Yesterday a man walked into a city council meeting in Kirkwood, Missouri and opened fire with a gun and killed five, two police officers and three city officials. Inside I pain for the people of Kirkwood and the families of the police and the city officials. Inside my brain swims with questions; why would he do this? What would drive a person to grab a gun and attack? How can human life go so unvalued? What made him snap? Why are there so many guns in the hands of so many unstable people who view those guns as the only effective way to solve a problem? Why is our society at war with itself?
The questions out weigh the answers, but maybe as a recovering angry person I can shed light on some of this. The attacker most likely felt slighted by society and was offered no constructive, effective outlet for those slights. As the slights against him built in his mind they began to boil to the point of lost control, and perhaps the only thing that he could see was the red of his anger. Then, put a gun in the hands of an angry person, who is clearly at the end of his rope and out of control and poof, disaster in Kirkwood, Missouri. One would beg the question, is America the only angry society in the world? Simple observation might say no, look at chaos in Africa, hooliganism in England and organized crime in the former Soviet Union. I think each of those societies grapple with the same problem but in different ways.
To me the solutions are simple and plain but not simplistic. Start by getting guns off the streets and out of hands of people. Oh, I’ve heard the comment that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. True, but I rather like this statement instead; people with guns kill people more often. Second, churches, local government and agencies put in place programs to deal with an angry society. The training must be started at an early age and it must start with a call to conscience and judicious thought.
It is imperative in this country that we start treating one another with mutual respect and love. Day to day I am in contact with angry people or people on their way to institutional anger, whether it be an email blasted off without though or regard to other’s feelings, a belief that one can say whatever one wants without regard to other’s feelings, or an angry home owner who calls me, rails me out because she has received several postcards and a letter or it’s an aggressive driver acting out behind the wheel of a car. In each instance I see the old angry me lashing back in rage. Sometimes it was a scary reaction, which took me out of my car and into another person’s face.
I recognized with me that this instant and spontaneous reaction to even the slightest of slights or perceived slights caused my emotions to boil faster. It is within us to curb these actions when we come to the realization that we are loved. For me it is the gift of the cross at Calvary which takes away my anger. It empowers me to not respond to a slight. I pause, I take the Psalm, be still and know that I am God, and I reflect on it. I say a silent prayer in my mind for the anger I’m confronted with and more importantly the person. Do I still get angry? Absolutely, sometimes to the point where I feel hot; I try to walk it out and pray it out and get myself back to a loving place. More often than not when I take that time to reflect and pause it becomes very clear that the problem isn’t mine and by not submitting to my anger I don’t buy into the problem. I give it up to God.
I suppose the real work here or the million dollar question is; how do you get a society to see this and when?
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