Quit Pushing the Reset Button

(In Memory of those brave souls:  Dawn Hochsprung, Victoria Soto, and Mary Sherlach.)

I don't have the answers.  I know it's a complex issue.  But I recognize bullshit and rhetoric when I see them, and I recognize the sights and sounds of the reset button being pushed:  the montage of victims faces with piano music played over, the politicians promising change... no really, real change this time, honest, we swear... real change... right?

I can tell you that what needs to occur is a cultural change.  It may involve gun control legislation.  It may involve better investment in mental health.  Maybe it requires a more careful look at censorship and movie ratings.  Maybe it needs a greater investment in the schools.  Perhaps the media needs to take a closer look at their civic responsibilities and less a look at their ratings.  These are all things everyone regurgitates time after time as these events occur with ever-increasing frequency, and yet nothing happens.  The button goes down; the button comes back up.  Things go back to the way they were.

And there is no silver bullet.  There is no one simple, legal-policy solution to a large and complex social problem.  And what solutions may come will come slowly, because social change is always an evolution, not a revolution.

What I can say is that such a change, a real change, can only come from a real commitment.  It doesn't come from the New Years Resolution to diet, or the promise that you'll quit smoking right after this last pack, and those are the kind of assurances that the American people seem to repeatedly hear from the American government.  If you want to lose weight and keep it off you need to make a lifestyle change, and maintain it.  You need to make a real commitment to a change you can live with, and live with forever.  If you want your citizens to stop spree-killing one another, you need to make a cultural change, and maintain that new culture.

Obama had the flags lowered, in grief, after the event at Sandy Hook Elementary.

Here's my suggestion:  keep the flags down.

Keep them down.  Not in grief, but in shame.  Keep them down as a visual reminder that you're making a commitment to real change.  To me, when that flag goes back up, it's like the reset button coming back up.  Things return to the way they were.  Nothing is any different, and the future won't be either.  So keep them down.  Keep them down until you've actually taken the steps toward real change.  It's like saying "I don't get to buy my new big-screen TV until I've shaved off 10 pounds, and kept it off for three months!"  Put something on the line.  Put a comfortable walk into a government building on the line.  Put pride on the line.  Put the reputation of a nation on the line (hint: it already is).  Let the policy-makers walk past a half-mast flag every day until real changes have been put in place, as a stark visual reminder of the colossal failures of the past.

Of course, there's one really big problem with my suggestion:  it would require courage, humility, and a willingness to proritize results over reputation.  If the American culture had enough of all those, it wouldn't have a spree-killing problem in the first place.

I hope they find a way to make a real change.  I really do.  And I hope this not just because without it more people will die, but because this line - a school full of elementary children - is the farthest and darkest line I can think of.  So if the American culture crossing this line isn't enough to inspire real change, what is?

And So It Comes to This

"words you say never seem to live up to the ones inside your head
the lives we make never seem to ever get us anywhere but dead

the day I tried to live 

I wallowed in the blood and mud with all the other pigs  

singing

one more time around might do it

one more time around might make it
one more time around might do it

one more time around might make it
the day I tried to live 

the day I tried"

-- "The Day I Tried to Live", Soundgarden --

(Awesome video here.)

 

March 2nd rolls around once more and - predictably - I write.  Today, I'm thinking about people, about relationships, and about the spiderweb of fate and influence.

I'm thinking of people past and present, and the connections we make (and sometimes lose or break).  We drift together and apart, somehow touching one another in irrevocable ways both great and small.  I'm a firm believer in the notion - I'm unsure of the exact quote or its true original source - that everyone has something to teach us, some by shining example and others by horrible warning.

Geoff lost his father just a few weeks ago.  My heart goes out to him.  I wish there was something I could say to calm the storm of powerful emotion that must stir in his soul, but as much a clever wordsmith I might think myself, I know full well how useless words can be at times like these.  I love him like a brother.  I ache to tend his wound.  

I didn't know Geoff Seymour Sr well, but did have the good fortune to speak with him on several occasions.  I knew immediately that he and Geoff Jr shared a very important quality, the quality that draws me so strongly to my friend, and I can say with confidence that if I'd known him better, I'd have loved him for the very same reason.  It's hard to contain it in words, but if I must, I'd say they are "gentle souls".  That's something you can't possibly get enough of in your life, especially in this day and age.  I cherish Geoff, a man made possible by the gentle soul that came before him, and through him, that older gentle soul that has passed.

I miss Patti Cronin.  I regret not visiting her in Ottawa when I traveled there.  It's one of those things we always promise ourselves we'll "get around to" but never do, but even having not and it being too late, I am honest enough to shamefully admit it won't actually change me.  We all cry at the end of Dead Poet's Society and promise ourselves we'll "seize the day", only to return quickly to our regular lives in short order.  I've come to learn in time this is not a terrible thing; it's just a thing.  Happiness is still to be found within such normalcy.  Indeed, where else should it be found?

When I think of Patti, despite the years and distance that had been between us, I feel a sadness.  In the past, reflection brought about the uplifting notion that "some day I'll see her again, and we'll have tea, and talk about the past and laugh".  No matter how remote a possibility that was, it was still a possibility.  Now, instead, reflection no longer holds such optimism, but only brings the realization that such a meeting can never take place.  

What will change me - what already has - are the two things she told me in the last conversation we ever had, her final "life lessons" to her "other son".  These are lessons I will keep and never forget, my perspective on the world shifted ever so slightly in a positive way because this wisdom was bequeathed me by a woman for whom my depth of respect was immeasurable.  It saddens me to think that Liza-Ann and Olivia will never know her, except through me.

And it goes without saying, of course, that I've thought a lot about my own mother of late.  A few nights ago, after returning from seeing Andrew James O'Brien at the LSPU Hall with Liza-Ann, I was dropping the babysitter at her house, and sitting there in the car I realized - as peculiar as this is going to sound - that I probably never feel closer to my mother as I do in that moment.  When I was a teen, and first started dating, she impressed upon me the importance of always seeing the girl to her door and making sure she got inside safe.  Living with Liza-Ann, I don't get that very often because I'm normally coming inside with her, but I'd never in a million years drive away in the car before the babysitter is inside her house.  In that moment, I always think of my mother, and of her influence on my life and on who I am.  

It crossed my mind the other night that Olivia will never know her.  It's saddened me before from the perspective that my mother will never have a chance to know Olivia, but it was the reverse that really struck me recently: that Olivia will never get life-lessons from "Granny Constantine", except through me, unaware of their source but affected nonetheless.

I wonder about my father's parents, dead before I was born, of whom I know so little as to not confidently recall even their names.  I wonder how much of my father came from them.  I wonder how much of them is in me.

People come and go, and unpredictably so.  In relationships both great and small, the course of our lives is altered, in ways both great and small.  And often we lack the nerve to say the things we should to the people who deserve to hear them until the last sand in their hourglass has dropped, and with it, our opportunity has slipped away.

But this is not the tragedy it sounds.  It is neither a good thing, nor a bad thing, but just a thing.  Because the truth is that those who affect you in the most powerful and positive ways, forever changing the course of your life by their presence in it, those whom you truly love... know.

How could they not?