By Andrew
Malekoff© February 19, 2018
The 2018 Valentine’s
Day massacre at Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida has elevated beyond
cliché status the oft-stated sentiment about a loss of innocence in childhood.
For many, the events of that day evoked painful memories of the 2012 Sandy Hook
Elementary School shooting and scores more in recent decades. Schools, movie
theaters, concert venues and more have become American killing fields.
After
“thoughts and prayers” are paraded around by politicians from all sides, what
happens next?
Many gun rights advocates, refusing to allow for the fact that
our forefathers were talking about the right to bear arms such as muskets and
had no conception of guns that could shoot down dozens in an instant, stand in
the position that it’s not about guns but rather mental illness.
As the
Executive Director of North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center, which
serves children and their families facing issues such as depression, anxiety
and substance use disorders, I have seen the many faces of mental illness and
addictions for more than 40 years. It is incredibly rare for those who are
labeled as mentally ill to be violent. In fact, they are far more likely to be
the victims of violence than the perpetrators.
Nevertheless,
we do need to have a discussion about mental illness at times like these. That
discussion, however, needs to be about how health insurance companies and the
elected officials who count on their donations are failing miserably at having
adequate numbers of providers on their lists who take insurance.
Over and
over again, we hear that, before they found North Shore Child & Family
Guidance Center, which never turns anyone away for inability to pay, they made
numerous calls to the mental health providers on their insurer’s list and found
that they no longer take insurance or are booked for months.
Aside from receiving
emotional first-aid, the surviving students from Douglas High are demonstrating
that they need to take action; action that represents triumph over the
demoralization of helplessness and despair.
Noted trauma
expert Bessel van der Kolk said that “talking about the trauma is rarely if
ever enough.” Survivors have a need to
create symbols such as memorials or participate in action that “enable them to
mourn the dead and establish the historical and cultural meaning of the
traumatic events.”
The surviving
students from Parkland are turning their heartbreak and rage into activism by
demanding a new look into America’s gun laws, as Emily Witt wrote in the New Yorker (Feb. 17). In her encounters
with some of the surviving students she reported that “Their grief was raw,
their rage palpable.”
“Emma
Gonzalez, a senior at Douglas, had the most searing indictment:
“The people
in the government who were voted into power are lying to us. And us kids seem
to be the only ones who notice and are prepared to call B.S.
“Companies,
trying to make caricatures of the teen-agers nowadays, saying that all we are
self-involved and trend-obsessed and they hush us into submissions when our
message doesn’t reach the ears of the nation, we are prepared to call B.S.
“Politicians
who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the N.R.A., telling us
nothing could ever be done to prevent this: we call B.S.
“They say
that tougher gun laws do not prevent gun violence: we call B.S.”
From Columbine
to Parkland, there have been so many shocking events in between. Too many have faded
from consciousness.
As Journalist
Gary Smith, who wrote about a lesser known 2012 shooting at Chardon High School
in Ohio, stated: "The clock is already ticking in the land of
amnesia."
How long
before Parkland, too, is gone? If it is up to the young activists in Parkland,
never.
Published in
Blank Slate media February 2018
