Thursday morning dawned bright and crisp in Colorado, partially eclipsed by the dark shadow hanging over a nation once again grieving the slaughter of its children.
I walked my 6-year-old granddaughter, Maddie, to school. The only allusion to the massacre was the school flag at half-staff, fluttering bright red, white and blue with snow-capped mountains as background. As Maddie skipped off to greet a friend I called out, “Have a good day! See you later!”
The morning before, thousands of miles away, parents also called out, “Have a good day! See you later!” Many will never see their children again.
Thoughts and prayers. We are a country that thinks and prays a lot when kids are gunned down, thereby absolving any responsibility to actually do something.
I hesitate to write about this issue, because what has not been said? We will have another debate about gun control and nothing will happen. Much commentary on television news Wednesday night focused on the need for better security in schools. For some, like in Vermont, that means no guns in school. For others, like some politicians and citizens in New Hampshire, it means more guns in school. Liberals will call for tighter regulation and universal background checks. The NRA will pour gasoline on these arguments with disingenuous claims that the liberals really want to confiscate all the guns and leave good Americans defenseless against mostly imagined threats. The NRA’s lapdogs in Congress will think and pray until the moment passes.
The problem, our president and so many others say, is not guns. It is about keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and those who are mentally ill. The morning papers and talk shows were looking for answers in mental illness. It must be de facto mental illness, they reason, because no sane person would execute 17 humans with an automatic weapon. That ties it up nicely. All we have to do is identify the mentally ill and our children will be safe.
“There were warning signs.” There are always warning signs. If only someone had seen something and said something.
The quick rush to diagnosis is convenient — and wrong. The history of Nikolas Cruz indicates no clinical mental illness. A disturbed and angry young man is not the same as a mentally ill person. As is true in the quick jump to a diagnosis of autism in previous cases, this easy answer unfairly stains the millions of women, men and children who actually suffer from mental illness and are no more likely than you or I to become violent.
In a Wednesday evening news conference, Florida Gov. Rick Scott declared it a manifestation of pure evil. This, too, absolves society of responsibility for its sickness. Evil is beyond our control other than, of course, exorcising it through public proclamations of thoughts and prayers for victims and their families.
I suspect I will draw outrage by expressing sympathy for Nikolas Cruz. As with the resistance to gun control, people may believe it’s too soon for that — if it might ever be time.
Once we have cultivated angry young men like Cruz, the background checks, security measures at schools, improved identification of “mentally ill” people or gun regulations will remain necessary but woefully insufficient. It is like a frantic scramble to treat smallpox without ever looking at the cause. All of our responses to the slaughter of children are epitaphs on a closed barn door.
Boys like Cruz were not born evil or mentally ill. Seething anger that erupts in a spasm of blood is not a genetic or theological condition. It is often a product of neglect and abuse, bullying and humiliation. Every backstory of a man bent on extreme violence is a story of a boy bent by the indifference or cruelty of a milieu lacking love and compassion. It may happen at home or it may happen in a school where some boys are isolated in plain sight or taunted with no one paying attention.
The one nearly universal factor is that these boys are desperately lonely. In a few cases, like the two often-bullied boys who riddled Columbine with bullets, they bond with another and the rage is compounded.
As reported in The New York Times, Melisa McNeill, Cruz’s public defender, told MSNBC that he did not have the support system to deal with the problems in his life.
“When your brain is not fully developed, you don’t know how to deal with these things,” she said. “That’s the child I’m sitting across from. He’s sad. He’s mournful. He’s remorseful. He is fully aware of what is going on, and he’s just a broken human being.”
In October, after the horror of the wholesale slaughter in Las Vegas, I wrote, “But when life circumstances leave some men with a crippling sense of inadequacy or a profound sense of injustice, they don’t seek counseling or mediation. They get even, as they have learned to do explicitly and implicitly through a lifetime of images, admonitions and admirations.”
Nikolas Cruz is just another of the boys whose life circumstances left a crippling sense of inadequacy. It is not too soon to examine how this happens, over and over and over again.
Steve Nelson lives in Boulder, Colo., and Sharon. He can be reached at stevehutnelson@ gmail.com.