My heart broke when I heard of the Newtown, CT shooting back in December. As an anthropologist, one of the things I try to understand are the reasons for killing or otherwise harming other humans. Killing children, especially 6 and 7 year olds, is a little harder for me to wrap my head around, although it certainly serves its cultural purposes, but a masacre at an elementary school proved challenging to the point of heartbreak. What most bothers me about this incident are the future lives of the surviving children, their siblings and all other children who were profoundly altered by this event face. I lament over the psychological trauma these children faced so needlessly. Six years old is a very young age to be confronted with such bare truths of humanity as delusions, matricide, murder and suicide. Learning to cope with this incident may be one of the bravest things these children ever do. I have been writing my graduate school application essays and so I've spent some time over the last few months interrogating my own childhood memories to find what experiences may have precipitated my interest in medical anthropology. I asked myself why I was interested in illness and health in the way that I am and why I choose a non-clinical career path. Illness touched my family when I was very young and persisted throughout my entire upbringing but it wasn't something always talked about. Perhaps I search for a deeper understanding of illness through medical anthropology to counteract the lack of understanding I felt growing up. The doctors showed their concern for my mother and treated her aggressively but with care. The 'care' she received at her general hospital was exemplary, I make no mistake, but even though we traveled the 100 miles or so to get great advanced care, I always felt a little bereft of support on the car ride home. We still drove home with the illness (it was chronic but sustainable with frequent treatments) and brought it back to our home. It never left us and all that time in between trips to the hospital it was seldom attended to, checked up on or inquired about. That was all dealt with in the personal while the illness was addressed in the clinical and never the two should meet. This consistent lack of understanding, on all sides, left me wanting to know more about illness and not just in the clinical sense but in the meaning sense. The greater meaning behind things eluded me growing up as what information is provided to children can be abridged to fit curriculum or doctrine. Hepatitis was always learned about in association with drug abuse and carried a moral weight. My mother contracted it through a blood transfusion however and this reasoning was never morally mediated. Junkies got Hep C, not mommies.
I wonder now about the Newtown children and how they now face the monumental task of making sense of and giving meaning to a mass-shooting at their elementary school. Will they be supported in their quest for information? I want to distinguish here between explanation and comprehension and the greater organizational feats our minds accomplish when we find meaning in traumatic events. That Adam Lanza took his own life, and therefore his voice and story, I regret because much is lost here in way of understanding, which is immensely valuable in therapeutic contexts. How do you begin to explain to a traumatized 8 year old that abnormalities in Lanza's brain contributed to his attack? How do you explain brain abnormalities in general? Show them diagnostic images? Detail how neurons can communicate in different ways in different brains? Would this help them understand Lanza's actions without instilling a lasting doubt of the mentally ill in their minds? How would one venture to explain that the very video games they (or more likely their older siblings) play contributed to Lanza's violence? These questions are delicate and have no absolute answers whatsoever, making this job of helping children understand such events precarious, to say the least. The clinicians and therapists that have been working with, and will work with, these children are a courageous group indeed to take on such an assignment.
Obviously, a more engaged conversation about guns can serve to both prevent future shootings, or so suggested, and to lessen the trauma associated with gun killings. Gun violence, if 'solved', cannot provide the answer as killing is much more complex than method and motive alone. At the very least, I hope the great debate that remains will give rise to a new application of philosophy and a better national understanding of ethics. Whatever we point our finger to or place blame upon, change is expected and needed but any change will fail if understanding isn't broadened. It will, I hope, influence the lives of those surviving children in ways that are healing and restorative. Perhaps the shooting in Newtown will give rise to a new generation of anthropologists that study links between mental illness and violence or gun culture. Without a doubt, this experience will change their world perspectives and I argue we should begin a national conversation about how these perspectives can be seen for the good rather than for the bad. My hopes for these children are that they are brought to a more dynamic understanding of human nature, in all its disturbing truth, and gain a new understanding of the world like I did. Such an understanding can become an advantage later in life and I truly hope it will be for the Newtown children and all those who were traumatized by this incident.
In memoriam: Sandy Hook Elementary School, Newtown, CT. 12/14/12
