crash and economic ups and downs of the last few years (mostly downs needless to say).

Lots of folks are talking about gun control once again. I almost dread the overly well-trodden arguments that are already beginning on social media and even in the press.

Of course it’s people who kill people and not guns, but the amount of death and destruction that can be accomplished by a human who’s out of control with a knife is tiny compared to one with a semi-automatic weapon. So, while the basic statement is true it’s not helpful in trying to determine policy. And human-tailored policy is not about absolutes but about the nuances of human behavior and what our real commitments are to each other in a civil society.

Similarly, there are the quoting and misquoting, the interpreting of the Second Amendment of the Constitution. The one thing that’s absolutely certain is that the folks who wrote that amendment were not even capable of conceiving the possibility of automatic and semi-automatic weapons. So, falling back on their understanding certainly won’t help us face the world in which we live now. These days an automatic weapon can change hands, cross state lines and wreak havoc in a distant community in a matter of days, if not hours. So, we must craft policy for the present not some past that can’t be compared.

Honestly, my friends who actually do use guns to hunt for food would never use a semi-automatic or automatic weapon. Those guns aren’t intended for regular everyday purposes such as our founding fathers might have conceived of. In fact, my friends who hunt say that if it’s really about sport skills you should be using bows and arrows.

So if it isn’t about hunting and it isn’t about regular use, then I think it’s legitimate to ask why these weapons? And especially what does it mean if these weapons can fall into the hands of was purportedly a mentally ill young person? I don’t think anywhere in the Constitution was supposed to be enshrined the idea that a young person with mental illness would be taught how to use semi-automatic weapons. And I’m certain that’s not what our forefathers were thinking of.

That gets to the deeper question here: throughout time there have been mentally ill young people. Addressing their challenges is harder in a time period when many of us cannot look young people in the face and honestly ask them what they’re dreaming of growing up to be. That’s because we aren’t even able to dream of any future for them,

But if we had real connections to each other, we wouldn’t leave in the hands of only one or even two adults the moral questions of not only training a young person with mental illness issues in using semi-automatic weapons, but we would be addressing the real underlying health issues for any and all of our mentally ill young people.

There is a harrowing description posted by a mother of her experience with a seriously mentally ill child that was constantly threatening violence and the complete inadequacy of our medical system. The fact that we’ve allowed our medical system to splinter into specialties where some issues – like mental health – are not considered “real illnesses” where we insist on medical care until someone is safe to be released is merely the tip of the iceberg.

We’ve allowed healthcare cuts and denials not worthy of a civil society. And beyond the significant number of preventable deaths because of treatable illnesses left untreated (US is one on this measure), now we have the deaths caused by another type of illness left insufficiently treated.

The real question is, if we are a village raising healthy children, then all of us take responsibility for the well-being of children; we ensure that all of them have adequate health care and are not left alone in the hands of only one or two adults who may not be able to cope with a seriously mentally ill child.

A real society – a society still reaching for the goal of being a beloved community in which all people are included, valued, and their strengths drawn into the well–being of the whole and their weaknesses addressed; It may take that kind of society to raise a healthy village for all of our children.