Bang, Bang, (9x) and Sorrow for Our National Memes

Tonight was a beautiful early summer evening.  I sat at the neighborhood park

and listened to a band of old men playing rock tunes from 1960.  The parents of young children danced with their kids.  The older children ran around, playing mixtures of baseball and soccer.  They wore jerseys that read Messi, James, Perdroia, and “Free Brady”. The older people sat on lawn chairs and nodded in time to the music. There were about two hundred people, of almost every race and age out together as a community.

It was the kind of evening I would have loved, but I was distracted by a pervasive feeling of sorrow. I was again, worried about what continually happens in my country. Land of the Free.  Home of the Brave.

I never have met or evaluated Dylann Roof, the adolescent who murdered nine people during their bible study, so it is unethical for me to diagnose him.  But i have known people like him, angry, lost, misguided, racist, violent, paranoid.  Also, given my age, of three score and ten, I can put him in the context of the America I have lived in and see how his actions, like so many before him, are so much a part of the contradictions and conflicts built into our culture.

This is not just a simple act of racism. Yes, it was racist, but he wasn’t a lone, deranged racist, he was part of the culture. Also, he was another in a long line of mass shooters, many of whom, as we have seen lately, are White people shooting Black people.  But it takes many other factors to even allow a disturbed person to have the idea that it is possible to walk into a church and start shooting. 

The most obvious, of course, is racism, which was written in to the Constitution. Black people were the basis of the energy and economic policy of several of the original colonies.  For this to be permitted by our ethical Founding Fathers, Black people could not be considered people. Even the Civil War did not erase this view. Clearly, it still haunts America.

But a confounding, and more complex factor, is the importance of individualism and individual freedom in America.  It is this idea that has exaggerated both America’s strengths and weaknesses.  Individualism has lead to some great new ideas, freedoms, creativity and entrepreneurship.  It is really what attracts people from all over the world to come here and make their own way. Part of the real attraction of America is that people can succeed based upon their own efforts.   In that way, there is no other country comes close.

However, now that the world has become more complex, individualism shows it’s frightening underbelly.  It easily promotes narcissism, which leads to greed and paranoia. Our society has become so complex, with all of us so intertwined that asserting one’s own individualism often invades the space of others. Usually, the rich and powerful invade the space of the poorer and weaker. Those who feel trampled, confused and left behind either become depressed or violent.

It is this distortion of individualism that is woven in with the longstanding American tradition of guns and violence.  The tradition holds that a person has a right to defend himself (him is the defining pronoun), and that he has the right to a gun to do it. That tradition began when the early Europeans drove the Native Americans away.  It has been revised and intensified with anti-government sentiments, since the election of a Black President.

Also, for the last hundred and fifty years America has almost always been at  war. This was viewed as a great strength when the U.S. was the saving force for Europe and Asia when tyrants threatened the world. But now has turned into a never ending, never winnable struggle with a undefined objectives.  The cost of this has been huge, in lives, money, and our views of morality.  We appear to the world, and ourselves also, as killing to make the world safe for big corporations, especially energy companies.  We easily justify killing by declaring we are always right.

Underlying all of this, and really the original and basic cause, is money.  Half of the country feels that the basic American freedom is to be able to make as much money as possible, and any means is acceptable.  That was the original basis of slavery. It is the reason we go to war.  It is what keeps the NRA going.  It is why corporations don’t like government regulation. Money is the way narcissists prove themselves. 

All of these factors have become tightly woven together and have created a society that becomes horrified but does nothing about the killing of dozens of elementary school children, of high school students, of college students, of Black people by White police, of families by their fathers, of wives and girlfriends by the hundreds, of people who may have parked in the wrong place, of kids riding their bicycles in their neighborhoods, or playing basketball, of shoppers in malls, of people sitting at a movie, of people sitting in beauty parlor, of people worshiping at a temple, and now at a church. Add to that the many veterans of those wars who come home and kill themselves. Also the unnoticed but huge amount of white men, usually in their fifties, who blow their own brains out with the guns they have had for years.

Dylann Roof was not one lone deranged person, acting on his own. The was a member of our conflicted society.

This leads to the last point, which is something I am very aware of after forty years as a Psychologist. This type of tragedy is usually labelled the act of someone who is mentally disturbed.Somehow, that seems to end the discussion.  But we know that the mental health treatments available in America range from inadequate to nonexistent. During the forty years that I have been practicing their have been very few innovations in treatment that could have prevented these awful events, and even those are rarely funded or implemented. 

Part of this is because, even more than other complex diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, diabetes, Parkinson’s, and even ALS or cancer, the causes of emotional and psychological disturbances are complex.  Mental health issues are the result not only of biological factors, which include genetics and brain disorders, but are also affected by family dynamics, cultures and subcultures. Also there are other physical causes such as toxins in the body, physical pain, and traumas both mental and physical. I would guess all of those factors played a role in shaping that Dylann Roof’s ability to kill.  Real treatments need to be more comprehensive and to include input from many professions. 

That would cost money. Money that many individuals are not yet willing to part with for the good of the whole society, a very diverse society.

Can three hundred and fifty years of the shaping of a culture be changed? Yes, it will finally happen when enough people feel that we have all suffered enough.  But tonight, in the friendly park in a prosperous New England suburb, not enough people were suffering. We have learned to let life roll on unless the bullet ripped through our own family. The people we see crying on the news will fade away until next time, which is usually only a week or two away.