I wish the cure was as easy as a few rounds of “Kumbaya” and really… if everyone hummed a few bars mentally together once in a while it would make a small difference but that’s a pretty unrealistic solution to tragic events like the horrific loss of life in Connecticut on Friday.

Once the initial reporting occurred, the talking heads and pundits proceeded to do what they do best…saturate us with blah blah blah non stop. I have to believe on a personal level, everyone speaking to the matter initially wrestled like we all did with the horror of the situation. But then, chatter matter took over. The eventual star of the show, naturally, was gun control. I’m no expert on gun control…far from it. I’m willing to bet though that if 1 million gun owners exist, the madmen who pull off these mass shootings (mostly male, white, young) probably account for a nano percent of those million. I also realize that of the segment of the population who is mostly male, white, and young…there’s an extreme minority of that class who’ll pick up a gun and take out their frustrations by killing unsuspecting crowds of people.

This is a bizarrely complex issue and while gun control is easy to talk about and debate, it doesn’t begin to address the real woes. I can’t pretend to know where it starts. I don’t know if the families and support systems of these shooters (mostly male, white, young) were different than that of myself and my brothers. Probably not much different. We had guns and my brothers had many similarities, they were young, male and white…not once in a million years though would they ever have thought the escape from their internal pains, angers and other problems could be achieved by the taking of innocent lives.

In my opinion… mass killings, rape, domestic violence, bullying in school, gang wars and arson, it is about power and control. Societies all over the world have such a stark division and misguided reverence about “celebrity” “influence” and “affluence” in sports, entertainment, politics and religion that when some of their own itty bitty lives are inspected they feel insignificant, ignored and disdained.

We are a world obsessed with the “haves and have nots”, the “our kind and their kind”, the “reds and the blues”, the “gays and the straights”, the “whites and everyone else”, the “rich and poor“… we seem to embrace division instead of diversity and we always want to know there’s someone weaker and more unfortunate than us. Even the apparent make up of the madmen (mostly young, white males) becomes a division and will cause fear and suspicion when we wonder which one will crack next.

How sick is that?

There is no cure for the anguish and despair the families of the slain are feeling this season, but if we don’t start embracing tolerance for each other’s differences soon there will never be an end to these tragedies.

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