Out My Back Door: Children Shooting Children

Photos by the Oregonian

 For the Children

My heart grew heavier as I neared the Troutdale Fred Meyer store. The helicopter was nearly over my car as I drove, so close to today's school shooting, to pick up a four year old I am the legal parent of for his counseling intake appointment. And I just wanted to cry and cry. I still do...

Reynolds High School is in the neighboring district to the schools our three sons went to in Gresham. And my heart aches. Aches for all the children. For all the parents. For those who died, for both are victims. And I ache for all children and people and beings everywhere who are victims of violence.

Flashback... It was perhaps 1976 or 1977. I haven't told many people this story. My mother called me to say that she knew John had two guns. She reported confiscating one, but not knowing where the other one was. My twin and I were in our mid-twenties. Dad had died a year or two earlier and here I was 2,500 miles away in Oregon scared to death that my brother was going to blow himself and our mother away. He didn't. A year or so later John just quietly checked into a motel room, paid for three nights lodging, and spent the next three days calling the suicide hotline off and on while he drank vodka and took the Valium he'd been stockpiling for who knows how long. Monday morning, January 30th, 1978 they found John dead with a suicide note sharing who to call... And poetry expressing my brother's deep wishes for world peace...

How is it that our culture, more than all other developed nations, has become such fertile ground for violence? I see it all the time in my work as a permanency caseworker with the State of Oregon Child Welfare. And I grew up with it in our upper middle class home in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Violence is constantly on the news and in what we call "entertainment." It is in wars that have gone on longer than all others. And in the death penalty, off the charts addictions and incarceration rates, in racism and sexism and all the "isms," in global warming and species extinction, in factory farms and disappearing rain forests, in pollution and related illnesses, in institutionalized poverty and in the ever growing obscene redistribution of wealth upward. The list can go on and on. Certainly violence is in every heart that closes for that act of cutting the thread that connects us with ourselves and all of life is itself an act of violence. One that is so common.

There are so many ways to shut down. Just go shopping. Shut up. Rage. Blame. Judge. Drink. Eat. Isolate. Go looking for love in all the wrong places. Become comfortably numb. Be normal. Don't be. Nearly anything can be used to take us out of our hearts, out of our deep remembrance and knowing, out of our sense of Interbeing, as Thích Nhất Hạnh refers to our connectedness with all. I understand so much about this business of shutting down, and feeling a part from rather than a part of, because it was what I experienced as normal for the first three decades of my life.

Over the course of the past thirty years that I have spent healing and awakening, the fog around my heart and mind has been gradually lifting, more so with each year I am alive. It is not easy to be in the world, very much including in "the wealthiest nation on Earth", with eyes, hearts, minds, spirits and souls open. Open to see what we see, feel what we feel, know what we know. Open to love, kindness, compassion, caring, consciousness, and experiencing how I am part of you and you are part of me.

I do not have the answers. All I know is that I need, again, to allow my heart to break open. I need to weep and grieve. I need to care just as deeply about the teenager who ended his life today as the 14 year old he killed. And I need to stay fierce in my commitment to look deeper. Deeper into the stories we are told. Deeper into my part of the violence in the world and how each and every day, in my tiny corner of this beautiful Earth we all share, I can increasingly open to being the peace we all so deeply yearn for and need. I can catch myself in my judgments, sense of separateness, blame and shame, anger and fear. And it is in each moment of mindfulness that I find the fertile ground to cultivate something different. I can instead, in that moment, in each precious moment, feed my heart and those around me with tender and fierce kindness.

I also have needed to talk with my children and my husband and others and share together our horror and our caring. I needed to reach out to my dear friend who was there when the shooting happened at Clackamas Town Center 1-1/2 years ago and whose PTSD has no doubt been triggered. Again. And, so importantly, I am needing to remember love and beauty, blessings and gratitude for so much... Balance. Joy and sorrow are deeply intertwined.

The challenge, among many, is how to not allow the PTSD we all may suffer, to one degree or another, continue to numb us out, shut us down, plague us with empathic impairment within ourselves and toward others. WE NEED TO OPEN UP! Allow our hearts to break, break wide open. Again and again and again. I do not believe there is any other way. For if we block out pain, we also block out joy and beauty and the immense caring we are all capable of for ourselves and all the children. All the children everywhere. And all other beings.

Enough is enough! We can each continue to set such strong intentions to grow our own ways to be peace. Live, breathe, be peace. Not passive peace, but fierce unrelenting peace that stands strong in the determination that another world is possible and that each of us has our part to play. For the children. For all of the children of all of the species through all of time. We can do it. We can be that brave. We can love that much. 

Just imagine...

With so much love for all the children,

and for all of us...

Molly

♥~♥~♥~♥~♥~♥