In Part One, I shared with you the pathway to a teenager or young man’s life choice of mass killing in the community. I should point out that community mass killers are a bit different from workplace mass shooters, who are typically older though with many of the same incentives and identification. By now you should be familiar with the importance of externalizing responsibility, embracing alienation and isolation, identification with the destructive and valuing destructiveness, how eventual mass killers use isolation to more readily dehumanize future targets, including immersion in video game violence, and how mass killers make themselves unapproachable to all in order to invest in their grievance and reinforce their righteous indignation. By the time the shooting starts, they believe – and have to – that everyone around them deserves the death they deliver.
Parents, neighbors, the general public, teachers, priests and houses of worship, mental health professionals, media, law enforcement, and government officials each have a role to play in eliminating mass killing. Not surprisingly, that role is defined by how mass killers develop and how that pathway can be redirected long before anyone picks up the gun or other weapon. Part One, below, focused on what you can do as Parents.
What You Can Do as Neighbors – The most important role you have is to see yourself as a model or example to the children of other families or to other young people in your community. You do not know who notices the great example you can set. But as I regularly deal with the worst of man, I would submit to you that even the most troubled notice the light and respect it – even when they are not immediately drawn to it or may feel unworthy of it. This is not some new age gobbledygook. Rather, you as a neighbor have the capacity to set an example for young people or the alienated to even incidentally notice and to be influenced. You may be in a position to impact someone you will never know, someone who interacts with you or someone who watches you from afar. That someone may see in you qualities that he does not have reinforced at home but instinctively recognizes as right. Or, qualities that he is too rejecting of because of his alienation from his family or other natural mentors – yet somehow appreciates how you exhibit them in your actions.
So what should you be setting an example of?
Support people who are struggling. When others in your neighborhood witness this example, inevitably some follow it. The initiative feeds on itself and sets the tone for a whole community, and inevitably progress to approach the unapproachable. The more your neighborhood is one where people not only seek to support the struggling, the more the struggling find it easier to accept support. This quality of community makes it easier for those normally alienated to be accessible to somebody, anybody, who may penetrate a self-imposed wall before it is too late.
It is also especially important to model empathy. Troubled individuals may not be exposed to empathy in their own home, or values of charity or concern for “outsiders.” Such a home environment promotes an insular thinking that may have its benefits, but makes it easier to devalue others who “aren’t in the family.” The disaffected and alienated man who witnesses the example of empathy and repeatedly so is better able to appreciate others and strangers as people with their own rights and humanity. This is the kind of psychological push-back needed against an angry person’s disregard for everyone around him. That person MUST dehumanize others in order to destroy them, and this example makes it harder.
Animal rights activists employ techniques to highlight humanity in animals to engender discomfort in hunters, poachers, and others who use animals for fur and other comforts or perceive value. The politics of this are beside the point; modeling empathy inspires all who witness to relate to the humanity of others – even animals. We need the disaffected to tap into suppressed conscience before they decide that the social payoff of larger-than-life relevance is worth the price of neighbors who are faceless to them.
Neighbors also should create activities that make it easy for all of those in the neighborhood to partake in and enjoy. Whether it is the basketball court in one’s driveway, to the fruit trees on one’s property, the barbeque on the roof, one’s swimming pool, or the block party on the street, activities that make everyone feel welcome to any degree of participation promote connectedness to someone who finds isolation more familiar, before that isolation is the only comfort. Furthermore, considering that many parents work and leave their children to entertain themselves, activities in the immediate vicinity of the home that get the children out of the house provide alternatives when parents cannot replace the TV and computer with an involved parent or Big Brother. There are many parents whose children are raising themselves and fall into computer and other addictions simply because the alternatives are not enticing or accessible enough. Neighbors and neighborhoods can make a difference in that regard.
Next in Part Three: What You Can Do as a Member of the General Public
