Mama Finds the Answers to Gun Violence

Since the horrible shooting at Sandy Hook last December schools, parents, and the nation as a whole have all been left trying to figure out how this could have been prevented. I too sat around in the days following the tragedy wondering where things had gone so terribly wrong. My heart ached for the families. I am a mother. I can not actually even begin to comprehend the loss. I can only know that even the thought of losing one of my sons paralyzes me. I know life would never again be the same. As our nation mourned we opened up the debate on gun violence more fervently then ever before. While the argument raged on we sent our children back to school and hoped that they were safe.

The search for answers left us with no answers.  People were left fearful. Some schools decided the best option was to have teachers armed with guns. Other schools tried to profile students hoping they could determine which kid is the next threat to society. Teachers and parents are all on high alert. In the midst of this of the chaos  my 5th grader and his friend drew some pictures of aliens fighting. This set off a chain of events that disturbed me and frightened me on a whole new level.



Pictures like the one above have been drawn by little boys for as long as they have been able to draw. I am sure thousands of years ago little Roman boys were drawing pictures of chariots attacking each other. The teacher did not see it that way. She grabbed the picture from the boys and began to lecture the entire class about how pictures like this are how mass murderers are created. WTF? Seriously. This is the first step down the slope to becoming a mass murderer?  Finally someone has the answer but she is not sharing it with anyone but a class full of eleven year olds.

The future mass murderers were sent to the principal and told that drawing war scenes was part of the zero tolerance for violence in the schools. The boys left the principals office confused. The library was full of books about war. Those books had pictures of tanks, guns, bombs, and other accouterments to war. The teacher talked in class about her boyfriend in the military and the guns he used to protect our country. History books that they were required to study detailed wars. I am pretty sure I remember 80% of history class in school being about one war or another. Our country had been at war for almost the entire lifespan of these boys. I was pregnant with my son when 9/11 happened. He was six months old as I watched shock and awe unfold. From the time he was an infant war had been something he heard about and saw because it was a part of our nations unfolding history. These two boys, who were drawing pictures like lots of boys before them, walked through school the rest of the day feeling like they were what was wrong in the world and possibly the harbingers of death and destruction.

I have three brothers. They all drew war scenes and played war. Our home was a no gun zone. This did not stop the boys from turning toast into guns. My mom has a notebook filled with seventy-five pages of war scenes that one of my brother drew at church. While he was supposed to be taking in the glory of the lord, he instead drew destruction. Good news is we somehow avoided the horrid fate that awaited them and all of my brothers grew up to be a normal non mass murdering adults. How did we avoid this though? When clearly they had taken the first steps down that path so long ago. If boys portraying war and having an interest in guns is truly the key, how is that no one I know committed such horrific acts?

One hundred children can draw war scenes and if one of them goes on to commit an atrocity everyone is going to point their finger and say Ahha! this must be the reason. This logic is applied across the board to all activities that a murderer was interested in. Violent video games  movies, a song, a book, and the list can go on.  Logically this makes no sense. Let's look at one example out of many. Call of Duty Black Ops 2 is a first person shooter game. I have watched my husband play it. It is all guns and shooting. You have missions to slaughter people. 7.5 million copies of this game were sold. That is at minimum 7.5 million people with access to this mind altering madness. That does not even take into account households with multiple people such as mine. One copy with four people in the home. That number could feasibly triple. However let's just look at the base figure of 7.5 million. If this was one of the catalyst that was pushing people to depart from humanity and commit horrid crimes, would we not see an actual epidemic of this. With 7.5 million people exposed we would certainly see more than the 3-4 horrific acts that we saw last year.

At the end of the day none of those things are what made someone step away from humanity. There is nothing we can pin point and say is the cause. This scares the shit out of us. We need to understand why someone strays so far from the path of normalcy. As a teenager I had an obsession with serial killers. Not because I wanted to be one thank you very much. It was because my brain could not wrap around it. How? Why? What? I wanted to understand. The crimes that people committed were so far beyond my ability to comprehend and I wanted answers. I wrote a research paper about it hoping I would find something to explain it all to me. What I found was there is no perfect recipe that creates that void within someone. Some had horrid childhoods. Lots of people do. They don't all turn around and murder thirty people.Some had wonderful loving parents. Well crap. Now what do you do? There was no definitive thread of commonality that screamed "This is how a serial killer is born!!!!."

 As I told my sons on the day of the shootings human brains are like computers. Most of the time they work exactly as they have been programmed to work. We move along our day and our existence with our brains doing the job they were intended to. That job includes providing us a sense of right and wrong. Sometimes their is an error in the brain. We see an error message but it doesn't tell us where the error came from.Why did that one computer, in the same environment, with the same set-up, same updates, same everything behave differently? It is a miracle that with as complex as our brains our these errors happen so little.

Our desperation to understand leads us on a modern day witch hunt. My son was humiliated in front of his entire class. When I talked to the teacher about this she defended her actions as protecting my son. She said a new profiling was being started and because my son was quiet and really liked to draw war scenes he would be a target of this profiling. Funny thing is this profiling doesn't take into account so many little elements of my sons personality. His father is very shy. He was always the quiet kid in class. Yes he drew war scenes like nobodies business. So his quiet thoughtfulness never worried me because he is his father's son. These profiles will not know this. My son has had lots of obsessions in his short span of existence. One of them was My Little Pony. Yup rainbows and being friends. His list of  obsessions doesn't end there. Seals, Pokemon, rocks, Hot Wheels, Indiana Jones, and  Legos. The last year or so we have watched him obsess over Minecraft and Halo Megabloks. He falls in love with something, learns everything there is to learn about it and then moves on. It's how he has always been. They won't know that. They also won't know that he has a deep affinity for animals and can not stand to see them harmed. He is afraid of bees. He loves the ocean and could swim for hours. His brother is his best friend even if he doesn't realize it now. He is a momma's boy and fiercely protective of my feelings. All these things will never be seen because their profile says look for the quiet kid in class drawing guns.

The whole fiasco ended out OK.  The teacher apologized because she realized that she had gone overboard. I understand her fear. She needs to understand mine though. Our kids are being stripped of their ability to be kids more and more everyday. They live in a world where we have all become so afraid that we fear living itself to some point. By becoming so terrified of these people that have committed horrible acts, we are giving them a power they don't deserve. We have become terrified creatures striking out at each other in fear. I just want my son to have a childhood in a world full of madness. Drawing war scenes is part of that childhood.

Mama Doesnt Want To Be Angry

It has been over a month since I have had the time to start writing again. Mama had a big move that consumed the entire month of February. Work picked up and became hectic and I still have boxes sitting in my living room. Mama  is back though and ready to preach her gospel.

About a week ago I started to write about the horrific climate currently facing women. Everywhere Mama turns there is some new legislation or bill being passed denying women the right to dictate what will and will not happen with her body. We are expected to be barefoot and pregnant it seems. I must say I do love running around barefoot . I live by the beach. Nothing feels better then squishing sand between my toes on a hot summer day. The pregnant part I can do without though. So, it was with a sense of righteous indignation and fury that I began writing last week. I was ready to throw my rage out into the cyber world and vent to whoever would listen.  My vagina is my business. (aside from discussing it on the internet). My steam ran out that evening and I left it to sit and stew.

A few days ago it hit me that all the anger and rage was pointless. Blogging about it does nothing to stop the deluge of confused individuals hell bent on stripping my right to prevent an unplanned pregnancy. Of course Mama will vote. That is a given. Our system is not perfect. Mama does feel that our collective voices have a power. Obama is President because of that collective uprising of voices. Voices hungry for a change. Voices that wanted this Presidency to be different. I believe as a society we can stand up and make our voices louder then the ones screaming that we are amoral sluts if we take birth control. I don't think that this is the biggest contribution I can bring to the table though. I will do it because it is right but I know there is more.

This train of thought led me to realize the biggest impact I can have is here in my own home. I have two sons 12 and 10. My power is to teach my sons.

My sons need to see women as strong, capable and intelligent. They need to be shown that my husband considers me an equal. That he values my right to choose what does and does not happen to my body. The men of tomorrow need to be shown that women are their equal partners in life.

My husband was raised by a strong, beautiful, smart and resilient single mother. I believe he has deep respect for me because of his mother. His role model was a woman who had to be a mother and father. She had to wear both roles and could not pause to see if it was ok with society. She had children to feed, cloth and shelter. She took on what had been traditionally the fathers role in the process teaching my husband a valuable lesson about life. We need to teach our sons that these traditional roles women once held in society are gone. Women can have all the traits that had once been admired in men and still be wholly women. We can be equal and valuable in society. This does not take the place of men. This makes men better as whole.

Women have to embrace their own strength and be ok with it. For years I worried I was that I was a crappy woman. I don't love make-up or chick flicks. I would rather play computer games then do arts and crafts. My idea of looking nice would make Clinton and Stacy  have nightmares for months. I felt I needed to do embrace all these "womanly" things or I was failing as a woman. At the end of the day I have a vagina. That makes me a woman. Trying to be more "woman like" stripped away my humanity. It took from me what it was that made me unique. I am who am. I am a woman who likes kung-fu and arterial spray movies. I am a woman who only recently learned to cook. I can not sew but I can implement an enterprise software system.

I had to discover it on my own. We can help our sons and daughters discover it. Our sons need to be ok with being stay at home dads, having wives that make more money, and crying when their first baby goes to kindergarten. Our daughters need to be ok with changing tires, pwning on Modern Warfare, and mowing the lawn. They need to learn from our mistakes. If we teach them now that it is ok to be nurturing, loving, compassionate and respectful this will become the norm for the next generation. 15 years from now we will see men and women who look at each and no longer place a value based on gender. It will be a value based on their humanity. 50 points for kindness. -50 points for misogyny.

The challenge is thrown.  Our sons and daughters shouldn't move forward unenlightened and ignorant. We owe it to ourselves and to their future selves to show them a new path. A path in which we all have a place in this world and that place is based on our merit as a human being not what does or does not dangle down below.