All We Need is Love
Part I—A Crisis of Self-Centeredness
Yet another shooting, this one the worst in American history, should[1] have everyone asking, “What's gone wrong? What causes students to kill classmates and then themselves? Why does a parent murder children, even infants? What can be done? Someone should do something!" Leaders, experts, talk show hosts and callers are puzzled, angry, certain they could have prevented the tragedy somehow. Predictably, the anti-gun crowd calls for more gun control, ignoring the reality that many violent offenders already ignore current laws[2]. Others will offer certain convictions of the cause--movie and TV violence, the Internet, poor parents, loss of values, mental illness, MTV, the media, the Democrats, or conservatives! Authorities, from school officials and police to the President, will promise to do something, but their pledges, in the light of uncertain and conflicting opinions of the causes, will be meaningless. Yet they will promise more school security, more gun control, more regulation, and, of course, more spending and government involvement. Yet, in the succession of school tragedies and other horrors upon and by children, one thing is clear. Nobody really knows what to do!
I know what to do, what needs to be done. I have the answer. All we need is love!
Now, before you link to something else, please, hear me out! I’m not saying that the Beatles had the answer 40 some years ago. I am not being simplistic or idealistic. I don’t mean romance, and we certainly don’t need more sex! I am not recommending some vague, emotional urge. With these few qualifications, I hope you will read on.
First, let me explain the problem. If we are not to chase illusions, we must recognize that "nothing is new under the sun" (according to Ecclesiastes). Many of the factors people blame have always existed in human culture--sin, violence, weapons, bad parents, poor education, evil--yet children have rarely, if ever, killed their own classmates as some have, nor have men, who are themselves fathers, typically murdered children. Here and now, when children have every material advantage for more than adequate provision of their personal needs, the best prospects for a good education and future, and even a wealth of “toys” to play with, problems of the past no longer drive most young people. Urban gangs are only a modern form of tribal or feudal war. Technology and instant communications may multiply the scope and awareness of destructive behavior, but violent movies, MTV, or exploitive news shows are not the likely cause, however objectionable we may find them, for many who do not turn to violence.
While not all communities may agree, the U.S. used to be quite safe and civilized, and generally still is. How can a nation so blessed produce such barbarism? While some evil has, indeed, hidden under a veneer of civility and law, the United States has been a beacon of liberty, opportunity, and hope to people all over the world. How can it be something so different to its own children? How can kids, with the possibilities and promise of an unexplored future in this privileged land, become obsessed with despair, destruction, and death? How can men who love their own children execute the children of other loving parents? The answer is nothing new; the irony is that it seems so contrary to what we expect.
A murderous attitude and the mindset that produce it are one and the same. Both the immediate and the ultimate cause is self-centeredness--a total preoccupation with one's own feelings, wants, wishes, desires, needs and their disappointment--demonstrating a simple truth: selfishness begets selfishness. Now, some may say that the word sin is more correct. However, look at what sin is, at the various lists of sins, such as the works of the flesh in Galatians 5, or at "original sin" and the temptation that led to it. Sin is what self-centered people do, rejecting both God's authority and God's wisdom, as well as the needs and wants of others, and doing what they want in total self-absorption. Sin is natural for everyone, and every kid is born self-centered; but our Judeo-Christian heritage has, for most of our American history, offset this inborn condition so well that it produced one of the most generous nations in history. Yet, even in the midst of our success and better intentions has grown a cancer of self-destruction.
This cancer is more than students killing classmates, deranged men killing kids, or kids killing kids. Parents kill their own children for the same reason. It’s hard to forget the mother who drowned her children. In my own area, a mother and father are imprisoned for killing their adopted 7-year-old son. The father reported the boy missing, protecting the mother whom the jury convicted of the murder. The story at trial was one of abuse and neglect. How many other children have died simply from neglect? How many parents have scarred their own children with sexual or physical abuse?
Getting back to school shootings by teenagers, consider how these kids lived? These were not ghetto kids. We expect anger from the "under-privileged," but these seem, typically, to have come from prosperous homes. Guns, ammo, bomb-making supplies, and the privacy to listen to music, surf the Internet, and create 40 explosive devices says, among other things: "The Good Life!" Why would kids who seem to have it all be filled with such anger and hatred?
Look at the man who murdered Amish schoolchildren. He seems to have been a happily married man, a loving father, and a hard worker. Again, how could someone, who had so much, be moved to execute 10 little girls and then himself? How could he take his violence into a peace-loving Amish school?
Look closer. What does the “good life” look like from the inside? Often, both parents work to "have enough,” leaving kids to childcare or, worse, alone. We know that the kids who killed were alone, unsupervised enough to acquire supplies and create their explosives. In other words, their parents gave them everything materially; but, in the process, the denied them the one thing they needed most. Kids need parents unselfish enough to "make a home, not buy one!" A kid’s self-esteem is not a school subject to be left to teachers; genuine self-worth is a quality instilled by parents who plainly value their children more than their own personal dreams and desires, whose dreams and desires are their children!
Today, children are growing up in homes where the "golden rule" has been replaced; the "Me Generation" lives more by the rule of plastic: "I will give my kids anything money can buy, I will deny them nothing, as long as I get what I want and look good for doing it." Where once parents sacrificed for the good of their children, now the common rationale is "I have to take care of myself, first." Even well-meaning parents lose themselves in a confusion of personal careers and material success, thinking they give their children everything when they are actually depriving them of what they need most.
Parents who harm their own or others’ kids demonstrate an extreme form of the same self-focused life. Sexual obsession, guilt over past failings, anger, disappointment, resentment, discontentment, and an inability to be satisfied with the blessings they possess is as easily a description of the parents who neglect in the quest for something more as it is of those who yield to their worst impulses to abuse, molest, or kill.
Some will say, "Wait! These kids were strange--geeks and social outcasts. These killers were deranged!" The suspected Virginia Tech murderer was apparently a loner, a Korean who was isolated by culture, and someone who wrote disturbing essays that led to counseling referral. Perhaps, people mistreated him because he was foreign, had an accent that rendered him largely incomprehensible, and was strange in other ways. Perhaps his back ground included abuse or other horrors, long before he came to the United States; perhaps, he came to the U. S. and found “ugly Americans,” who mistreated him, maybe right there at Virginia Tech.
Yet, odd people have been mistreated in the past without turning to violence. I know from personal experience. I was a nerd, had few friends, and didn't fit in. I dealt with one bully, in particular, and I picked up a nickname that I hated. I grew up on TV and movies filled with violence. My Dad hunted, and guns and bullets were freely accessible. I even thought, for some time, that my father was disappointed with me, that I wasn't a good son. Yet, I never killed; I never even thought of hurting those who picked on me. I struggled with insecurity and self-doubt, just like many other teenagers, yet I never committed suicide[3] or murder. I have struggled with temptation, wished my life had gone a different direction, but I could never murder anyone, especially not a child. Why not?
I was basically an outsider at school; buten, wh I came home every day, my Mom was always there. We didn't have much, so I grew up with a deep appreciation for things that money can't buy--home-cooked meals and home-made cookies and breads, garden produce, hand-sewn shirts, and a clean, livable home kept by a "home-maker." My folks weren't perfect by far, but they gave me security, personal care, approval and encouragement, and someone to listen to whatever I wanted to say--they gave me love. Their pride and faith in me became an intense self-confidence in spite of my own struggles with personal insecurity. I doubted, at times, but I came to understand that they indeed loved me, sacrificed for my brothers and me, and truly parented, unlike many parents today. They worked hard for our family, Dad at a less than wonderful or well-paying job, Mom at home, yet they still had time to spend with us, sometimes working together, sometimes having fun together. They not only gave me love in which I grew emotionally healthy, but they were examples of unselfish adults, as were their parents and many others, all of whom helped me to become an adult capable of unselfishness.
Loving, sacrificial parents rear secure, emotionally healthy, confident children, but self-centered parents create self-centered kids who feel unwanted and unloved, children who may sooner or later become capable of the most horrible self-centered acts. Selfish teachers cultivate self-doubting students. A self-important Hollywood-Nashville-Washington-media culture reinforces self-centered values that leave only emptiness inside. Teaching self-esteem leads to self-importance but not true self-confidence, which schools cannot teach. Self-involved parents develop self-doubting, then angry kids who lash out, in their pain, to hurt others or destroy themselves to still the pain of worthlessness born in the self-centered, emotional neglect of self-centered parents and the “care-less”-ness of those who should care. Proverbs 22: 6 says, "Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it." The right question to ask is “In what way is the child being trained?”
Anyone who feels a deep sense of rejection will look for something, someone, or some way to find what is missing or stop feeling the loss. They will make bad friends, join gangs, and be incredibly vulnerable to peer influence and peer pressure. The company of others in pain may make a kind of belonging and family in place of those who have failed to create the real thing. Still in pain, lonely, perhaps outcast or self-isolated, teens, now also fighting the doubts and internal demands of adolescence, become angry, sullen, and uncooperative at home and school. They turn to sex for an illusion of affection and worth, to drugs and alcohol, or to violence upon themselves or others to ease or erase the pain of rejection by parents and peers or to hurt those they resent blame or for their misery.
They suffer on into adulthood. They do the things that adults do—learn, work, date, marry, have children, and acquire things—or stumble along without and resent what others seem to have that they do not. They blame their parents, their spouse, their employers, or God; then they lash out at those whom they blame or those they envy. In this, the politics of victimhood[4] encourages them to resent and blame rather than to accept their misfortunes and make a better life for themselves, suggesting that they are somehow forever doomed by what has gone before.
The government cannot fix this![5] The government cannot fill a need to be accepted and valued. Schools, teachers, and psychologists, however well-intentioned, cannot instruct or manipulate broken hearts into wholeness, especially when they are themselves often rooted in the same pain and self-doubt. Right-minded values will be rejected if they seem only to represent power to control, as will too-late efforts to discipline teenagers who where given free reign as smaller children. Both often represent the preferences of self-centered adults, who try to manage children rather than meet their needs, overlooking the "cute" offenses of small children but coming down hard on them when they become "willful" and their rebellion isn't cute anymore. Wise parents, who know they have no more important task, discipline their children at an early age when they are easily controlled, recognizing that appropriate discipline conveys love; then as they grow toward adulthood, such parents gradually release them into adulthood, recognizing their need to be trusted to become their own person, and knowing that harsh discipline at older ages leads to reaction and rejection.
Government can't fix this, but damage control and safety may necessitate extreme measures, in the short run. High-security schools, tough love programs, counseling, and, finally, courts and prison may mitigate the consequences of our self-absorbed society. They are undeniably necessary, but they do not, cannot solve the problem. The cause is ultimately individual; the root is selfishness, and the solution is love. The redemptive power of God and His love mediated through His people can break even this evil power of selfishness.
In Part II, I will define love because most people no longer understand that real love is not, first, about how the lover feels but about making the loved one feel loved. Deeply rooted in our crises of selfishness is a concept of love that is fundamentally self-centered, and that's not love!!
[1] Of course, Left-leaning media and politicians prefer to talk about how the President and his administration show the entire Republican Party to be corrupt and the Democratic Party the true protector of the innocent, despite the fact that not even the greatest police force in the world could possibly protect everyone, especially from solitary shooters.
[2] At this writing, the Virginia Tech shooter was reported to be using weapons with the serial numbers removed, possibly due to purchasing illegal firearms from illegal sources.
[3] Teen suicide is another disturbing problem that baffles many of us; I believe this, too, may be traced to these same root causes.
[4] The contribution to the problem that comes from encouraging perpetual victimhood is worthy of its own discussion. Those who use classes of victims to create blocks of angry supporters cultivate anger, and angry people are more prone to angry, violent actions.
[5] Selfish, self-centered people want the government to provide for everyone and solve all the problems so that they need only look out for themselves. Those in government are often willing to appear to do so, because they gain the power to satisfy their own interests, although often at the expense of what even their supporters want or expect.
Yet another shooting, this one the worst in American history, should[1] have everyone asking, “What's gone wrong? What causes students to kill classmates and then themselves? Why does a parent murder children, even infants? What can be done? Someone should do something!" Leaders, experts, talk show hosts and callers are puzzled, angry, certain they could have prevented the tragedy somehow. Predictably, the anti-gun crowd calls for more gun control, ignoring the reality that many violent offenders already ignore current laws[2]. Others will offer certain convictions of the cause--movie and TV violence, the Internet, poor parents, loss of values, mental illness, MTV, the media, the Democrats, or conservatives! Authorities, from school officials and police to the President, will promise to do something, but their pledges, in the light of uncertain and conflicting opinions of the causes, will be meaningless. Yet they will promise more school security, more gun control, more regulation, and, of course, more spending and government involvement. Yet, in the succession of school tragedies and other horrors upon and by children, one thing is clear. Nobody really knows what to do!
I know what to do, what needs to be done. I have the answer. All we need is love!
Now, before you link to something else, please, hear me out! I’m not saying that the Beatles had the answer 40 some years ago. I am not being simplistic or idealistic. I don’t mean romance, and we certainly don’t need more sex! I am not recommending some vague, emotional urge. With these few qualifications, I hope you will read on.
First, let me explain the problem. If we are not to chase illusions, we must recognize that "nothing is new under the sun" (according to Ecclesiastes). Many of the factors people blame have always existed in human culture--sin, violence, weapons, bad parents, poor education, evil--yet children have rarely, if ever, killed their own classmates as some have, nor have men, who are themselves fathers, typically murdered children. Here and now, when children have every material advantage for more than adequate provision of their personal needs, the best prospects for a good education and future, and even a wealth of “toys” to play with, problems of the past no longer drive most young people. Urban gangs are only a modern form of tribal or feudal war. Technology and instant communications may multiply the scope and awareness of destructive behavior, but violent movies, MTV, or exploitive news shows are not the likely cause, however objectionable we may find them, for many who do not turn to violence.
While not all communities may agree, the U.S. used to be quite safe and civilized, and generally still is. How can a nation so blessed produce such barbarism? While some evil has, indeed, hidden under a veneer of civility and law, the United States has been a beacon of liberty, opportunity, and hope to people all over the world. How can it be something so different to its own children? How can kids, with the possibilities and promise of an unexplored future in this privileged land, become obsessed with despair, destruction, and death? How can men who love their own children execute the children of other loving parents? The answer is nothing new; the irony is that it seems so contrary to what we expect.
A murderous attitude and the mindset that produce it are one and the same. Both the immediate and the ultimate cause is self-centeredness--a total preoccupation with one's own feelings, wants, wishes, desires, needs and their disappointment--demonstrating a simple truth: selfishness begets selfishness. Now, some may say that the word sin is more correct. However, look at what sin is, at the various lists of sins, such as the works of the flesh in Galatians 5, or at "original sin" and the temptation that led to it. Sin is what self-centered people do, rejecting both God's authority and God's wisdom, as well as the needs and wants of others, and doing what they want in total self-absorption. Sin is natural for everyone, and every kid is born self-centered; but our Judeo-Christian heritage has, for most of our American history, offset this inborn condition so well that it produced one of the most generous nations in history. Yet, even in the midst of our success and better intentions has grown a cancer of self-destruction.
This cancer is more than students killing classmates, deranged men killing kids, or kids killing kids. Parents kill their own children for the same reason. It’s hard to forget the mother who drowned her children. In my own area, a mother and father are imprisoned for killing their adopted 7-year-old son. The father reported the boy missing, protecting the mother whom the jury convicted of the murder. The story at trial was one of abuse and neglect. How many other children have died simply from neglect? How many parents have scarred their own children with sexual or physical abuse?
Getting back to school shootings by teenagers, consider how these kids lived? These were not ghetto kids. We expect anger from the "under-privileged," but these seem, typically, to have come from prosperous homes. Guns, ammo, bomb-making supplies, and the privacy to listen to music, surf the Internet, and create 40 explosive devices says, among other things: "The Good Life!" Why would kids who seem to have it all be filled with such anger and hatred?
Look at the man who murdered Amish schoolchildren. He seems to have been a happily married man, a loving father, and a hard worker. Again, how could someone, who had so much, be moved to execute 10 little girls and then himself? How could he take his violence into a peace-loving Amish school?
Look closer. What does the “good life” look like from the inside? Often, both parents work to "have enough,” leaving kids to childcare or, worse, alone. We know that the kids who killed were alone, unsupervised enough to acquire supplies and create their explosives. In other words, their parents gave them everything materially; but, in the process, the denied them the one thing they needed most. Kids need parents unselfish enough to "make a home, not buy one!" A kid’s self-esteem is not a school subject to be left to teachers; genuine self-worth is a quality instilled by parents who plainly value their children more than their own personal dreams and desires, whose dreams and desires are their children!
Today, children are growing up in homes where the "golden rule" has been replaced; the "Me Generation" lives more by the rule of plastic: "I will give my kids anything money can buy, I will deny them nothing, as long as I get what I want and look good for doing it." Where once parents sacrificed for the good of their children, now the common rationale is "I have to take care of myself, first." Even well-meaning parents lose themselves in a confusion of personal careers and material success, thinking they give their children everything when they are actually depriving them of what they need most.
Parents who harm their own or others’ kids demonstrate an extreme form of the same self-focused life. Sexual obsession, guilt over past failings, anger, disappointment, resentment, discontentment, and an inability to be satisfied with the blessings they possess is as easily a description of the parents who neglect in the quest for something more as it is of those who yield to their worst impulses to abuse, molest, or kill.
Some will say, "Wait! These kids were strange--geeks and social outcasts. These killers were deranged!" The suspected Virginia Tech murderer was apparently a loner, a Korean who was isolated by culture, and someone who wrote disturbing essays that led to counseling referral. Perhaps, people mistreated him because he was foreign, had an accent that rendered him largely incomprehensible, and was strange in other ways. Perhaps his back ground included abuse or other horrors, long before he came to the United States; perhaps, he came to the U. S. and found “ugly Americans,” who mistreated him, maybe right there at Virginia Tech.
Yet, odd people have been mistreated in the past without turning to violence. I know from personal experience. I was a nerd, had few friends, and didn't fit in. I dealt with one bully, in particular, and I picked up a nickname that I hated. I grew up on TV and movies filled with violence. My Dad hunted, and guns and bullets were freely accessible. I even thought, for some time, that my father was disappointed with me, that I wasn't a good son. Yet, I never killed; I never even thought of hurting those who picked on me. I struggled with insecurity and self-doubt, just like many other teenagers, yet I never committed suicide[3] or murder. I have struggled with temptation, wished my life had gone a different direction, but I could never murder anyone, especially not a child. Why not?
I was basically an outsider at school; buten, wh I came home every day, my Mom was always there. We didn't have much, so I grew up with a deep appreciation for things that money can't buy--home-cooked meals and home-made cookies and breads, garden produce, hand-sewn shirts, and a clean, livable home kept by a "home-maker." My folks weren't perfect by far, but they gave me security, personal care, approval and encouragement, and someone to listen to whatever I wanted to say--they gave me love. Their pride and faith in me became an intense self-confidence in spite of my own struggles with personal insecurity. I doubted, at times, but I came to understand that they indeed loved me, sacrificed for my brothers and me, and truly parented, unlike many parents today. They worked hard for our family, Dad at a less than wonderful or well-paying job, Mom at home, yet they still had time to spend with us, sometimes working together, sometimes having fun together. They not only gave me love in which I grew emotionally healthy, but they were examples of unselfish adults, as were their parents and many others, all of whom helped me to become an adult capable of unselfishness.
Loving, sacrificial parents rear secure, emotionally healthy, confident children, but self-centered parents create self-centered kids who feel unwanted and unloved, children who may sooner or later become capable of the most horrible self-centered acts. Selfish teachers cultivate self-doubting students. A self-important Hollywood-Nashville-Washington-media culture reinforces self-centered values that leave only emptiness inside. Teaching self-esteem leads to self-importance but not true self-confidence, which schools cannot teach. Self-involved parents develop self-doubting, then angry kids who lash out, in their pain, to hurt others or destroy themselves to still the pain of worthlessness born in the self-centered, emotional neglect of self-centered parents and the “care-less”-ness of those who should care. Proverbs 22: 6 says, "Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it." The right question to ask is “In what way is the child being trained?”
Anyone who feels a deep sense of rejection will look for something, someone, or some way to find what is missing or stop feeling the loss. They will make bad friends, join gangs, and be incredibly vulnerable to peer influence and peer pressure. The company of others in pain may make a kind of belonging and family in place of those who have failed to create the real thing. Still in pain, lonely, perhaps outcast or self-isolated, teens, now also fighting the doubts and internal demands of adolescence, become angry, sullen, and uncooperative at home and school. They turn to sex for an illusion of affection and worth, to drugs and alcohol, or to violence upon themselves or others to ease or erase the pain of rejection by parents and peers or to hurt those they resent blame or for their misery.
They suffer on into adulthood. They do the things that adults do—learn, work, date, marry, have children, and acquire things—or stumble along without and resent what others seem to have that they do not. They blame their parents, their spouse, their employers, or God; then they lash out at those whom they blame or those they envy. In this, the politics of victimhood[4] encourages them to resent and blame rather than to accept their misfortunes and make a better life for themselves, suggesting that they are somehow forever doomed by what has gone before.
The government cannot fix this![5] The government cannot fill a need to be accepted and valued. Schools, teachers, and psychologists, however well-intentioned, cannot instruct or manipulate broken hearts into wholeness, especially when they are themselves often rooted in the same pain and self-doubt. Right-minded values will be rejected if they seem only to represent power to control, as will too-late efforts to discipline teenagers who where given free reign as smaller children. Both often represent the preferences of self-centered adults, who try to manage children rather than meet their needs, overlooking the "cute" offenses of small children but coming down hard on them when they become "willful" and their rebellion isn't cute anymore. Wise parents, who know they have no more important task, discipline their children at an early age when they are easily controlled, recognizing that appropriate discipline conveys love; then as they grow toward adulthood, such parents gradually release them into adulthood, recognizing their need to be trusted to become their own person, and knowing that harsh discipline at older ages leads to reaction and rejection.
Government can't fix this, but damage control and safety may necessitate extreme measures, in the short run. High-security schools, tough love programs, counseling, and, finally, courts and prison may mitigate the consequences of our self-absorbed society. They are undeniably necessary, but they do not, cannot solve the problem. The cause is ultimately individual; the root is selfishness, and the solution is love. The redemptive power of God and His love mediated through His people can break even this evil power of selfishness.
In Part II, I will define love because most people no longer understand that real love is not, first, about how the lover feels but about making the loved one feel loved. Deeply rooted in our crises of selfishness is a concept of love that is fundamentally self-centered, and that's not love!!
[1] Of course, Left-leaning media and politicians prefer to talk about how the President and his administration show the entire Republican Party to be corrupt and the Democratic Party the true protector of the innocent, despite the fact that not even the greatest police force in the world could possibly protect everyone, especially from solitary shooters.
[2] At this writing, the Virginia Tech shooter was reported to be using weapons with the serial numbers removed, possibly due to purchasing illegal firearms from illegal sources.
[3] Teen suicide is another disturbing problem that baffles many of us; I believe this, too, may be traced to these same root causes.
[4] The contribution to the problem that comes from encouraging perpetual victimhood is worthy of its own discussion. Those who use classes of victims to create blocks of angry supporters cultivate anger, and angry people are more prone to angry, violent actions.
[5] Selfish, self-centered people want the government to provide for everyone and solve all the problems so that they need only look out for themselves. Those in government are often willing to appear to do so, because they gain the power to satisfy their own interests, although often at the expense of what even their supporters want or expect.
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