We Get What We Are...

I work with children, youth and young adults and I can tell you how their parents solve problems, deal with conflict, overcome obstacles, decide on consequences for misbehavior. I've not been in their homes, but you can see the patterns in the kids. You can see them in my kids, too. Not one of us is immune.

An headline in the New York Times this morning speaks of the patterns that are us, "An 8th Grader, a Gun and a Bystander." The paper tells a tragic story of teenage turf wars, an eighth grader who looks grown who listened carefully to his cultural patterns that guns solve problems, and an innocent bus traveler in the wrong place in the wrong time.

Note: someone will now be offended. I appreciate our right to own guns, but I think the conversations that try to frighten us into maintaining that right and assuming it is God-given in all times and places seeps deeply into the minds of children who do not yet have fully developed brains. If someone is trying to hurt you, or saying they will, the problem solving functions that 1) are weak because they are young and 2) are weak because they operate out of fear fail to work in the ways they should.

Guns solve problems in our movies and TV shows. We see people acquitted of shooting other people when the reason is "self-defense." The first move of this 8th grader was not to seek out his parents help, the support of a faith community (don't even know if he had one), the guidance of a trusted teacher or school official, or even the police. He just bought a gun.

Chew on that. An 8th grader bought a gun to solve his problem.

I've had four eighth grade children. They are bright, educated, well-supported, and not ONE of them had the sense to make a decision with a gun in the 8th grade.

So several lives are destroyed. Certainly the man who lost his life to the poorly aimed gun. The child now charged with murder. The children who will assume they need guns to protect themselves from each other beginning yesterday. The society who must now spend its tax-payer dollars to house a prisoner instead of educate a bright, promising student. Parents, grandparents, siblings, and friends of all those involved.

Again and again in parenting circles we are told, "You get who you are." Extrapolate. We get, as a culture, who we are. Our intense individualism, our assumptions that other's problems are not our problems, our dismissal of tragedy as not our problem, our glorification of violence, all these cultivate the culture that results in an 8th grader, a gun, and a bystander.

Who are we? Read the headlines as your Lenten practice today. Reject the assumption that negative headlines are "someone else." Consider who we are by what we get.

Pray for forgiveness, reconciliation, redemption, and transformation.