None of us are responsible for what happened?
Omaha, Salt Lake City, Blacksburg, Columbine and Counting
It is an odd thing to think that of all the people and all the money that went into the care of Mr. Hawkins who shot and killed 8 people and
himself on Wednesday, December 5, 2007, we don’t feel the least bit of remorse for not doing more. Everyone feels the best that could
be done was done. Perhaps that is true and maybe all a society that does not know how to take care of the mentally ill can do.
Oh, yes, I know we have systems in place that are designed and called mental health systems. We fund them to do something like that.
We grace them with lofty nouns that make us think they offer service and custody and even let them claim they have delivered what they
were supposed to deliver except that they tend more often than not to fail. It seems to have ended up costing much more than the
$265,000 worth of “care” that Mr. Hawkins received.
This was a kid who was in trouble and needed something more than being put in institutions and shuttled around for a few years and
then released because the state felt it was getting to be that time when he should be on his own. On his own to do what? To work at
McDonalds? To live with the only people who had the heart to let him live with them but not the smarts to see that a troubled teen has no
business with a gun?
If this doesn’t provoke outrage in us as a society for the way we deal with those who are in so much need of help then I truly don’t know
what to think of us. While we read in the news about issues as mundane as whose butt has cellulite while we pretend that this is a
religious country especially during Advent, a young man picked up a gun, showed it to people and then shot lots of people he didn’t
know because he could not abide living with himself any longer. We need to know how many more kids with similar feelings are going
through this right now.
We can probably assume that Mr. Hawkins was given psychotropic drugs. We can also assume that he ate a lot of junk food (he did
work at McDonalds) and we can also assume that he had little information about how to deal with all his competing feelings and the
warring emotions that were obviously eating him up inside. We can debate that these drugs cause violence in young people and we
can debate that junk food offers no sustenance and that both of them also cause brain abnormalities in the developing child. We can
say with some certainty that feeling unloved is an awful way to live.
Who wouldn’t be depressed and angry to know that you are not wanted and have nowhere to go and no prospects? At 19, life is either
frighteningly exciting or terrifyingly empty. You don’t experience much in your life in a balanced way and certainly not when thinking of
what is to come. You have no real sense of, nor ability to, comprehend the future and while you are not able to do that, you also have no
ability to evaluate the consequences of your actions. Those are the lessons you learn once you have survived adolescence.
In the heat of the moment, we, the older adults, tend to forget what adolescents and young adults don’t know and cannot know. We
make all kinds of judgments about the kids themselves as well as the adults who have been told to take care of them.
But systems reflect the society that puts them in place. As a society we seem to have totally ignored what all kids need and deserve as a
basic right of birth: to be loved and to know that love is consistent and ongoing so they can learn to trust and then to trust themselves.
Without that, there is little hope that kids will grow up to be much more than people in quest of love, most likely from the wrong people or
in a bottle or from a drug or in the wild and delusional fantasies of a way out that will give him/her something and if that something
offers a bit of “fame” then so much the better. It must seem to these kids that that is all we value.
Speaking from the vantage point of someone who has had to fight very hard and very long to overcome a severe mental illness, I want to
offer this thought: we need to teach kids how to look for real love when we cannot give it ourselves. We need to be honest with them
about our shortcomings and not to pretend we are helping them when all we are doing is marking time with them until they can be on
their own.
Life is too lonely and uncertain when you are as sick as this young man was and as I was. To be thrown into the midst of that cauldron
of anger, despair, hate, revenge and need with no one to help you out of it is a curse. We need to work to make sure that kids don’t feel
that way and to do the best we can to help each one that does. For our own sakes and for the sake of the people walking around right
now who don’t know that some young person with access to a gun is thinking about how going out in a blaze of gunfire will cauterize the
wounds he feels.