Tag: sandy hook elementary school

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Side By Side – In Memory Of The Newtown Victims

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFKExXi-qBA

As a response to the Newtown shooting, As One Song put together this song & music video within a few days after the shooting as a collaborative effort by people from different parts of the world affected by the Connecticut shooting. In the words of As One Song:

The global network of As One Song was shocked by the recent tragedy of the Newtown shooting. It opened our eyes to just how much violence there is around us, and how persistent are the effects of this violence on our children’s minds. We feel strongly that only by changing our environment—what we see on TV, what we hear on the radio, what we consume online, what surrounds our daily route from home to school—can we hope to raise a generation that rejects violence. No laws could ever substitute a fully inclusive loving attitude to all parts of our society – the loners, the outcasts, everyone. If we can show our kids more of that, if we could all participate in this, if we see this as the most important action we can take today, then we can promise our children a better year next year, a better life.”

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Who Is Responsible?

Sickening. Sickening, heart twisting news! But what is more sickening is that every channel keeps sucking ratings out of it, all the while playing commercials in between. What a culture, what an attitude, what a nation… Nobody is calling the news channel to demand recalling the ads to let the tragedy sink in, pay respect to the victims, and maybe even spend time pondering the causes of the horrendous act we just witnessed together…

The event seems grossly surreal: two weeks before Christmas, in a prosperous Connecticut town, an upscale, quiet residential neighborhood, on a street carrying a yogi’s name, the first crime unfolds, followed by even a greater one that takes lives of 28 people, 20 of whom are children attending an elementary school. A 20-year old man, after murdering his mother with the guns she kept to do sports, drives to the school where she used to work and opens fire on innocent young students, teachers and the principal, ending the massacre with a predictable act of suicide. Reporters say neighbors were “visibly upset” for they never expected such crimes happen in their town. They knew the gunman, as a “quiet kid,” who turns out to have suffered from a personality disorder. His mother though had a reputation of a “good-hearted person who was always doing something for some cause.”Authorities claim that “Americans are sick and tired of these attacks. Once again we are reminded that there is no safe harbor for our children.” (President Obama) and “Evil visited this community today.” (Gov. D. Malloy) Meanwhile, the media carry the message that schools are safe – a notion backed up by the data, they say, adding that “if the public’s confidence in schools’ safety erodes and is distorted, it can have broad, negative consequences for schools and society.”

It seems everybody is looking for rapid and comprehensive measures to prevent this kind of violence in the future. Some say there is a law about to be passed to forcefully confiscate privately owned weapons from the citizens. Others – that district leaders are advised to review their school safety plans and emergency procedures, with the goal to “remind parents and students that the school is a place to be connected, and that schools have their best interests at heart.” (R. Sprick, director of Safe and Civil Schools)

This incident is among the worst school shootings in U.S. history. Collectively, the deaths make the killings the deadliest K-12 school shooting in American history. While surfing the Net reading about and watching accounts of the tragic event, trying to find what people are saying about what really caused it, I have felt almost physical disdain for how practically every site on the web and every TV channel reports on the catastrophe between the lines of redundant merry commercials. Another one was that the nation seems to be mainly preoccupied with the confiscation of their guns. And finally, the shooter is not on the victim list. But the most crucial answer I wanted to find was to the question: Who is going to take responsibility now that the killer is dead? Not everyone will agree, but the answer is… we are. We, as society, are responsible for this entire tragedy and for all who have perished in it, including the gunman and his mother. Why? – Because:

  1. We are all products of the environment that formed us, with all our wants, attitudes, behavior patterns, ailments, and choices. And there is plenty of scientific evidence to that today. Killers are not born; they are made, cultivated, regardless of whether we are aware of it or not. And it’s not just the parents who form their kids; it is everybody who has ever appeared on their path. We can be molded into selfish psychopaths by our family, school, and society and have a broken psyche, mentality and spirit just as we can be shaped into altruists who live to care and give.
  2. We are the environment for others and hence influence their wants, attitudes, behavior, ailments, and choices. Depending how we choose to raise our children – either as individuals who have to “fight” with invisible rivals for future success, recognition, and happiness or as team players who will be gaining strength from helping each other do the same – we will receive adults who will either live in continuous agony of draining competition or joyous, fulfilling self-realization.
  3. We are living in a completely interconnected world, and everything that happens to one, immediately reflects on all others and vice versa. We are members of our society and are intrinsically involved in each other’s life. If somewhere life is stable and good and somewhere else it is hard and insecure, the inescapable law of balance will force us to seek how to ensure everybody’s happiness.
  4. There is education which delivers knowledge, but there isn’t one teaching how to be a wholesome, harmonious human being, able to connect and relate to others for mutual benefit. Today, education is aimed toward professional development whereas it should be nurturing the gift every child is carrying within, designated to give to society and the world. Education is supposed to train not only the intellect but the whole mind, building in it an awareness of interconnection between us. Moreover, we also need to educate the heart: teach it to love others and learn to get along – with parents, teachers, and the society.
  5. Our values have long since been switched from helping others, cooperation, and mutual caring to competing, winning, and taking advantage of one another for a personal benefit. We are living on the premise of “I”, “me”, and “mine”. The example of that is the whole industry serving “I” – ipod, iphone, ipad, etc. But this eventually destroys the connection between us and turns us against each other. Envy, greed, the need to be first and best gradually ruin a person’s integrity and tear him away from society.
  6. There is too little attention, compassion, and love in our society. We work to give our children “everything they need” but while doing so, we start forgetting what “need” is and switch to giving them everything they “want”, which deprives them of sense of self-worth, dignity, and desire to grow consciously.

Hence, school shootings cannot be prevented by gun control, placing security guards or, worse yet, hiring armed police to patrol the facilities where our children go to learn. We need to gather a national forum to sit down together and start to address the issue from the point of view of caring, mature, and wise caretakers, guides, parents and mentors. We must start viewing all our children and young adults as our collective, national responsibility if you will. Only then will we be able to create a safe, peaceful, and harmonious environment where violence, hate, and emotional pain will cease to exist.

If we agree to do it together, Obama’s and Malloy’s initiatives – “We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this.” (Obama) and “each parent, each sibling, each member of the family has to understand that… we’re all in this together. We’ll do whatever we can to overcome this event.” (Malloy) – can bear fruit.

by Irene Rudnev
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The Sandy Hook Elementary School Tragedy – Teaches Us That Yet To Be Developed New Education Is Needed Now

Hands

hands

As the story of the tragic Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school shooting unfolds, many people are pondering: Why has there been so much violence in the U.S. lately, and what can be done to stop it?

This year saw a mass shooting of movie theater patrons in Aurora, Colorado; the sentencing of Jared Lee Loughner on 19 counts, including murder and the attempted assassination of congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords; and the first overall rise in U.S. violent crime in nearly two decades.”

–CNN

Here’s What Happened

The Huffington Post reports,

A man opened fire Friday inside two classrooms at the Connecticut elementary school where his mother was a teacher, killing 26 people, including 20 children…The 20-year-old killer, carrying two handguns, committed suicide at the school, and another person was found dead at a second scene, bringing the toll to 28…The gunman was believed to suffer from a personality disorder…

The rampage, coming less than two weeks before Christmas, was the nation’s second-deadliest school shooting, exceeded only by the Virginia Tech massacre that left 33 people dead in 2007.”

What Can Be Done?

Why is it that violent crime is increasing in the U.S. and how do we stop it? The fairly recent research being conducted in the field of social network science gives a clue as to the “why,” and also to the “how” to prevent future violent crime. As Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, coauthors of the book, Connected: How Your Friends’ Friends’ Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, And Do, write:

If we are affected by our embeddedness in social networks and influenced by others who are closely or distantly tied to us, we necessarily lose some power over our own decisions. Such a loss of control can provoke especially strong reactions when people discover that their neighbors or even strangers can influence behaviors and outcomes that have moral overtones and social repercussions.”

However, it could be argued that in the case of Adam Lanza, the 20 year old shooter in the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting, that normal rules do not apply. Also, if we look at the various mass shootings that have occurred in recent years, these individuals have also not been treated as normal. In the case of mental instabilities, as has been reported again with Lanza, this is accurate.

But that being said, to discount the influence of the social environment upon a person, to simply say that nature is to blame, and disregard the aspect of nurture, is not only naïve, but also counterproductive to both understanding behavior and treating it.

In the case of social network science this is taken into consideration, as Christakis and Fowler report,

People are constrained by geography, socioeconomic status, technology, and even genes to have certain kinds of social relationships and to have a certain number of them…”

So although genes are a factor, not looking to social influence, at how we are connected, as a factor which can be changed (unlike genes), is misleading and counterproductive to society preventing violent crimes from occurring in the future.

The Need For New Education

So if society is completely interconnected as the study of social networks documents, but mostly lacks knowledge about this, then new education is needed in order for society to begin to acknowledge its interdependence. Our current education and social influence does not yet realize this, as values of competitive materialism still prevail, values that inherently detach people from each other and allow for all kinds of defects to ripen. As a result, society should see the necessity to care for others in society, that mutual responsibility between everyone is needed.

This is also the case in relation to mental instability, and in regards to the psychological development and wellbeing of individuals in society. To understand why this is so the following question should be asked:

With the form of education that exists within the U.S. now (and it is the same form throughout most of the world), is an individual being taught about what people principally deal with on a daily basis, i.e. human relationships and how to get along with others, about how to develop oneself so as to best benefit oneself and others in society?

Sadly, without this new educational direction, which takes priority not on excelling individually at the expense of others (like our education does today) but literally on how to develop a happy individual in a happy society, it appears as though the words of analytical psychology founder, Carl Jung, still hold true today:

Man cannot stand a meaningless life… We need more understanding of human nature because the only real danger that exists is man himself. He is the great danger and we are pitifully unaware of it. We know nothing of man, far too little. He should be studied because we are the origin of all coming evil.”

Image: “Hands” by barnabywasson on Flickr.