WHAT MEDICINE?

Yesterday's murderous rage is not the first,

nor will it be the last.

Something is sick at the center.

Calling for gun control will not solve the illness, but don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of firearms, and yes, more stringent

oversight is necessary, but will not be enough.

Something is sick at the center.

I cannot even name the illness, at least not call it by one name.

It is a many armed beast.

Something is sick at the center.

This disease is old, anthropological.

Our current culture simply the mirror.

We can say yesterday's massacre was an aberration, an anomaly.  Yes, but it grew from soil laid down over centuries of warfare, from the ancient  struggle for dominance on earth.

Something is sick at the center.

Encoded in the DNA of our species, the old rivalry rises in each one of us--when we push ahead in the line, take more than we need, or demonize the other, and yet, that is how the world works some say--you get what you deserve--but what, what

could those children have ever done to deserve to die like that?  

Something is sick at the center. 

Who was that particular young man armed to destroy that world yesterday?

What was his story?  Was his rage the flip side of his grief?

What medicine can cure that?

"Because I believe in the community of little children,
Because I have suffered such little children to be slain;
I have gazed upon the sunlight, dazed, bewildered,
As a child is by nothing more than rain.

Not until I can no longer climb,
Until my life becomes the tallest tree,
And every limb of it a limb of shame,
Shall I look out in time, in time to see

Again those who were so small they could but die,
Who had only their vast innocence to give,
That I may tell them, pointing down the sky,
How beautiful it might have been to live."

poem by William Jay Smith posted by a a friend yesterday