Waiting for the Bullets to Fly
Something is completely fubared here.
Lucinda Roy, a long-time member of the English faculty at Virginia Tech had Cho as a student in a creative writing class. She said Cho seemed so depressed and angry that she contacted the police, student affairs and other university officials, and eventually referred him to counseling.
“All my alarms went off,” Roy told NPR. She said she felt a personal responsibility to reach out but that the authorities she contacted believed their hands were legally tied unless the student made threats.
Legally tied against what — talking to the boy? Offering him counseling? Stopping in at his room to see how he is? If the only plan you have is to shoot back then all you can do is sit and wait, locked and loaded. If on the other hand, health access — mental and physical — were available and it were known widely to be available, and it was easy to get to, if it were as easy to get as , say guns, don’t you think at least some of these obsessed injured would go try it?
My recommendation: a nationwide campaign –we could start in California– modeled on AIDS awareness for the next ten years with fine graphics, wonderful persuasive speakers, spots on TV and radio, saying: If you have obsessive thoughts about killing, destruction, blood, knives, bullets; if you want to hurt yourself or others; if you are sexually obsessing over children; if you get pleasure from the terror of others, you are ill. You have an illness that will kill you. There is help available.
There is no crime in finding the desires floating inside you. Don’t let them become crimes by letting them grow to a cancer. Obsessions, like cancer, will alter your mind and behavior until you bring ruin and havoc to others.
You can’t cure cancer without help. You can’t cure obsessions without others.
Reach out and ask for help. It’s your life and the lives of those you love.
Call 1-800-IAmHelp
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Of course I think something has to be done about access to guns. I am one of the enormous majority in the KOS poll who doesn’t own one and most likely never will, though I’ve shot them and even earned, a couple of times, the Expert ribbon for pistol shooting in the Navy. But I don’t think banning guns solves the problem — witness Rwanda: massacre by machete. Nor do I share the fantastical belief of the gun pornographers that arming everyone makes us all safer. They of course don’t read the news coming from Iraq or Afghanistan. I sort of think that to own a gun one should be part of a “militia” per the Second Amendment, and that said “militia” is part of the accessory to any crime committed by a member. This enables people to organize to caress their weapons but strongly encourages social oversight and control of them. Meanwhile, people whose brains are bursting need to know there is help available, how to get it, and not to be ashamed to treat their illness.
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April 18th, 2007 @ 9:42 am
Will:
Thank you for this initiative. It actually is quite comprehensive. Particularly your opening suggestion:
“Legally tied against what — talking to the boy? Offering him counseling? Stopping in at his room to see how he is? If the only plan you have is to shoot back then all you can do is sit and wait, locked and loaded. If on the other hand, health access — mental and physical — were available and it were known widely to be available, and it was easy to get to, if it were as easy to get as , say guns, don’t you think at least some of these obsessed injured would go try it?”
1.)I’m not sure how we get to the overall health care goals, but surely community health care centers situated conveniently and everywhere, would be part of an economic universal health care delivery system. The centers would include emotional and mental health care access. We need to erase the idea that there is a line between good mental health, and ill mental health, and that there is a line between normal and “crazy.” There must be a recognition of “everyday trauma”, not just “big trauma”, and that healing from all of the incidents of daily trauma, and stresses is essential. The centers could utilize all of the wisdom of our ages, all of the meditative practices, counseling, spiritual coping, conflict resolution, medical interventions.
2.)As part of a universal health care delivery system, these centers would form the network of resilient community and disaster preparedness strategies.
3.) Half the prison-industrial budget could be shifted to support such community health centers since half the people in jail are allegedly there for addictive uses of drugs.
4.) Politicians and movie stars all go to rehab for their obssessions and addictive behaviors. So why not universal access for all.
5.) In the process such skills as mediation and conflict resolution could begin to percolate up from the grassroots health centers and into the national and global psyche as an expectation.
6.) People could again become more connected to community with a sense of belonging, than to their “belongings”, now used as a substitute for “community and connection.”
7.) The centers might help people get placed in the peaceful-promoting local jobs of the new economy, which is based on renewable energy. I say this to give context to another dimension of how these centers could help guide better choices. And once in those jobs, the people would “vote their jobs” for peaceful solutions, rather than voting jobs for munitions manufacturing and war, now heavily funded by the military-industrial-lobbyist consortium.
6.) To get this process rolling, it might be effective for citizens, acting on their own, to create Citizens Assemblies, modeled on the British Columbia system which convoked such an assembly on the issue of electoral reform. Even without a government mandate, I think citizens can begin to do this everywhere, of their own volition, on any focused issue, and draft legislation and lobbying capabilities to take to local and regional law-making bodies. Should the draft legislation be rejected, without institutional discussion, the Citizen Assembly would now have the organizational and empowering skills to take the new ideas directly to the voters.
Any other ideas on this topic are welcome, and I’d like to follow others input.
April 18th, 2007 @ 1:48 pm
Jack, What a wonderful set of ideas! It is now all too clear that the folks around Blacksburg had all the warnings anyone should need: this kid was in serious trouble. In part, no one saw all the connections. In part there wasn’t enough serious follow through with what was available and with what was known.
How connections are seen without creating universal databases of behavior is a serious problem. Somehow though communities need to be able to see, and know, its members as communities did until about 100 years ago. The connections have to be richer instead of thinner. How, without creating monstrosities of the State, is a very important issue.
My rough guess is that every single one of these automaton killings has had at its core an extreme disconnect from others that in almost every case was not due to a diagnosable pathology but to behavior learned to counter being shut out. The feed-back cycle carried them down: shut-out — feel shut out| act aloof — be shut out…
Caught in the ricocheting echoes of their isolation and blame, revenge is the final, terrible shout-out: I am here and I count!
Not everyone, but I bet a lot of people, were there help available as there is for depression, alcoholism, grief of all kinds, would try it to escape the craziness they feel creeping up within them.
I think this is true for most pedophiles also. You have those feelings? Get help. Here’s where….
April 18th, 2007 @ 8:14 pm
Bob Cesca, at Huffington Post is thinking along these same lines.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/its-not-about-the-firear_b_46104.html