I look at Jared Loughner’s photo and weep. As a mother, grandmother, aunt, friend – as a caring human, I see a sick, frightened, misguided or unguided, sad, defeated, hopeless child. I imagine the added heartbreak of knowing this child, or worse, knowing he is my child, and wondering if I contributed to his confusion or neglected to hear his cries for help.
People call for this killer to be killed and I know how I would feel hearing these words spoken about my child, especially if he was sick or if I had not done everything possible to protect him from himself. Then I realize the truth; this child belongs to all of us, and there are many others like him.
Few of us doubt our own sanity or know when it might depart us. None of us wants to look at our children and imagine that they can be the kid who is too sick, too distraught, or too hopeless to hold it together another minute.
So, who raises children like Jared Loughner? We all do. Together, we lose them, a few here, a couple more there, by turning our backs. By remaining silent when someone else has turned their back. By being too nice to say what should be said to the people who leave them ill equipped to solve problems and feeling hopeless. By laughing at hope.
If you think your child’s privacy and/or coolness are more important than reading his FB page, knowing what the headphones are pumping into his mind, meeting the guys he hangs out with at school, or engaging him in conversations that he doesn’t want to have, you might be laying the groundwork for an unprepared young adult.
If you declare politics an off-limits topic of conversation, say things like all politicians are the same, we can’t trust any of them, the government is our enemy, don’t waste your time because no one will listen or care, or you can’t make a difference because you aren’t anyone important, there’s a good chance you are raising a politically frustrated, ignorant young adult who will believe he is incapable of finding solutions.
If you excuse Grandpa’s rewritten history, Grandma’s fantasy facts, Uncle Joe’s irrational opinions based on incorrect information, Cousin Clara’s shoot ‘em up or bomb them back to the stone ages rhetoric with a chuckle and a, "Gotta love ‘em," you turn loose on the world a confused young person who hasn’t learned to research the correct information and defend it intelligently. It’s possible you’ve raised a young adult who thinks he has to believe what anyone tells him, no matter how wrong it might seem to him.
If you haven’t watched Congress in session, the State of the Union Address, Congressional hearings, and political debates with your (probably eye-rolling, furious) children, you’ve deprived them of the opportunity to see politicians as real people, performing important jobs that affect our lives. The government could easily become an evil ‘thing’ instead of living, thinking, feeling people. To children who have not met politicians, have not attended political functions, have not been taught to discuss politics, and can’t identify their elected officials and identify how these people impact their daily lives, there is no process – only chaos. There’s a chance these children will grow up not knowing their options and thinking violence is the only way to get anything done.
Parents who have never walked a child through a day of what taxes do for them – the library where you get your books, these roads we drive on, that place where you will get your driver’s license, the airport where we leave for vacation, the army tank you photographed, the parks you love . . . – risk turning out confused, angry people who often vote against their own best interest. Then, they blame the government when the streetlights are out, they lose a tire to the pothole no one got around to fixing, they missed lunch standing in line to renew their license, the playground equipment at the park hasn’t been painted in years. Maybe, some of them will be disappointed, angry, and hopeless enough to think Jared was the only one who knew how to get anything done.
When parents support candidates who are "just like me" because they are too lazy to "be just like" the ones who can and will do the job, they teach their children to settle for less than they deserve and to accomplish less than they can. When they criticize others for caring about facts, grammar, and education, they tell their children they don’t believe they are capable. They risk seeing their child’s mug shot on the national news and hearing people ask how this happened.
When the rest of us see and hear these things and say nothing, we contribute to the raising of children who grow up desperate for all we have not given them. Desperate people take desperate actions.