On Sandy Hook, Violence, and Finding Reasons

I've been watching the reactions to the Sandy Hook massacre, and finding them distressing. Not as distressing as the massacre itself, which was simply sad-- but there's nothing I can do for its victims, beyond send thoughts and warm wishes to the survivors. (And appreciative texts to the teachers I know.) Which I do.

But the reactions-- well, there have been some I've found helpful and enlightening. echoboots has a comprehensive, thoughtful, and very readable three-part series on "Unpacking Mental Health and the Sandy Hook Tragedy." nightengalesknd has a thoughtful post about how people are talking about the tragedy and autism. Both of them make the excellent point that I wish I saw more places: it's more complicated than that.

I guess what really got me was the First Parish Unitarian Universalist service on Sunday. They're a place I usually go and find wisdom, companionship, inspiration. So I was disappointed that they just didn't have much useful to say about it. We mourned together, which was a relief after a few days of me going, "oh, godsdammit, not again."

But then there was a somewhat incoherent attempt to link it to the issues of poverty (okay, I sympathize that my minister had clearly worked very hard on a sermon about classism in UU, and didn't want to completely scrap it, or maybe didn't have time to completely rewrite it, but), and there were a few mentions of the need for better gun control, and better mental health care, and a call for less "glorifying of violence" in our culture through such media as action movies and first-person shooter video games. But these are not the answers I wanted.

( Possibly because I HAVE some answers, and they're not those. )