May I Have Your Attention Please?

I remember driving my car to my last exam before fall break in 1999.  I was hoping to arrive early to cover my notes and calm myself before class started.  I was listening to the radio when I changed stations and heard people talking and crying.  It was a replay of people giving interviews the night before after they had witnessed the tragedy in Fort Worth, Texas at Wedgwood Baptist Church.  A lone gunman had entered the sanctuary and had started shooting and killed and injured many people.  My heart stopped.  My ex-boyfriend and his friends were playing in a band that performed there that night.  I drove as quickly as I could to my school so I could call someone, anyone, to find out if they were alive, injured, or worse – dead.  I was so relieved to find out that the entire band had survived uninjured. Unfortunately, their spirits would remember this day forever.

Many years later, I was working in a firm and went into the lunch room to get some coffee.  Everyone was glued to the TV sets as the news casted the horrifying scene of another lone gunman at Virginia Tech.  I had lived and worked in DC and knew many people who graduated from there.  I hoped that none of them had family members there.  I later learned that a colleague from my DC office was the parent to a child who was in the building (yes, I can call a college student a child when a gunman is involved).  Fortunately, the child was one of only two people who survived.  Unfortunately, the nightmares of what was witnessed would stay forever.  I also remember the news stations airing the video the gunman had made after an episode of American Idol.  I had no idea they were showing it and caught a second of it before crying so hard I literally got sick.  The evil was too much for me to bear.

I do not understand these situations.  Now, hearing about what happened in Aurora, Colorado, my head and heart are put into a fetal position of misunderstanding of the world in which we live.   If you cannot go to church, school or even a movie without being in danger – then where can you go? How does someone do something like this?  I know there is evil in the world.  But, we cling to our spiritual guidance counselors, Bibles, Torah, Buddha, God, Jesus, Ashram, Temple, etc – so we can try to be at peace and hope we never face the same fate.  We hope that we are protected from that kind of evil, as well as committing that kind of evil.

I imagine that the gunman doesn’t wake up one day and decide to do this.  Somewhere along their life a seed of evil is planted.  Then it is nourished, watered, given sun and all that it needs to grow and spawn more evil in the heart and brain of the person.  We can venture guesses as to what nourishes and breeds evil.  We may say it’s the TV, newspapers and magazines feeling the need to inform us of these gunmen but slowly they desensitize our brains to the travesty.  Or perhaps we think it’s from playing video games where shooting a 
computerized gun at a cartoon allows them to feel no emotion or empathy to the point that 
when in front of a real person with a family and future, they have no problem shooting.   Conceivably there is the notion that some of them want the glory and fame of being notorious – because there is no such thing as bad fame to them.

I heard a quote on a TV show the other day that stated “guns are meant to kill.  If you don’t 
want to kill someone, don’t use a gun”.  I know there are very responsible people out there 
who are educated on guns and teach their families well on using them.  Unfortunately, not 
everyone is taught this – so perchance some of these gunmen were not taught about treating guns with respect and the understanding of all the devastation they can inflict.

Maybe these gunmen were loners in school.  They were avoided by the girls because they 
made the girls uncomfortable.  Possibly they were bullied by the boys.  Teachers did not call 
on them and perhaps found their comments or essays rather odd.  As they grew up, they had little to no friends.  I cannot even imagine what their families were like.  But, maybe if they 
had someone offer some attention, things would have been different?

There are often debates about guns’ existence.  This is not a political debate about this.  Some believe in gun control and some don’t.  But either way you believe, you may join me in appreciating something Tom Selleck said many years ago.  I am paraphrasing here but the point was this:  "Guns were more accessible 40 years ago.  If people wanted to commit suicide, they did in their homes.  Today, if someone is suicidal, they sit at home, nurse their grievance, develop a rage, and then take 20 innocent lives with them. There is something changing in our culture."

There is something changing in our culture around the world.  This is not a problem only in 
America.  So, here is one solution I want to put out there.  We need to pay more attention,
folks.  My mother always says that if she had her life to live over again, the one thing she 
would change would be to pay more attention.  So, let’s pay more attention now.  Not only 
will we look for the loneliest kids who may be crying out for help, but we will be honest with ourselves as well.  We will look inwards at our own families, at our children, and make sure 
we are giving value to all emotions our kids are trying to communicate to us.

I have been reading a book that discusses in depth about the power of validating your children’s emotions; how just one comment about understanding them can change the outcome of their behavior when they are in the middle of a meltdown.  Isn’t that how we all are?  How reassuring it is when someone else verbalizes what we think but we are too afraid to say.  How comforting it is to be able to talk out what we feel and have someone else listen to us and not force their opinions on us, but actually listen to us and express that they understand how we feel.

I truly believe that all everyone in the world wants is to be loved, to feel understood and to be accepted.  If someone grows up festering evil in their hearts and heads it could be because they feel they have no love to give or receive.  They may feel they have no value – that their emotions and thoughts make them odd, abnormal and evil.  Please, let’s all pay attention to our kids – whether our own, our children’s schoolmates, our friends’ children, or children we know from where we live.  Let’s pay attention to our neighbors, friends, colleagues and fellow world citizens.  Let's pay attention to the lone kid or adult who seems to have nobody else in their life.  We need to make this a priority every day because we do not get a chance to live our lives over to pay more attention – we have to do it now!