Across the country Americans are collectively mourning the senseless loss of 20 young children and six dedicated civil servants at Sandy Hook Elementary School. We are like a family of 311 million sharing our grief. This Sunday morning, two days after the shooting, my neighbor made my wife and me a loaf of banana bread. It was late on this cold snowy morning when she handed the freshly baked loaf to me across the fence separating our two yards. The tinfoil wrapped bread immediately warmed my hands when I accepted it. She apologized for what she felt was her unkempt appearance. She said she had not yet had a chance to groom herself or even brush her teeth. I smiled at her, told her she looked great and thanked her for the bread.

My neighbor is a former school teacher. She is now juggling the responsibilities of another demanding job and being a married mother of three young children. She proudly told me that her children had spent the morning, with some supervision from her, hand crafting 26 stars, each with the name of a Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victim. The stars are displayed on a front window of their house for passersby to see. I saw them as white paper memorials appearing through white snowflakes. She told me she had spent much of the day before in tears. Her children’s project helped lift her spirits and take the tears away.

I told her I had spent part of the day on which she was shedding tears recording my thoughts in my journal. It was my second journal entry this week referencing a public shooting. Before writing, I had spent time reading reports about the shooting on the web and the responses of my fellow citizens on various blogs. Across the writings, I saw two dominant themes emerge as possible solutions to preventing future random public mass shootings. Enacting strict gun control laws and strengthening mental health support systems across our country seemed to be the solutions most frequently discussed. I thought, OK, this makes some sense, but what other factors might need to be considered? Is it really mostly about lack of sufficient gun controls and mental health services?

I let my thoughts about this flow freely into my journal. My initial instinct was to support a push for stricter gun control laws and more mental health services. But the more I thought about it and the more I wrote, the more I realized just how complex the issue is. The following set of random words and phrases came to mind as I put pen to paper — heavy use of social media; political divisiveness fueled by our elected leaders and media; onslaught of shallow messaging delivered through mass marketing; consumerism; violent scenes constantly portrayed on TV, in movies and children’s video games; intense lobbying by the firearms industry; lack of spiritual identity (e.g., only 8% of New Hampshire residents go to church on a regular basis); accelerating and overwhelming increase in technology; increasing wealth disparities; 24 hour news cycle; loss of social connectedness.

Unless we consider and address the complex array of issues at work in our modern day society, we will have difficulty preventing such tragic incidents from occurring in the future. Perhaps we could start by spending less time on social media and more time baking banana bread for our neighbors.

Terry Johnson

Dover