It seems obvious that the horrific tragedy at the Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, CT will never be forgotten by any of us for the rest of our lives. In that case, the next question we might wonder about is: “How will our individual and collective interpretations of the events of that day change over the years to come?”

Though the Virginia Tech Massacre and the one carried out last year in Norway killed and injured higher numbers of people, the one at Sandy Hook Elementary hits us particularly hard because of the ages of most of the victims and the setting – an elementary school in small-town America. It certainly hits home for more Americans than not even though massacres like this, though for different reasons, are happening throughout the world nearly every week.

However, when our insular American lives are forcibly penetrated by such a heinous and unnecessary tragedy, we might be forced to “feel” for a bit what many in the rest of the world are experiencing regularly in they and their children’s lives. Politics, poverty, ethnicity, ideology, and economics are usually the reasons for most of these atrocious public massacres in the rest of the world.

In our country, however, the recent massacres that are averaging, according to the USA Today, nearly every two weeks, are being attributed by and large to other reasons. The massacres in places like Aurora, Columbine, Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, the mall in Clackamas Oregon, and Sandy Hook are all pretty uniquely American. What I mean by that is that they are all being blamed on or associated with various kinds of mental and emotional illnesses rather than the political, economic, religious and ideological reasons found in most of the world for such events. Certainly, other countries do have public massacres and mass shootings attributed to the mental illness of the perpetrator, like the one in Norway, but again, most of these events in the rest of the world are based on the causes listed above.

What is it about our country that is causing so many people to act from a place of solipsistic and narcissistic nihilism? How and why are we producing so many spiritual and emotional weaklings and cowards? How else can one describe a person who would do these things to innocent people? We are hearing all over the news these days about various groups bringing up and blaming “mental health” (even though we do not know yet if that was the case with Adam Lanza), gun-control, and even video games and movies as culprits in all of this.  Undoubtedly all of those things are legitimate things to bring up and can and do play roles as causes in these massacres. However, at the end of the day, those things are merely scape-goats for all of us who are unwilling or unable to look deeper.

I believe that those things are each and all just symptoms of a much larger and greater social and cultural illness that our American society is suffering from. We have become a largely Godless and Faithless nation. What do our national and collective actions demonstrate that we truly believe in, stand up for, and profess our faith in? As a whole, we are a hyper-consumptive, excessively materialistic, selfish, and confused society. Our priorities and values are often hypocritical and couched in “Orwellian” terms in their twistedness of meaning. For example, any truly prayerful contemplation of our society and popular ways of life would reveal that, more often than not, things like “brotherly love, freedom, and the American Dream,” are merely just self-serving and misleading platitudes and/or illusions that we cajole ourselves with. Perhaps the worst of such “double-speaks” is when we pride ourselves on being a “Christian Nation.”  Would Jesus agree that we are one? Interestingly, the most popular, well-attended and prosperous churches in America are the so-called “Prosperity Churches” which promote a shallow to non-existent theology that tells its congregations that money, stuff, and status are God’s Plan for the “faithful.”

This is NOT to say that there are not good people in our country. I believe that the majority of individual Americans are actually good people. What I am saying is that, in aggregate, once we allow ourselves to be subsumed by the general evil of the world and allow it to define our culture as a whole, we become partakers in a society that produces and nurtures the “Evil” that God said was in and of the world!

It would seem obvious that, no matter what they might say, the people who committed the evil and violent acts we are discussing, viewed themselves as somehow entitled to take lives that they valued and saw as less than their own. They sought a power which is truly only the domain of the God that their actions showed that they did not believe in. Additionally, they clearly did not believe in the human soul since they did not even believe in the sanctity of mortal human life, including their own.

In conclusion, the ultimate reasons for the public massacres that have occurred, and will continue to occur in our country, are rooted in our society’s essential rejection of God and, by that rejection, our unwitting cultural partnership we have entered into with the “devil” and his works. To the degree to which you disagree with that statement is to the degree to which you likely prove it right!

May God Rest the Souls of ALL of the victims at Sand Hook.

DDS