Reality Check 101

As we watch unfolding details of another horrific elementary school massacre, we are faced with the profound grief and brokenness of innocent families as well as those first responders who now live with the trauma of their experiences.  As law enforcement, social services, and governments struggle to investigate, care for victims, and find political solutions, the news cycle sensationalizes the horror lends fodder to recriminations, ignorant analysis, shameless opportunists who see no better time than now to capitalize on their agendas.

Why is it so difficult to face the moral and spiritual decay of American society?  Why is it so difficult to face the stench of that decay – sexual decadence, violence, political corruption, abortive infanticide, self-idolatry, etc. etc.. etc.?  America, no less than any other nation, has always consisted of fallen human beings.  She has wrestled for centuries with sins both great and small.  But she has purified herself through all the pain and thrived, at least until recently.

The fact is that no amount of psychological, legal, or political hand-wringing that ignores or dances around the corruption of the human heart will ever understand, let alone mitigate, the evil generated by those lost hearts.  And yet those futile efforts will once again rear their pitiable heads:  shut down social media expression, treat the perpetrator as mentally ill, generate more laws, incite more intrusive government power.  All of this is just chasing after the wind.

President Biden’s charge into the wind is his new May 25, 2022, executive order (EO).  It is the perfect metaphor for this vanity.  Among other things, the EO initiates the following throughout all federal law enforcement agencies:  Creation of a “Law Enforcement Accountability Database”, more investigation and prosecution of civil rights violations and “systematic misconduct”, restricts no-knock entries, requires new standards that “limit the use of force” while tracking all incidents, directs HHS to report any “disparate impacts” on communities, restricts transfers or purchases of military equipment, calls for a plan to “reform our justice system”, and much much more.

In other words, the Biden administration’s answer to the mass killing of a classroom full of elementary kids and two teachers is to put the hammer down on law enforcement, remake the justice system, and play nicer with prison inmates.  The Biden “why” is bad police, a bad justice system, and bad prisons.  That would have prevented rampage.

The rest of the blame game is being played the same way it always has been – it’s the fault of metal and composite (gun), the fault of the Second Amendment, the fault of the Right, the fault of social media, or the fault of school administrations. 

So, which “why” holds the key to human evil?  At the most basic level, isn’t the question of depravity versus purity the question of all questions?  The way in which one understands the problem of evil determines the futility or success of a solution.  All of the above strivings after the wind rest on blaming a system; political, legal, psychological, or even the marketplace. 

I believe that the “why” is buried within every human heart.  The Uvalde shooter was not a virtuous person who just decided one day to shoot his grandmother and 21 other people.  As with all mass shooters, as more information is shared, it will become clear that his life was a wreck from a very early age.  All of the instruments and social structures that exist to “train up a child” will be exposed as absent, abusive, or perverted.

The answers begin at the beginning; literally the beginning – the fallen nature of every newborn child and the moral conditions he or she is born into.  The potential paths for the child’s life are first anchored in the purpose, structure, and training from the family or lack thereof.  In very short order, the molding influences of culture evolve via the community, civil society, and the educational system.  All the while that innate bent nature is either challenged and trained toward goodness or toward a “crusty” hardness of life.

In the end, a sick heart trying to mature in a sick family within a sick society will end in tragedy.  In America, over the last two decades especially, the descent into violence has been appalling and predictable.  As the saving, cleansing power of Christ is spurned and the family disintegrates, sorrows will multiply.