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.

Fantasy Series

Cover Art from Robert Jordan's The Eye of the World

I remember where I was and what I was doing when I heard about the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, President Kennedy’s murder in 1963, Senator Kennedy’s murder in 1968, the Edmond Post Office murders in 1986, the Murrah Federal Building Bombing in 1995, and 9/11 in 2001. Having grown up and lived most of my life in the Oklahoma City area, the Edmond Post Office and Murrah Building were parts of my daily life. I passed the post office on my way to work each morning and our credit union was in the Murrah Building. Each of these events shook my world, shifted my world view.

And then one day in September 2007, I was driving north on I-35 with my daughter, then a Freshman at Oklahoma University. The car radio was tuned to KGOU our Public Radio Station. Suddenly my daughter started screaming and beating on the dashboard. When she told me why, it made no sense. Some writer named Robert Jordan died. I had no idea who Robert Jordan was. She explained about his epic fantasy series. His unfinished epic fantasy series, eleven volumes of which she had read and loved and reread in anticipation of the final installment.

Being naturally commitment-averse, I made it a rule never to read serialized novels. Nonfiction in multiple volumes I’ve always been comfortable with. Who can cover the Civil War in a single volume?

Fantasy? Also, not happening. I don’t easily suspend disbelief, so the minute something supernatural comes on the scene, my mind begins to wander and the book languishes beside my bed or under it.

And I never reread works of fiction. There are too many good books out there and I don’t have enough time to read them all as it is.

There were noteworthy exceptions to my policies of no fantasy series and single read-throughs. Tolkien’s Trilogy of the Rings, which I read to please a husband. I still have the books, but not that husband. And Rowling’s seven-book Harry Potter series which I read to please my daughter. Happily I still have both the books and the daughter.

Jordan, however, was not a blip on any radar as far as I was concerned. And as of the day of his death, never would be.

Today I am one-third of the way through Eye of the World, the first in what was to become Jordan’s fourteen-book series The Wheel of Time. The final three volumes were written by Brandon Sanderson. And this will be my third time through the series from beginning to end. Plus rereads of the later volumes in anticipation of each new release.

Why The Wheel of Time? To be honest, I thought I’d never enjoy another fantasy after The Lord of the Rings. I tried a couple and was not impressed.

I believed Tolkien’s world, complete with his Orcs and Ents. Then I came to believe Rowling’s world and Jordan’s, with their Hogwarts and Quiddich and Aes Sedai and Tarmon Gai'don. In each and every one of these books, characters from unremarkable backgrounds lead their people against the forces of darkness and win. Characters I got to know and care about, thrown into intolerable situations, attempting impossible goals, and succeeding.

Some days, my real world feels threatened by darkness on an epic scale and I need to believe there are real people from whatever backgrounds who can and will stand up when we need them.