It's Time to Talk about Fear and Love

What do guns, race, and mental illness have in common?

Charleston shooting demands difficult conversations about guns, race, and mental illness

James Holmes was obsessed with Batman. Elliott Rodger thought all women hated him and he needed to exact revenge. Adam Lanza killed innocent first graders, an act that shocked the collective national conscience. Now, in a country already reeling from racial turmoil, mass shooter Dylann Roof has targeted black churchgoers. All of the shooters were described as “quiet bright boys” who became increasingly isolated in their teens.  For all of them, numerous red flags were raised.

In his national response to the tragedy, President Obama observed what many have been saying for years: “This type of mass violence doesn’t happen in other advanced countries.” 

That’s not entirely true: Norway’s 2011 massacre, the attacks on Charlie Hebdo in France, and the Germanwings crash show that other nations experience unpredictable and senseless violence as well. But Obama’s still-valid point is essentially the same one muckraker Michael Moore made in Bowling for Columbine (2002). There’s something different about guns and America.

Let’s look at what we know about gun violence.

Fact: Mass shootings account for only about two percent of all gun violence in the United States. In 2015, only 133 of 5,767 deaths caused by gun violence were the result of mass shootings. In fact, you are much more likely to die in an airplane crash than in a mass shooting event. 

Fact: Blacks are disproportionately affected by gun violence. Though blacks make up only about 13 percent of the U.S. population, 55 percent of all people who died by homicide in 2010 were black. 

Fact: To date in 2015, there have been 2,025 reported and verified shootings involving law enforcement. It is hard to know exactly how high this number is because the government does not track police shootings. The Washington Post has reported 385 fatalities this year so far; The Guardian 470. According to a Pro Publica study, young black men are 21 times more likely to be shot by police than young white men. 

Fact: Suicide completion is the second leading cause of death for people ages 15-34, with 41,149 deaths by suicide completion across all age groups in 2013. Almost 60 percent of deaths by gun violence are completed suicides; the vast majority (87 percent) of suicide gun violence victims are male.

Fact: Based on studies of mass shooters, about half of the shooters suffered from serious mental illness. But the most common form of violence associated with mental illness is self-harm; more than ten percent of people diagnosed with schizophrenia and 15-17 percent of people with bipolar disorder die by completing suicide.

President Obama acknowledged that gun control is not going to happen, not even when a Bible study group is gunned down by a young man obsessed with white supremacist dogma. That’s why it’s up to each of us to face up to what guns, race, and mental illness represent in America. The seemingly endless and unproductive debates are really about our fear. It’s time to change that conversation.

How do we solve the gun issue?

We all look in the mirror and admit that we are afraid to die. We acknowledge that we likely will have no control over the time, place, or manner of our deaths. Then we start living. As part of our commitment to overcoming fear, we educate ourselves, practice responsible gun ownership, and teach it to our children. (Also, we start tracking data about law enforcement and gun violence.)

How do we solve the race issue?

We all look in the mirror and say, “I’m human. So is everyone else, no matter what color his or her skin is.” Then we start to treat people the way we want to be treated. We hold doors open for people of all genders and races. We write thank you notes to each other and buy each other’s coffee in the drive through lines. If we’re white, we recognize that we have privilege, and we fight even harder for the rights of those who do not share that privilege.

How do we solve the mental illness issue?

We all look in the mirror and say, "Mental illness is not a choice or a character flaw." Then we end stigma and provide treatment. Mental illness is a costly public health crisis, in both financial and ethical terms.  U.S. Representative Tim Murphy has reintroduced his “Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act” with significant revisions that can help individuals, families, and communities to improve access to care. 

In the wake of mass shootings, I used to write about the need to provide treatment before tragedy. My new message is this: enough about tragedy. Let's focus on treatment. Treatment provides hope, and love overcomes fear.

The American writer Thomas Wolfe wrote, “To believe that new monsters will arise as vicious as the old, to believe that the great Pandora's Box of human frailty, once opened, will never show a diminution of its ugly swarm, is to help, by just that much, to make it so forever.” Let’s stop believing in new monsters and start hoping instead for an America that can overcome its fear—of guns, of race, and of mental illness. Today we may feel lost and hopeless and afraid. But as Nelba Marquez-Greene, a grieving mother who lost her six year old daughter to gun violence, said one month after her daughter’s senseless death, “We choose love. Love wins in Newtown, and may love win in America.” 

   

I'm betting on love.

The Dangerous Illusion of Safety

What a German co-pilot’s death and a Jewish rabbi’s life teach us about love

In 1984, I was 12 years old. That summer, my mother handed me two worn paperback books: George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. “Read them both,” she told me. “Then tell me which one you think is more likely to come true.”

In 1984, I chose Huxley, with his seductive dystopian future shaped by caste systems and fueled by a pleasure drug that rendered life pleasant but meaningless.

In 2015, with our terrorized, NSA-monitored, trigger-happy America, I choose Orwell and his future built on fear and the dangerous illusion of safety.   

For me and for many, this Easter season has been overshadowed by yet another tragedy involving a young man with mental illness. This time, the weapon of destruction was an airplane, not a gun, and it proved far more deadly than other tragedies like Sandy Hook or Columbine. Yet like the school shootings, the essential purpose of the Germanwings crash was the co-pilot’s suicide.

While tabloids could not resist inflammatory headlines like “Madman in the Cockpit,” 

for the most part, the mainstream news outlets were respectful and cautious, stressing the outlier nature of the tragic incident that claimed 150 lives and calling for an increased focus on improving mental healthcare for everyone. Two years after Newtown, this balanced approach shows that we have come a long way as a society in how we understand mental illness.

But the “blame and shame” comments on these articles demonstrate that we still have so far to go. 

Orwell’s book described a society controlled by fear. I would suggest that our society is swiftly moving along this exact trajectory, and that the way we treat people who have mental illness demonstrates how Orwellian fear can be used to control public opinion.

As one example of how we have traded reason for fear, in the wake of the Germanwings tragedy, a journalist with a major news outlet actually asked a mental health policy expert friend of mine, “Is it safe to fly?”

This question demonstrates our incredible inability as a species to assess risk. In fact, it is still safe to fly, much safer than driving to the grocery store. In 2013, for example, there were 32,719 automobile crash fatalities, and only 443 aviation related deaths. This year won’t be much different, even with the Germanwings disaster.

The way we think about violence and mental illness also reveals how we fail to understand risk. While it is true that school shooters are more likely than the general population to have mental illness, the vast majority of gun-related violence is not associated with mental illness. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has tracked school-related violence since 1992: in the entire United States, between 14 and 34 youth die violently at school each year. To put that number in perspective, in Chicago alone, more than 300 young people between the ages of 10 and 25, mostly young men, were killed by guns in 2008. 

The crux of our collective and irrational fear is this simple truth: we are all going to die. An almost statistically insignificant number of us will die in an airplane crash. More of us will die in car accidents or because of gun violence or by suicide. Many of us will live to old age, only to succumb to dementia, heart disease, or cancer. But one way or another, every one of us is going to die. Nothing can keep us safe from death.

Only when we embrace this essential condition of human existence—when we become comfortable with the inevitable truth of our ultimate ending—can we live a life that is truly free from fear.

For me, Easter is a celebration of this freedom. The celebration begins more than 2000 years ago with Christ’s bloody, agonizing exit from mortal existence, his lifeless body hanging on a cross, pierced by a Roman spear. The celebration ends with Christ’s mythical transcendence to divinity and allegorical return to the empty tomb. But Easter is really a celebration of radical love, the kind of love that makes all men and women our brothers and sisters, the kind of love that conquers death.

I think sometimes that we focus too much on the promise of the resurrection, of life everlasting, and too little on the Rabbi’s earthly message of love right here and now. At its heart, Easter teaches us to overcome our fear of the most cruel and brutal death possible, to embrace instead the life we were meant to live. Christ's life reminds us that a stranger from Samaria may save us, that the leper may be cured against all odds, and that none among us is perfect. Christ’s message was to “love one another,” to embrace the stranger, to help the poor, and to forgive.

Instead, our “Christian Nation” has adopted an Orwellian illusion of safety and rejected the inherent risk of Christ-like selfless, radical love. We do not love one another. We do not embrace the stranger or help the poor; we blame them and incarcerate them. We do not forgive trespasses; we harbor grudges, as individuals, as communities, and as nations.

Here’s the question I have for you on Easter: What if this life is all we have? That is the question we are asking ourselves, in the wake of a senseless airplane crash that could have been prevented, if only (mental health care, no stigma, social support networks, etc.).

The question we should be asking ourselves is this: “How do I live the best life I am capable of living, here and now, today?”

Only by answering this question can we overcome the Orwellian culture of fear that is dividing the world into smaller and smaller islands of false safety. None of us can escape death. But Christ’s death should have taught us this: we all have a sacred duty to love.