These Young Men

In the past ten days, two eighteen-year-old males have, between them, murdered thirty human beings, most of them children, and been murdered themselves by police acting on the same appetite for violence.

Now every decent person in this country is calling for reform of our gun laws, at least a strengthening of background checks. It is not an excuse for doing nothing to note that no reform will ever pass the firewall of Republican opposition.

Yet there are decent people in the Republican party, men and women, who may remember the murders at the Sandy Elementary School twenty years ago and the agonized attempt afterwards to prevent assault weapons, the most profitable and the most widely sold, from falling into the hands of would-be murderers. The move was defeated by the Republican party and public inertia and despair.

I pray for some kind of reform before the next rampage happens, as it will. But even in the event of reform, we have to consider the fact that we live in a militarized nation that has been committed to wars for its entire history.

The “heroes” we applaud wear camouflage and tote weapons to destroy strangers in countries they know nothing about. Even the increasing rates of suicide among returning veterans has done nothing to resuscitate the moribund peace movement. And we women are often the cheerleaders for “patriotism” without reflecting on the link to the domestic violence from which so many of us suffer.

But back to these two young men, about whom almost nothing is known, and about whom nothing will be known as long as the mothers and grandmothers are sealed behind a wall of shame. One grandmother was shot first, perhaps the same sixty-six-year-old woman who had tried to teach kindness and compassion—”feminine” strengths that hyper-masculinity must deny and destroy.

Because it is almost certain the two young men, like thousands of others, were raised by their mothers and grandmothers. Their fathers, recognizing no responsibility, are long fled, their grandfathers may have already died. Mothers and grandmothers are working minimum wage jobs, often more than one, to pay their bills, and desperately trying to exert some degree of control over their sons, or giving up in despair.

Without fathers, there is no hope for these boys who attain physical manhood without male models or discipline or goals. The women who struggle to raise them are discounted by the world around them which refuses to grant respect, affordable child care, or a living wage. These killers know this, they see it on every hand, and adolescent rebellion against all forms of authority, but particularly the feminine, is reinforced by every video game and most Hollywood movies. Saddled with spurious support of “freedom of expression,” we do nothing to curb the insidious money-making of these image spewers.

The images are all the same: male bodies driven by unconscious impulses to destroy.

What is to be done?

I don’t know. We are deep into another recreation of a woman-hating culture when the gains we’d painfully achieved in the 1960’s are overridden by darkness, when we are about to lose control of our own bodies—and why do we never hear anything about the men who create these unwanted babies?—and when in the rush towards war against somebody—Russia? China?—blots out every attempt at a national conscience, a national repudiation of what is happening over and over and over.

A spiritual awakening. Yes. The news photograph of the Roman Catholic Archbishop embracing sobbing women near the school brought tears to my eyes. The church in most of its manifestations teaches humility and acceptance, never to be embraced by the male. But if we have lost control of the violent men in our midst—our fathers, sons and brothers—perhaps Christian humility and acceptance is our only choice other than fruitless raging.

As President Biden advised in his speech Tuesday night, “God is close to the broken-hearted.” This may be our only consolation.

In Women, Politics, Religion