Individual Achievement and the Common Good

In educational policy and practice, as in a democratic society as a whole, balance is needed between these two goals and their corresponding measures of satisfaction: (1) the liberty and success of the individual and (2) the thriving of the whole (the community, state, and nation) including all its people.  I have added the phrase, “including all its people,” because the misuse of numbers can make “the whole” into something that does not truly include all its people.  Here’s a simplistic example.  Suppose I made a million dollars last year (dreamer!) and you made $20,000, and this year I make two million dollars and you, having lost your job, make nothing.  “We” (the group consisting of the two of us) are doing much better this year, even though financially you are doing terribly.  Our average income has soared.  Doesn’t knowing “we” are prospering make you feel better as the mortgage company forecloses on your house?

So, in a democracy, the whole must include all the people, not an average or sum in which the impoverishment and misery of many people is hidden behind the extreme prosperity of some.  Indicators of national economic success become lies if fewer and fewer people are being paid a living wage.  Remember that term, “living wage”?  These days we are reduced to arguing over the “minimum wage” as the ridiculously rich seek ever cheaper labor to exploit.  We are now told that 23% of children in the United States live in poverty, almost one in four.  We cannot rightly regard ourselves as a rich nation when so many of our children are poor, hidden statistically behind the vast wealth of a small minority of financially elite people.

In my previous post, “Public Education Is Not a Race,” I referred to Stefanie Fuhr’s article in Sojourners magazine, “Public Education for the Common Good,” and recommended it.  Fuhr drew from a contrast between (1) a democracy of desire and (2) a democracy of worth.  She cited as her source for this contrast Philip Phenix’s, Education and the Common Good: A Moral Philosophy of the Curriculum.  

What is all this talk about “the common good”?  Don’t we send our children to school so that they, our children – “my child!" – can gain what they need for security and prosperity in life?  I want my child to “get ahead”!  Ahead of your child?  Well, nothing personal, but I have to look out for my own.  You look out for your own.  May the odds be always in our children’s favor (reference to the Hunger Games as a parable for our times).  And if the odds are not currently in my child’s favor, then I want options, I want choices, I want a charter school or a home schooling plan or whatever it takes to put the odds in my child’s favor. 

As a parent, should I not look out for the well-being, security, and success of my own child?  Yes, I should, and sometimes that parental responsibility requires my making a choice for my child I may wish were not necessary.  In principle, I want the public school to thrive for the benefit of all the children, but if the public school is a disaster area for its children, then I may have to make a choice I don’t like for the sake of my own child.  This parental desperation is what the privatizers, stealers, and destroyers of public education are exploiting for profit.  On the parents’ part, it’s not always greed and selfishness but fear and love.  I’d like to rescue the whole system but cannot, and it’s now or never for rescuing my child.

Democracy should allow room for the individual to achieve satisfaction, to thrive in life.  I avoided the word “prosper,” even though it can be a synonym for thrive, because we equate prosperity with wealth (of money) which is really only one, very limited, kind of prosperity.  Room for the individual to thrive implies freedom for variation.  That is, the individual must be allowed, encouraged, and enabled to be an individual and to develop as an individual in his or her own particular ways. 

But the individual is not an island.  Democracy is “we the people,” not just “I the individual.”  Balance is needed to keep “we the people” from becoming a faceless mass in which individual liberty is lost.  Balance is needed also to keep the individual from becoming autonomous, utterly self-centered, and heedless of the well-being of others and of the common good.  There is no “we” without “I.”  Neither is there any “I” without “we,” but we Americans seem to have trouble understanding and accepting that second truth, so thoroughly have we imagined life to be a competition in which some win while many lose.

To cover up the blatant selfishness of this competition model of life, we speak with some reverence of “equal opportunity,” which is fictitious in practice and irresponsible in theory.  That’s the Hunger Games.   There is no equal opportunity in the United States, and as long as life is seen and lived as a competition, there never will be.  There will, of course, continue to be people who don’t care to win by beating others, who just want to “live and let live,” who might be quite happy if all could thrive and achieve both security and satisfaction in life, but they are the losers in the competition whose peaceful hope is rendered fictitious by the machinations of the rich elite hellbent on taking as much of everything as they possibly can.  The spokesperson for the real players in the competition is J. K. Rowling’s Professor Quirrell in book one of her Harry Potter series: “A foolish young man I was then, full of ridiculous ideas about good and evil.  Lord Voldemort showed me how wrong I was.  There is no good or evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it.” (Philosopher’s Stone, 211) 

Furh quotes Phenix as saying that the second type of democracy, the democracy of worth, “centers around devotion or loyalty to the good, the right, the true, the excellent.  Devotion is different from desire.  It is primarily other-regarding rather than self-interested.  It invites sacrifice and loyalty instead of conferring gratification.”  This is high-minded stuff, high enough that it may seem beyond reach realistically in any human society, especially one in which individual liberty to strive for personal success is so highly valued as in ours.  But public education is founded upon the balance between individual satisfaction and the common good of the whole people, the society.  We don’t have public education just for the huge collection of individuals (our children) and the satisfaction of those adults who happen to have children in school; we have public education for the benefit of the whole – “we the people,” the nation as well as for the smaller units of the whole, the state and the community.  Democracy depends upon the education of as many as possible of its people.  Public education is a cooperative undertaking, not a competition.  It’s done for the whole people as well as for the individual children, which is the reason we all pay for it and should all continue to pay for it.  Fuhr writes, “‘Race to the Top’ forces states to implement policies in which students, parents, and teachers compete with each other for school funding that focuses on collecting data instead of nurturing a learning environment that supports the common good.”

In my next post, I’ll consider what I regard as Stefanie Fuhr’s most vulnerable point which is also, I believe, her strongest point.  She concludes, “Our public school system is in need of a revolution that is guided by love.  Our children and future generations deserve our devotion to the notion that public education is a common good for all.”  Love?  Wow!  I can hear the laughter from the vultures circling over public education as the hyenas tear it apart.  Next time I’ll explain why I think she’s right, much more right than the hyenas or the vultures can comprehend.

Public Education Is Not a Race

The whole idea of “Race to the Top” assumes that the education of our nation’s children is a competition and, indeed, a cluster of competitions: child against child, teacher against teacher, school against school, state against state, and our nation against the other nations of the world.  The name of No Child Left Behind implies, falsely in its practice, that all will share in success; Race to the Top suggests a few winners and many losers.  That’s one factor in the harm being done: education as a competition.

What is the prize?  What is to be gained by getting to the top, above the rest?  The reward-and-punishment (carrot and stick) nature of this competition, with its rhetoric about preparing our children for competition in the global economy, indicates that the prize is material success for the individual, to be enjoyed in the most materially successful of nations.  It is a free market dream that is supposed to inspire our children and their teachers to beat the rest in this race, to out-compete the opposition, to rise above the masses of our world.

The pleasures and joys of learning are, it seems, for wimps.  In this race, satisfaction is to come only from winning, and survival depends upon not losing.  No wonder, then, school districts cheat on the tests.  Why would they not cheat when only winning matters?  It’s like the Hunger Games, and so it’s foolish for competitors not to try to put the odds in their favor. 

Consider the proclaimed assumptions of this race to the top: (1) all children come to school equally capable of learning, (2) the only differences that can determine outcomes lie in the quality of the teacher and that of the school, because (3) no outside factors or individual differences among the children can be admitted to influence student learning and testing outcomes.  But, brace yourself for this contradiction, curriculum should be standardized and all teachers should teach the same way at the same rate, so all are on the same page each day and are following the same methods and practices.  Huh?  If there is to be no difference in teaching, how can teachers make the difference?  If curriculum and teaching methods are standardized, how can the difference be in the schools?  And if all children are equally capable of learning and must be assumed to learn in the same way, how can they score so differently in the same classroom with the same teacher?

Of course, outside factors can influence greatly children’s ability to learn, and individual children differ significantly from each other.  Does any parent with two or more children find them to be identical?  No, not even if they are identical twins.  They vary in countless ways, including how they understand and respond to questions (including test questions), where their interests lie, how their abilities develop, and how they learn (and at what pace).

It seems apparent to me that some, indeed many, are meant to lose.  If education is, after all, a race, then most will lose.  If the assumption is that all will improve by virtue of competing (which is false in practice), toward what end, what outcome?

I think too many of us fail to grasp and appreciate the distinction between democracy and individual autonomy.  Democracy is a cooperative venture designed to take government out of the hands of the elite by putting it into the hands of all the people through their representatives.  It is cooperative, not competitive, which is the reason elites are always tempted to hate it.  For them, democracy should be that of the board room: not one vote per person but one vote per share of stock owned.  That’s proportional voting which is not democratic at all.  It empowers the already powerful, the elite, and marginalizes the rest of us.

If democracy is by nature cooperative, why should the education of our children be competitive?  I’m not suggesting the competitive ever will be or should be taken out of education (or a democratic society) completely.  Our children need to discover what they are “good at,” although – be careful! – they could be good at much more than most realize or are allowed to realize.  And isn’t that the issue?  The “race” theory of education convinces children they are losers, and many of those children will believe that lie and will be stifled by it.

Who, then, suffers?  Just the child who gives up, drops out, or hangs back?  Just that child’s family?  No, we all suffer.  Democracy says we all matter and are together in this matter of being a community, a nation, and, indeed, a world.  We should be educating our children for fulfilling, productive, and cooperative life in a democracy, not training them to be wage slaves (or managers) in a Walmartized world.

The other day, I read an article in Sojourners magazine that described two very different understandings of democracy.  The article, written by Stefanie Fuhr, employs the distinctions she draws from Philip Phenix between (1) a democracy of desire and (2) a democracy of worth.  The article, “Public Education for the Common Good,” is here and is well worth reading. I’ll look further into Furh's article in my next post.  For now, I’ll say that in a democracy, public education is for the common (shared) good as well as the good of each individual child, not for the hyper-success of the best test takers and those who excel at keeping the odds in their own favor.

Torture

This report is important to the soul of our nation.  Torture breaks the bodies and minds of its victims.  It also breaks the souls of those who do the torturing and damages the soul of the nation that enables and justifies it.  As we saw in the photographs from Abu Ghraib, they (the torturers) may even come to delight in the pain and humiliation they are inflicting upon people rendered helpless.

The New York Times editorial put the report into context for our past, present, and future this way:

The report’s appearance all these years later is a reminder of the lost opportunity for a full accounting in 2009 when President Obama chose not to support a national commission to investigate the post-9/11 detention and interrogation programs. At that time, Mr. Obama said he wanted to “look forward, not backward.” But identifying past mistakes so they can be avoided is central to looking forward.

My only complaint with the editorial's insight is its word "mistakes."  The deliberate policies and acts of torture are not "past mistakes" but crimes and sins for which there has been no confession, no repentance, and no justice.

There are some who favor torture simply because they hate and in their minds have conceived our enemies as being not human so that inhuman treatment of them is supposedly justified and may even be glorified and enjoyed.  To such thinking it may not even matter whether the victims are guilty or innocent because they have been identified and dehumanized as members of a group that is "not us."  Others say that sometimes torture is justified because information is needed to serve a "greater good."  I have responded already to this greater-good notion in a blog post called, "Does Torture Work? It Doesn't Matter." 

I hope President Obama will be moved to see beyond self-serving pragmatism and take action to end decisively our still murky policies regarding torture as an option.

Unbelieving Fundamentalism

For years, I have been observing a phenomenon I have come to call “unbelieving fundamentalism.”  What is that?  It’s literalistic and simplistic interpretation of both the Bible and Christian beliefs, which it accepts as standard but disbelieves, often casually but sometimes loudly and belligerently.

Here’s a sample.  For a long time, people have noticed that in the first chapter of the Bible’s book of Genesis, on the first day of creation, God separates the light from the darkness, calling the light day and calling the darkness night.  Not until the fourth day of creation does God get around to making a greater luminary to rule the day (the sun) and a lesser luminary to rule the night (the moon).  Believing fundamentalists take this strange and seemingly impossible order of things literally and defend it as though it were literal, historic, scientific fact (rather than the salvific, life-giving truth of God's redemptive love).  Unbelieving fundamentalists also take this strange order of creation literally and mock it as supposed proof that the Bible is ridiculous and so should be discarded.

There is good theological and prophetic sense to putting off the creation of the sun and the moon until three days after God had separated the time of light on earth from the time of darkness and good reason for not deigning even to call the sun and moon by their names.  There is a strong message here of hope and encouragement to a thoroughly disheartened community of exiled Jews living in Babylon where the sun and the moon had deity status and the power of Babylon and its gods seemed unassailable, and there is rather the same strong message of encouragement to people in any time and place who feel themselves trapped and helpless against forces and systems far too powerful for them to overcome, resist, or even escape by their own strength.

But the Bible is not a science book.  It is not a good science book to be accepted and believed as science.  It is not a bad science book to be rejected and scorned.  The unbelieving type of fundamentalism is no more enlightened than the believing type, but the believing type of fundamentalism has the great advantage of being open to God and to faith in God.  The unbelieving type has only the current advantage of being able to sell many books to people who revel in belligerent ignorance as long as it mocks what others believe.

Retirement, a Preface

A friend told me he hoped I would write something on my blog about my experiences in the early stages of retirement.  Today, I am concluding eight months of it, and so, while I am miles away from being competent at living this new adventure (let alone expert), I think I can say a little on the subject of beginning retirement.  My thoughts, feelings, and experiences are, of course, just my own and should not be generalized into anything prescriptive or even descriptive for others.

Probably because for strategic reasons in the life of the church I loved and had served for nearly twenty-seven years I retired at the end of June as the congregation was entering its summer rest period, my first two or three months without a job seemed much like an extended vacation.  Moving into a new home in a different state consumes plenty of time and energy, and I rediscovered on an almost daily basis that I enjoy yard work, especially the heavier kind that requires physical exertion but little knowledge of landscaping or skill at gardening.  I dug out sizable bushes, mowed the lawn one or twice a week, pruned trees, and hauled debris to the nearby and very convenient “leaf and woody yard waste” facility.  We explored the area, had fun, got to know our neighbors a little better, enjoyed our yard, had our screened porch enclosed, painted rooms (choosing colors was the hardest part), bought furniture, and in September went with friends on an actual vacation in Vermont.

Because our house has the unfinished basement I wanted very much, we have room for our treadmill and weight-lifting area, my workshop, general storage, and our overflow of books.  Now that everything has been moved into the house and we’ve made it through our first Christmas season, we need to rearrange all of it for room to use our new basement and find our stuff.  We also need to get rid of more. Mentioning our overflow of one type of stuff brings me to the real topics of this post: time and books.  Retirement is life after the time for an active career and as such is far too broad a subject for one blog post. 

My new sense of time fooled me.  I had been assured by people with plenty of experience that time would speed up for me, that my days, months, and even years would whiz by me, so that prudence would require decisions that took full account of preparing for the various incapacities that can come with aging and would quickly be upon me.  Wrong.  Time has slowed down for me.  “Was it just this morning we did that?” has become a common question between my wife and me.  I have been restored to the time sense of my childhood.  My days are longer then they have been since I began my career, but I have yet to be bored since retiring.  I now find I can take my time with projects and even the smallest doings of the day.  I watch the birds that visit our feeder, not just to spot and identify them, but to see what they are doing and how they interact.  I walk into town to the bank and post office or to the library, and sometimes we walk just to walk.  We’ve even taken up hiking.  I no longer (for the most part) have to make myself refrain from resenting interruptions, pokey drivers, slow check-out lines, and routine matters of managing a household and property.  I’m no longer rushing to get things done.  The sense of relief and freedom is a hard but very pleasant adjustment. 

I admit that sometimes I still have a frustration dream or, during the day, the sudden feeling that I am behind in tasks I must get done so I can move right along to others.  Then, I ask myself, “Behind in what?” and laugh at myself because I have no answer.  I suppose that persistent sense of being behind is a sort of habitual free-floating anxiety developed over four decades of mostly seven-day and multiple evening work weeks, but now I find myself thoroughly enjoying the time sense of my childhood.  I am free to live like a kid but think as an adult.

Books, the mass of them significantly complicated our moving to and setting up our new home.  I kid my wife by reminding her that I have a friend who has more then 10,000 books in his house, but she just smiles indulgently because our one thousand or so of them take up quite enough room in our reduced living space.

Time and books have come together for me.  I have a new three-shelf bookcase expressly for those special books I either have not yet read or else have not finished (I read several books at a time, and some seem to slip away from me) – about fifty of them.  It’s not that I’ve stopped buying books.  How could I when friends not only keep recommending them but also write and publish them, and when there have been two neat little bookstores close by (one remains, the other closed this month) as well as the Barnes and Noble down the Fruitville Pike a short way?  And then there’s my Nook.  Anyway, I now have time to read and liberty to read what I want to and to experiment with light, escapist books just for fun, including science fiction and fantasy.

Do I have no issues regarding my retirement?  Yes, I have some.  Life review, as people call it, is not always pleasant and probably never settled.  I miss people back in Bridgeton, New Jersey.  Finding a church in a new area after retiring from pastoral ministry would be a chapter in itself but has as yet no conclusion.  We do see friends (for which we are thankful) but must also make new ones and find places for ourselves in our new community.  And we still have to find doctors, a dentist, etc.  I hope to write some books and have made beginnings in that direction.  What else?  When I retired, my executive presbyter, colleague, and friend, Debby Brincivalli, gave me a book titled, Called for Life.  I think there’s a message there, but I don’t know yet what it might come to mean specifically for me.  That I'll have to discover.

Of my most recent reading, I will mention only four books, three read and the fourth started.  The last two were written by friends of mine.

The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy – a famous (in some circles) short work by the recently deceased Albert O. Hirschman, Professor of Social Science, Emeritus, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Night (in a new translation by Marion Wiesel) – the brief, haunting, quickly read but not to be forgotten recollection by Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel of his youth as a victim and survivor of the Holocaust.

Shooting War – a novel written by Arthur Goldhammer, the renowned and award-winning translator of many works from French to English, blogger on French politics, and senior affiliate at Harvard’s European Studies Center.

Practicing to Walk Like a Heron – a book of poems written by Jack Ridl, professor emeritus at Hope College.

IWMD

Since last Friday’s slaughter in Newtown, Connecticut, I’ve been reading the back and forth of anger, sarcasm, and sanctimony about guns, gun control, gun rights, and gun violence.  I have heard also the beginnings of conversation about providing help for the mentally ill and their family members trying to care for them and striving desperately to contain the worst of their acting out. 

Some of the illogic is appalling.  If banning guns would stop gun violence, one Facebook posting asks, why don’t we make heroin, crack cocaine, and methamphetamine illegal, too?  Huh?  Since when has the validity of a law been measured by its complete effectiveness in stopping people from breaking it?  Speeding is illegal.  Tax evasion is illegal.  Shoplifting is illegal.  All three are perpetrated daily, but no one is suggesting the laws against them be taken off the books for failure to be completely effective.

Equally absurd is the popular slogan, “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.”  True, guns don’t fire themselves without human assistance, but guns certainly make killing quicker and easier.  When tempers flair, guns enable the worst response to be enacted so rapidly that there’s little time for second thoughts and little chance to prevent carnage.  Guns also enable alienated and shame-ridden people to feel big and powerful, with disastrous consequences.

We live in a nation where some 300 million guns are said to be privately owned and where gun ownership has been elevated to the level of the sacred.  We even have a Supreme Court justice who has suggested that under our Constitution, individual possession of a one-person rocket launcher might have to be recognized as a protected right.  How can we draw back from the absurd and work together reasonably toward solutions to terrible national problems, knowing our solutions will never be 100% effective?

I grow as weary of acronyms as anybody else, but I’m wondering if we don’t need a new one: IWMD.  That’s individual weapons of mass destruction.  I’m thinking of the types of weapons that enable someone who isn’t even a marksman to kill dozens of people in short order, perhaps even slaughter a whole class of school children before anyone has time to intervene.  IWMD would cover weapons designed for killing numerous people rapidly.

In the world of international politics, we don’t tell belligerent nations they can’t have at least the equivalent of a national guard or any weapons, but we do sit up and take notice when a belligerent nation is believed to be developing WMD, weapons of mass destruction.  Can similar logic be applied to individuals within our country?  Could we not ban the manufacture and sale of IWMD for private ownership?  Of course, there first would need to be conversation about what constitutes IWMD and thoughtful drafting of legislation, with input from weapons experts and gun owners who aren’t ideologically rigid about the right to bear arms being all or nothing.  Such legislation would require adult thought and conversation rather than the angry, empty-headed posturing we have now.  We would need to grow up as a nation for the sake of protecting our children.

Would putting such a limit on the kinds of weapons available to private citizens stop all gun violence and killing?  No, of course it would not.  We need better mental health care, too, but that would not end all killing, either.  It would be helpful stop feeding the minds and emotional systems of alienated teens and young adults on increasingly realistic video games that glorify rapid, massive, and gory killing done without empathy or any emotion other than perverse joy and satisfaction.  The reality that there will be no perfect answer, no absolute solution, must not deter us from acting together responsibly to prevent as much as possible of the carnage.   We need to do what we can to restrain those who would kill and keep IWMD out of their hands,  and we need also to offer better mental health care for those who might, if we do nothing, murder people they don’t even know.  We cannot stop all killing, but why do we have to keep making it quicker and easier to kill large numbers of people, and why do we have to make killing large numbers of people seem thrilling and empowering to people who are mentally ill?

When God Becomes an Excuse for Not Trying to Prevent Slaughter

Mike Huckabee’s comments on the slaughter of children as well as adults in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut are not helpful.  By blaming the schools and the nation for supposedly banishing God from the classrooms, he’s done little more than make a preemptive strike against anyone who might raise the issue of gun control.  He’s offering an empty and naive argument at best about the fantasized connection between school prayer and lives transformed by faith, but he’s making it in an obnoxious way by implying that we have gotten what we deserve.  None of the families in Newtown deserves to be suffering the grief that has been inflicted upon them, nor do we as a nation deserve such horror because we have followed our Constitution in denying to one religion (mine) the power to impose itself in highly diluted form upon all children through a state institution.

I’m old enough to remember school day opening exercises that included Bible reading and prayer.  They did nothing to teach us faith or compassion, to make us better people more likely to get along with each other, or even to put the fear of God (or of hell) into us.  They were routine.  Some of us tried sometimes to “get something” out of them.  Some of us probably felt quietly estranged by being forced to participate in something that was meant to be meaningful but in which they and their families did not believe.  Sometimes kids made a joke of the whole thing.  Psalm 117 was read often, not because it was meaningful, but because it is the shortest psalm.

I remember from decades ago the bumper sticker I would see around the town in which we lived then: “God, guts, and guns made America great.”  Rah, rah.  Throw down a few more beers, do some chest thumps, and tell me what was great about the Friday of slaughter in Sandy Hook.

If we would look at the actual carnage that persists and seems to be increasing in our nation and if we could adopt a mentality of problem-solving, maybe we could stop reacting to each new tragedy by running to our opposite poles and shouting belligerent nonsense at each other.  Maybe we could take responsibility for trying to make ourselves into a better, safer society.  Maybe we could think and act like grownups.

Meanwhile, let me ask where God was on that Friday of terror and slaughter.  No, God was not punishing us for not imposing Christian cultural dominance upon public school children.  Neither did God need some little angels to perform celestial functions.  What happened in that school makes sense only to insanity, and unless we want to make our faith insane and ungodly, we must not try to make sense of it, to rationalize or justify it.  It was a cruciform event, meaning a horror that tears at the heart of God and should tear at our hearts as well.  For me as a Christian minister, the slaughter of the children is something in which I believe God sees and I must see also the crucifixion of Jesus, whom I believe to be God’s Son.  He suffered torture, humiliation, and execution at the hands of an empire made great by the gods, guts, and swords. 

I believe that God has a long memory and that events in our past can be very present to God, which is what we Christians affirm when we share the Lord’s Supper.  On biblical and theological grounds, I believe God cannot separate that terrible Friday long ago when Jesus was crucified on the Hill of the Skull outside Jerusalem from Friday, December 14, 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut.  Or from the day three little girls were killed in their church by a bomb, killed because they were black just as Jesus was executed because he was Jewish.  Or from the slaughter in Congo or Darfur or anywhere else on earth.  We have done it again.  From a Christian perspective, by doing it to the children and the adults in the school (God’s children all), we have done it again to him.

But we didn’t do it!  A mentally disturbed young man did it.  An exception to the rule, an outlier from the norm.  Perhaps we should call him a monster so we don’t have to identify ourselves with him.  Not one of us.  He didn’t even own the guns but took them from his mother whom he also murdered.  So it wasn’t a question of society’s putting guns directly into the hands of a mentally ill person.  We didn’t do it! 

We aren’t going to take steps together to stop it from being copied and done again, either, are we?  We’re just going to retreat to our separate corners and shout ideological stuff at each other while the carnage is repeated in some other town and another and another and another.

Christians?  “As you have NOT done it for one of the least influential of these, my sister, my brother, you have NOT done it for me.”  Americans.  There is big money in weapons made for mass carnage, weapons designed for no other purpose.  There is also a sickness of mind, heart, and soul that equates having such weapons with being strong and manly.  “They’ll get my gun when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.”  And a voice answers, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” 

Can we do it?  Can we have a grownup conversation about gun violence?  Without demonizing gun owners or idolizing guns?  Without demanding all or nothing for our side?  Or will we wait for the next slaughter to blame each other again, thereby making sure nothing constructive happens? Or will we just pass the blame to God and our public schools?