Author Archives: Patricia Wild

In the wee hours of this morning, I was wakened by two loud voices outside my first-floor window, one a young man (ethnicity undetermined), the other a young woman who, I think, was inside her car, its engine running.

Their voices muffled and, maybe, ten feet away, only two words were audible: “. . . . fight!” shouted the young man.

“. . . no fight!” shouted the young woman. And then she high-pitched laughed as if trying to keep their conversation light and breezy. They repeated this exchange several times.

Three-quarters asleep and not aware of the time (it turned out to be a little past 4 am), my first reaction was, “They’re Somerville High School students on their way to school. Someone from the high school’s mediation program can handle this.” (It was only after they’d moved on that I was awake enough to realize that today is Sunday and that these two had probably just come from a club on Somerville Avenue.)

But here’s what I, a peace-loving Quaker, want to say: How deeply I was struck by the excitement in that young man’s voice every time he said “fight.” How, lying under my covers, without seeing him, without knowing anything about him save his gender and approximate age, his zeal for violence—and its attendant drama—made perfect sense! As if, at last, he were being offered an amazing opportunity! I wasn’t hearing rage. I was hearing his relief.

Oh.

[Here’s another op-ed piece hot off the press—or, should I say, JUST e-mailed toThe Boston Globe.]

Rush to Judgment?

How easy, immediately after the Newtown massacre, to want to blame or to fix. How easy to blame the death of twenty-six people, twenty of them children, on a horribly troubled young man’s “personality disorder” or on our inadequate mental health system. How easy to want to fix our gun safety laws and to ban assault weapons immediately, or to radically improve access to quality mental health services. Let’s fix this nightmare right now, our hearts cry out, while our sadness and outrage are most acute.

But, I’d like to suggest, before we can fix—and there’s plenty to fix—we need to mourn. Individually and collectively we need to pause, to take whatever time is needed to acknowledge our pain and our brokenness. For, I suggest, it is from that deep, sorrowful place within each of us that the hard questions will eventually emerge. It will be our answers to these hard questions, not our all too human impulse to blame or to fix, that must inform our future actions.

Why do I, an ardent supporter of gun safety and accessible mental health care suggest this? A stunned and pained face I glimpsed yesterday among the holiday-shopping crowds at Porter Square is why. That young woman’s public sorrow reflected my own and called to mind the days following September 11^th when so many of us were visibly bereft.

On a lovely fall afternoon a couple of weeks after the attack, for example, strolling to the end of Rockport’s Bearskin Neck, I came upon a hushed crowd simply sitting on the jetty’s rocks and looking out over the water. Seated among that silent crowd and looking at their pained faces, I’d felt our shared grief meant something different, something thoughtful, something wise would happen in response to that heinous attack. I believed that our shared grief meant a different outcome from a response engendered by anger or fear or the need for revenge. Eleven years and two wars later, thousands killed, our civil liberties thwarted, trillions spent on The War on Terror; how dead wrong I was!

I also remember, soon after that lovely afternoon, calling Senator Kennedy’s office to say much the same things at much the same length and to hear a young, bored voice on the other end reply, when I’d finally stopped to catch my breath, “So. Restraint?”

Our shared grief can guide us; so can the thousands of voices among us who have lost family members to violence; Representative Carolyn McCarthy of New York, for example, or the September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows or the Boston-based Louis D. Brown Peace Institute. Let’s listen.

After Columbine, after the brutal attack on Gabby Gifford and eighteen others in a Tucson parking lot, after Aurora, after Newtown, let’s get it right this time.

“. . . is love.

And gun safety laws. (Thanks, Diana of FMC and Dr. Susan Strong of the Metaphor Project.)

Have been wresting with another op-ed piece for the last week. And about to throw in the towel.

Which is hard because the prompt for this piece felt right.

The prompt was this sentence from Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree : “The horrors of war had propelled Elmer into integrity.”

Yes! I thought. I totally get that. (although “horrors of war” is uncomfortably close to a cliche, isn’t it.) Yes, I’ll write a piece begging for an honest and courageous conversation about war. A plea for integrity.

But after a week of struggle, it’s feeling like the real story is my own, deeper understanding of the pervasiveness of the military-industrial complex—the subject of this quote from Eisenhower’s 1961 speech: “Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.”

Whoa! (Woe)