Violence in America

Memorial in front of the Edmond, Oklahoma, Post Office

image from wikipedia.org

At 7:15 a.m., August 20, 1986, I drove south on Broadway in Edmond, Oklahoma, on my way to work. Just north of the Post Office, firetrucks blocked the street. Police cars blocked eastbound Edwards street. Local television station news helicopters hovered overhead.

I had to get to work. I took Ayers east to Boulevard and turned south. Ambulances sat waiting along Edwards and Campbell toward the Post Office.

I couldn't imagine what was going on. Edmond, my hometown, was a suburb north of Oklahoma City. Population? Maybe thirty or forty thousand. Ten to fifteen thousand souls bigger when the local college was in session.

As I passed the old Edmond Junior High School building, several people accompanied by police officers ran across the school yard  away from the Post Office .

Even now at nearly 90,000 people Edmond has very few murders. By that I mean one or two  annually and some years none. On that day, I knew of no murders in Edmond during my lifetime. Maybe there were some, but they were so long ago that I didn't know about them.

Domestic gun violence was not something with which I was intimately familiar. President Kennedy was murdered on my 16th birthday. That shattered my sense of security in one way. But that was twenty years earlier and 250 miles south in Dallas, Texas. I'd lived through daily television doses of violence out of Vietnam. But by 1986 those were a decade and thousands of miles away.

That day in 1986, I turned on my car radio and heard that someone was shooting people in the Edmond Post Office. Thirteen people died there including the shooter.

And now, almost thirty years, multiple work-place shootings, multiple school shootings, and a theater shooting later, it's happened again. Two days ago a man shot and killed nine people and wounded nine more at his school in Oregon.

Gun-control activists and anti-gun-control activists are back in the news advocating everything from no guns at all to everybody armed.

I think these mass shootings are a symptom of our society's predilection for violence. There are many more domestic violence based killings and gang-related killings in our country than these school shootings. They're symptoms, too. And we all know that treating symptoms while ignoring underlying disease does not cure.

Led by politicians and entertainment personalities, we passionately take uncompromising sides on the "gun issue" to the exclusion of the many other factors contributing to our problem. Mental health issues, people exposed to violent entertainment from a young age, our schools failing the most vulnerable of our children, our society's addiction to easy fixes. (We seem to forget that addictions don't solve problems.)

How about we enlist and listen to recommendations from our mental health care communities, our educators, our law enforcement communities? I know we'll get conflicting answers and it won't be possible to just point to the answer we want to try. (Easy fix again.) But somewhere in there, there will be legions of solutions that will work.

We might even try listening to the people around us -- our own children, our workmates, our playmates, that guy revving his engine at the stoplight -- and respond. Maybe respond by offering to make their lives a little more pleasant, a little easier.

If they need more than a smile and kind word, be willing to step up. Ask how that child got the bruises on her face. Ask that young adult wearing cuffs to hide evidence of self-harm. Recommend professional help. Report them to the appropriate authorities. And if you don't know what kind of professional help to recommend or which are the appropriate authorities, find out.

Afraid that would put you at risk? Aren't we at risk anyway, if we go to work or school or the movies?

You and I, working as individuals, can't stop wars or gang violence or world hunger. But we can offer to do what we do well. Offer a little free time to that over-stressed mom and maybe prevent an instance of child abuse. Volunteer to help that little league coach and show a child that they count. Be the kind of parent that says no to a request for the latest single-shooter video game and explain why. Encourage your son or daughter or the person at work to step away from an escalating personal conflict. Step away yourself.

Try to make a difference from the bottom up. We've been deferring to the folks trying to make a difference from the top down. And it's not working.

Let's wake up in the morning, put on a habit of optimism, and make a difference -- one person at a time, one day at a time.