Tuesday, July 10, 2018

When I sat down to write this message, I wanted to write about gun violence. We recently experienced yet another mass shooting in a school in Parkland, Florida, and it reminded me (again) that not much has changed since our own tragedy in Chardon six years ago. And we have witnessed so many tragedies in between. This last mass casualty event also reminded me (again) of all of the individual tragedies involving guns that we experience in our community every single year. These tragedies go mostly unnoticed by the media, except for six or seven lines in the newspaper or a sentence during the evening news. As adults, we skim or skip over the articles, tune out the broadcaster and go about our day. The tragedy is forgotten by the time we get to work.

Every single year – probably every week – one or more of Beech Brook’s kids are directly impacted by gun violence. He or she may witness a murder. A classmate might be gunned down. Maybe it is their mother or father who is shot. Sometimes it is a brother or sister or cousin or aunt or uncle. Sometimes, it’s one of our kids who is killed. I could go on and on because I have seen it for 27 years. It happens to our kids in our community all of the time. It is unacceptable, and we all know it.

So, why does nothing change? Why don’t the adults in our community and every other community do something to protect our kids?

We have become so polarized on certain issues in our country that we have become paralyzed and can’t find a way to move forward even on the problems that impact the very lives of our children. We tune out any person or bit of information that is contrary to our beliefs. We shout over others, insult them on social media, belittle and degrade them.

As parents, however, most of us strive to teach our children to solve problems with each other respectfully and most of the time they do. We ask them to listen to the other side, carefully, even when they don’t agree because the other person also has valid points, and they make every effort. We ask them to look for win-win solutions and ask them to be fair. They are particularly good at knowing what fair is. We never teach them that “compromise” is a bad word.

So, whatever side of this issue each of us happens to be on, we need to find a way forward, together. And if we can’t find that way forward as adults, maybe we need to start acting more like children.