From "I am Adam Lanza's Mother". A mother talks about her 13-year old son after having an argument about what color pants he needed to wear to school:
The morning of the pants incident, Michael continued to argue with me on the drive. He would occasionally apologize and seem remorseful. Right before we turned into his school parking lot, he said, “Look, Mom, I’m really sorry. Can I have video games back today?”
“No way,” I told him. “You cannot act the way you acted this morning and think you can get your electronic privileges back that quickly.”
His face turned cold, and his eyes were full of calculated rage. “Then I’m going to kill myself,” he said. “I’m going to jump out of this car right now and kill myself.”
That was it. After the knife incident, I told him that if he ever said those words again, I would take him straight to the mental hospital, no ifs, ands, or buts. I did not respond, except to pull the car into the opposite lane, turning left instead of right.
“Where are you taking me?” he said, suddenly worried. “Where are we going?”
“You know where we are going,” I replied.
“No! You can’t do that to me! You’re sending me to hell! You’re sending me straight to hell!”
I pulled up in front of the hospital, frantically waiving for one of the clinicians who happened to be standing outside. “Call the police,” I said. “Hurry.”
Michael was in a full-blown fit by then, screaming and hitting. I hugged him close so he couldn’t escape from the car. He bit me several times and repeatedly jabbed his elbows into my rib cage. I’m still stronger than he is, but I won’t be for much longer.
The police came quickly and carried my son screaming and kicking into the bowels of the hospital. I started to shake, and tears filled my eyes as I filled out the paperwork — “Were there any difficulties with… at what age did your child… were there any problems with.. has your child ever experienced.. does your child have…”
At least we have health insurance now. I recently accepted a position with a local college, giving up my freelance career because when you have a kid like this, you need benefits. You’ll do anything for benefits. No individual insurance plan will cover this kind of thing.
For days, my son insisted that I was lying — that I made the whole thing up so that I could get rid of him. The first day, when I called to check up on him, he said, “I hate you. And I’m going to get my revenge as soon as I get out of here.”
By day three, he was my calm, sweet boy again, all apologies and promises to get better. I’ve heard those promises for years. I don’t believe them anymore.
There are some odd things about this piece that make me wonder if it's fictional. Nevertheless, it dramatizes an important truth.
I assume that this mother, fearing her son as she does, has enough sense not to have an arsenal of guns in her home. Which rasises questions about the sanity of the real Adam Lanza's mother. Regardless of her mental state, the fact that she had those guns in her home given the instability of her son points to a second theme. From Evan Osnos's Letter from China in the New Yorker:
One of the arguments that authoritarian governments use to ward off the call for greater political freedom is to argue that American-style democracy is no guarantee of good policy. They point to American voters who depend on government benefits but denounce the prospect of tax increases to keep up with the costs. Defenders of China’s non-democratic system point out that even as the United States is lashed by growing effects of climate change, we have failed to compel our elected leaders to do much of anything about it. Over the years, I’ve grown used to these arguments, and my response has rarely wavered: Sure, we might make dumb choices sometimes, but we will defend, to the end, the right to make choices at all, because we believe that our collective conscience, freely expressed, will eventually lead us in the right direction. When it comes to guns, it is getting harder to muster that argument abroad. Every new shooting, every new failure of will and citizenship, slashes another hole in our credibility as a way of life.
After the Newtown attack, a Chinese commentator with a nationalist bent wrote, “When I see these democratic elites pretending to condemn the murderer, it seems absurd. You are the people who sustain the gun policy. You are also the people who condemn the shooter.” And another:
As the ‘free, democratic, human-rights-based’ land of heaven, the one that has lectured other countries everyday for a hundred years about ‘freedom, democracy, and human rights,’ even to the point of armed intervention, America should calm down and examine its own gun-control policy.
It takes a lot to make China’s government—beset, as it is, by corruption and opacity and the paralyzing effects of special interests—look good, by comparison, in the eyes of its people these days. But we’ve done it.
It should also be noted, China is way ahead of the U.S on the environment as well. Does anyone really believe that our collective conscience and political system has the capablility to learn from its mistakes and frame a sane energy and environmental policy? I don't.
So what do we have to show for our so-called freedoms? We have an absurdly expensive and redundant healthcare system run primarily to benefit special interests in the healthcare industry. We have an energy and environmental policy run primarily to benefit the fossil fuel industry. And we have an insane gun policy to which any sane reforms are obstructed by right-wing idelogues who think their guns (1) keep them safe from other crazy people with guns and (2) keep them free from the government that will enslave them if they don't have the guns to defend themselves when the government comes to enslave them.
A lot of people think that over time China's economic liberalization will lead it to become more democratic and to look more like the United States. I think the opposite is true: the United States will come become more authoritarian and come to look more like China. An authoritarian government, at least, is not politically paralyzed; its elites can look at the bigger picture and develop policies for the long term and it can make decsions that insure its survival. I'm not sure the United is capable of that anymore. And when a people feels that the government no longer has the capablility to keep them safe from corporate predators, crazies with guns, or environmental cataclysm, it loses its legitmacy.
For isn't the fundamental premise of the Hobbesian social contract that individual citizens give up their freedom in the eat-or-be-eaten state of nature to a sovreign power whose primary responsibility is to keep people from killing or enslaving one another in the war of all against all? If citizens become convinced their government can no longer perform that basic function, it is no longer legitimate, and its citizens should replace it with a government that can perform it. People want to be safe more than they want to be free, and if the U.S. government qua democracy cannot find a way to break its paralysis in the face of fundamental issues that threaten the health and welfare of its people, those people will happily embrace someone who can find a way. It's just a question of time before some future crisis becomes the straw that breaks the proverbial camel's back.
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