When You're Done Praying. . .

When you get up off your knees, let the prayers from your heart live through your legs and hands.  Prayers are like souls trapped in limbo until you activate them with a committed course of action.  Saying you're "sending prayers and thoughts" is not the same as actually sending prayers.  A real prayer inspires actual action.  Which means work.  Calculated, deliberate, detailed, intentional, full-on work.

Stop asking how we stop the violence, and get out there and stop it.  Take some of your TV and Minecraft and clubbing and fantasy football and blogging and facebook/twitter/tumblr  and texting time and volunteer at your local middle and high school as a mentor for youth.  Not just the troubled and delinquent, but the quiet and disenfranchised and confused and healthy and overpressured.  Don't know how?  Read some books, enroll in a training course or degree program or discussion group.  Get involved through another organization like the local PTA (even if you don't have a kid there), and find ways to spackle the cracks in the schools' ability to reach EVERY child in a deep and life-changing way.  Join Big Brother/Big Sister. Participate in your employer's partnership with a school.  If they don't have one, initiate one.  If you have one, recruit more colleagues.  Strong-arm them or sweet-talk them or bribe them.  Is the cause worthy?  Could it possibly prevent some future heartache?  Maybe. How would you know?  Get involved in your local community in a personal and immediate and sustained way.

If you can't do it yourself for whatever reason, when you're done sharing your opinion, shut your mouth and open your wallet.  If you can't be a direct part of the solution because [you're antisocial, or agoraphobic, to busy being successful, or  ...], and if you REALLY care (as opposed to wishing you cared or pretending to care or equate caring with clicking "share"), go to the next local school site council meeting and see if you can underwrite a couple (more?) social workers so they can serve the kids who need it, or fund a music program ($70K for a teacher w/ beneifts, $30K for instruments) so those students who have huge empty spaces in their souls for whatever reason can fill it with some music.  Or pay for their anti-bullying program so they can do more than a single assembly once a year.  Donate part of the funds to support another school psychologist who can help identify and treat students who escape notice because they don't act out overtly but still need somebody to talk to who can really HEAR them and knows what supports might help them find some alternative to the dark thoughts speaking to them.  There's no character development curriculum program at your neighborhood school?  Propose one and rally the financial support to pay for it.  Call up some friends, host a little cabal and hatch a plan to make a difference in your sphere of influence.  Join a group that already does this sort of work and ask how you can help.

Know that we won't be able to stop the violence.  There are 350 MILLION complicated people in this wonderful but chaotic and confusing and confounding and complex society.  Some of them will be damaged or undone or defective in ways that we cannot foresee and it will manifest itself in some terrible ways.  But with an order of magnitude greater level of support and , we can certainly prevent MANY of the killing rampages that would have otherwise occurred.  But if we finally start taking mental health seriously, what is now too common (though still rare), we will FOR SURE make it rarer. Perhaps MUCH rarer.

As relatively rare as it is, the damage done by such a rampage is so much more than the already overwhelming death and heartache of the victims. It propagates locally through the normal close relationships each of those victims had, and globally through the web and national and international news stories.  When Mount Saint Helens erupted in 1980, I was a thousand miles away in North Dakota.  But there was a thin but disconcerting layer of ash covering our town.  These events lays this veil of fear or despair over everyone for awhile , and some of the more sensitive among us, will instigate a long-term anxiety about things like going to school or a midnight movie.  Because it impacts us all, it deserves some attention from us all.

So the most important and pressing question coming from these tragedies has always been:  "What are YOU going to DO about it?"  All those other questions depend on the answer to this one.  As long as you remain one of the beseeching voices, there little will change.

But there's more.  Even if you don't individually contribute to preventing another horrifying trauma, being more involved in nurturing the mental health and well-being will make your life more satisfying.  If enough of us sign up for something that helps our neighbors, I'm convinced there will be a tangible and significant improvement in our communities and country.

One last word.  Those of you who already make it your life work to reach out to others and be a force for good, continue to strive to do your very best, and bring an open heart to your vocation along with your head and hands.  For those busy raising children, if you don't have the capacity to do more outside your homes right now, take a moment to think about how you nurture that sense of family, connectedness, and belonging in the family, and know your children.  Get them help when you're at a loss, get yourself help when you need it.  You are a powerful force in the overall health of our nation, and keeping yourself up to the task by keeping yourself informed and daring to know your kids and yourself better.

This is not something we can eliminate, but there are things we can do to diminish the tragic, so we must.

Animals

Milan Kundera is credited with the quote, "Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it. "

This, like most things, is one side of the story.  Given the aggregate of the human species from the first worship and awe of the animal-gods of the prehistoric world to the family picking up a dog at the pound, I wonder if the tenderness that shepherds might feel for their flock to the 165 million dog and cat pamperers in America today balances the fundamental debacle in an way.

Every bit of compassion stems from the human heart informed by some deep biological need to succor.  And the general slaughter of our feedstock through economic need (not real need, but economic) and prey of our hunters is a natural outcropping of the human condition, is simply neutral.  There is no universal mandate that we provide one iota of love to the animals we eat or kill for our protection, and yet even so, we sometimes do.  And though the small proportion of intentional torture and mistreatment (dog fighting, domestic violence, etc.) is reprehensible and indefensible, that is not an acceptable practice and is shunned and punished by society.

We've not been good at preserving nature in general, and globally, that could be considered a failure and in that way, we've been careless for a long time (since we've had enough of an impact on the earth the effect the mass extinction of species and the awareness of our capacity to do so).  The tide is turning in most developed countries where conservation can often debar the expansion of our human footprint, and many organizations work to preserve what we have.  But in that regard, we have been slow and resistant to learning.

That more people would agree with (and live by) the respect we want to show animals espoused by Kundera is evidence against the contention that we've failed as a race.

When you look deeper, life is precious.  We've allowed billions of animals to exist that otherwise would not have seen the light of day.  We've let cows suckle at their mother's teats and chickens to lay eggs, even if the conditions aren't subjectively ideal.  We've bred chickens who excel at laying eggs and raised them to do so. Like the slums of Calcutta, is the hard life of its human inhabitants an abomination that should not exist and a debacle?  I agree that the acute disparity between the rich and the destitute is sad, I don't relegate the existence of the destitute to failure.

All in all, I have to disagree.  Because we could do better is not enough to condemn the practice of raising animals and killing them for food to the status of a debacle.