Chilling

We awoke to chilling news this morning about a mass shooting at a movie theatre outside of Denver, Colorado. Innocent people were brutally gunned down while they were attending the opening night showing of “The Dark Knight Rises,” the latest installment in the Batman movie series.

Twelve are dead; 59 are recovering from physical injuries. Hundreds (maybe thousands) have injuries to their psyche. It was the largest mass shooting we’ve experienced as a nation.

You can imagine youngsters, teens and young adults were all chattering with excitement as they were heading to this mid-summer midnight showing of the latest blockbuster movie. Their enthusiasm was instantly transformed to terror a few minutes into the film by a gunman who, for selfish reasons known only to him, thought it would be appropriate for him to take the lives of innocent people. He told authorities, who had apprehended him, that he was “The Joker.” Later, we learned he had booby-trapped his apartment.

We pray for those who were injured; we pray for those who were lost. And we pray for their loved ones as they come to grips with this tragedy.

Sadly, it’s a familiar scene that becomes all too familiar with each shooting incident. I wish I – or any of the thousands of other bloggers writing about this tragedy – had the answer to solving this problem but unfortunately, I don’t.

This modern age of terror was born for most of us with school shooting at Columbine High School (located a short half-hour’s drive away from the Century 16 theater in Aurora that was the location for today’s early morning shooting). After Columbine, it seemed there was a number of similar incidents.

Sadly, we had a couple incidents in East Tennessee, the shooting of school administrators in Campbell County and in Inskip as well as another incident with a student victim at Central High School.

The horror at Virginia Tech  in 2007 seemed to advance the issue to our college campuses and, again, we’ve seen incidents since then at many of our great universities. Then, just last year, Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was gunned down while conducting a town meeting. Staffers and constituents were victims in that shooting incident as well.

Sadly, there are numerous other shootings I’ve simply omitted from this list.

The really unfortunate part of all of this is we have grown to fear international terrorists who want to do us harm and we’ve taken the battle to them. We’re not out of the woods, by any means, in our fight against Al Qaeda but we have made some progress.

The fear is definitely legitimate.

This is much different, though.

What kind of progress can we make against silent killers like this young American man who had no criminal record, a seemingly clean academic slate and no outward warning signs?

In our public schools, there has been a great deal of work focused on the issue of bullying and class warfare that seemed to prompt the Columbine incident and others like it. Recently, the anti-bully discussions have also spotlighted cyber-bullying, which is another forum for bullies.

It seems to me the root of all of this is the fact that our country has become cold. When I was a kid, kids played on neighborhood streets. In our summers, we hopscotched from house to house and played with pals from dawn ‘til dusk. Our neighbors knew who we were and they knew my folks. If we got out of line, our folks knew about it.

And, generally, we behaved. We played ball and we raced Matchbox cars; we played hide and seek and we developed great adventures for our Big Jims and Big Jacks.

Our parents talked, too, out at the mailbox or in the front yards. Folks were friendly.

Now, we race home after a pressure-filled day. We cut off drivers and flip them off as we zip in and out of traffic. We talk on our cell phones and think about how to climb to the next rung of the ladder of success. We get home. We close the garage door and we log onto our laptops and start our evening work.

Civility, it seems, doesn’t make the ‘to do’ list.

I don’t remember a lot of these Aurora-type incidents happening when I was growing up. Maybe the cepia-toned memories of an idyllic childhood gloss over such unpleasantries. Still, I have to believe that the way we grew up helped to identify potential trouble makers and maybe it helped to smooth things over with them in the days when teachers could paddle and educators were more concerned with educating than fearing lawsuits from a litigious society gone to court.

So, no, I don’t have the answer for how to prevent future shootings. But, I think if we took a little more time to love and understand each other and spent less time in our hustle and bustle, it would be a good first step.

 

JG 

Originally posted 7/20/2012