Local Responsibility
..more ideas, at smaller scale
Sometimes when I am awake too early, around 4am or so, I go ahead and get up. My brother is usually up at this time — he says “puttering around the house, writing, sometimes being useful before heading to work” — so I gave him a call. He’s an MD; preventative / occupational medicine. OM/PM docs focus on being and staying healthy, holistic health, systemic risk, and the intersection with public health policy.
Our conversation touched briefly on the Valentine’s day Florida school shooting. We considered the issue by reviewing our individual perspectives; one stand-out tenet claims that humans are tool using primates, and guns are in fact tools. As such, if legal authorities attempt to remove or control access to a particular set of tools, determined apes may still forge means to accomplish their goals. Illegal tools, or substitute tools — you can fill in the blanks here.
I don’t particularly “like” guns — whatever that means. I have a child in public school. I don’t want her to witness or be subjected to lethal violence, but of course she is/does, at least by proxy. It’s in our media, and in our culture at the highest level. I’d like the reader to think on one of our Nobel Peace laureate statesmen, who is well documented as the ultimate authority for the application of powerful lethal tools in foreign lands at an alarming scale. That particular statesman is not unique in authorizing the use of those tools; he’s merely unique in being knighted as a distinguished Man of Peace who also uses them. Doesn’t that seem a bit disconnected to you? How do we trust an organization functioning under that magnitude of dissidence?
To get back to the issue at hand, the good doctor asked the question, “who is best to intervene in this one man’s life-course? How is this sickness addressed and healed?” I don’t know much about the particulars of this perpetrator, and I doubt that many people reading this do. The reporters say things, and sometimes retract them. Narratives are constructed. People march, or make grand statements, pleas, or even threats. Of all of the comments I’ve read/scanned since Feb 14, only one said anything that looked to me like it might have been focused on a realistic symptom/solution. Paraphrased, “what about this kid’s local community?”
Did he have a school? A parent/guardian? Peers? Employer? He in fact did, and some reports, which may be accurate, have been made claiming that many of these people were not surprised by the outcome.
So, there you go. The people standing right next to the murderer seem to lay no claim to responsibility. It’s the Federal Government’s responsibility, right? The FBI was supposed to sweep this kid up and stop him. Congress is supposed to make “laws” that prevent him from getting that particular tool.
Western culture is paternal and authoritative. It’s also monotheistic. To me, this means we have a tendency to defer to authority to make broad single-source solutions to fix our problems. “Pro-active solutions”. Doctors are given exclusive authority to prescribe powerful drugs to heal sickness. Legislatures are given exclusive authority to issue regulation and laws to heal social ills.
For my part, I think we need more ideas, at smaller scale. We need more personal authority, responsibility, and accountability.
It’s pretty clear that federal agencies don’t have the ability to “fix things”. The push/pull of polarity politics makes top-down approaches heavy-handed, clumsy, and inept, in the best cases, and dangerous and lethal in the worst.
