The
Existential Fall Out after Newtown
I have a heavy heart tonight. My
thoughts and prayers are with the families of Newtown. The Newtown shooting is a terrible tragedy.
It has reminded me of lessons learned while studying the families of murder
victims.
For the past 2 years, I have been
researching the everyday lives of families who lose someone in a murder. This has been difficult—and often
heartbreaking—research. I have spent
many nights thinking about how much I take my family, friends, and other people
in my life for granted. I think about
the mothers, fathers, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and siblings whose first and
last thoughts of each day are of the person they loved and lost. The things
that I have seen and the stories that I have collected have left a deep and
permanent mark on my soul.
Amongst the many thoughts swirling around
in my head, I keep returning to a troubling “double standard” that we often
taken for granted when shootings happen.
On one hand, the Newtown shooting reminds
us that fatal violence can happen at anytime
to anyone. It is a painful reminder
that life is precious and that it can be snapped away from us at any moment. The Newtown shooting makes many of us feel an
existential fall out. How could this happen?
Why did this have to happen? And
what does this mean for me?
For many of us, these shootings cut a little
too close to home. They happen in places
to people who remind us of ourselves. We
begin to wonder: “Are we ever really safe?” “Will our children come home from
school today?” “Will this happen at my favorite movie theater?”
In turn, these ideas shape how we feel
about families who mourn in the wake of such tragedies. We feel deep empathy, compassion, and sadness
for families and victims in Newtown. We talk
about the victims here as innocent children who met a horrible death completely
out of their hands. We wonder how the
families and friends of victims will cope with such a loss.
But, the
same kinds of sympathy and compassion are often not extended to families who
lose their children in street shootings every day. These situations are treated very differently
by the media, by our leaders, and by many of us. We see these shootings as events that only happen
to people who are caught up in the wrong crowd.
We assume that these victims—who are often children—must have been dealing
drugs, in a gang, or doing something to meet such a horrible end. Everyday violence in our inner-cities helps
us hold onto a precious myth: Fatal
violence only happens to people who bring it on themselves. If we can believe this, or at least think it
might be true, we can feel safe again.
How do
we reconcile these conflicting responses to tragedy?
I’m
here to tell you that many of our popular assumptions about the second group of
victims are deeply problematic and misinformed.
Many of the people that I have followed over the years have been young
men who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is a powerful message that John Rich—a
physician, scholar, and interventionist—teaches us in his powerful work on young
black men’s experiences with trauma.
This is a theme that also resonates with
my work: One family I followed lost
their youngest son in a street-style execution shooting. The mother and two older brothers of the
victim faced an unsympathetic and sometimes cruel world. Newspaper articles talked about this case as
an example of how families need to keep closer tabs on their children. Local community leaders and church pastors
used this event to denounce drugs in the community. And, most hurtful of all, supervisors at the
mother’s work filed complaints about her work productivity slipping after her
son’s death. When she told them that she
was in the bathroom wailing over the loss of her youngest child—she was fired
and released with severance.
This is only a small sample of the many
tragedies that I followed in Philadelphia.
I hope that this underscores the need to rethink how we process and make
sense of gun violence across the board. The
deep sympathy and pain that we all feel tonight for the victims of Newtown
should be extended to families who lose sons, daughters, husbands, wives,
grandparents, aunts, uncles, best friends, and siblings in our backyards
everyday.
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