Heart, Mind, Soul & Actions, What’s Missing?

Posted on November 14, 2019

 

Today, in Saugus, California, another report of a student coming onto a high school campus, attacking with abandon, and succeeding in  taking the lives of fellow students. It simply makes my heart grow cold, my thoughts swirl with fatigue, and my soul become heavy with the loss that families, friends, communities now must endure as we all seek to understand and determine how we can move forward. While many articles have been written, many thoughts and prayers have been shared, and oceans of tears have been wept, we still are collectively at a loss for true actions to impede these types of events from continuing to disrupt the true fabric of our schools. Today, I ask again, What’s missing? I truly need to know! Not just for the sake of my own children, family and friends, but for the 30,000 plus students that I care so deeply about each and every day. I’m absolutely interested in your feedback, solutions, and guidance, as we all need to be in on taking steps to protect all of our children!

What’s missing? A simple question, yet, one which I often feel we miss when we seek to solve problems of humanity. As a society we often seek to solve a problem from our personal or ingrained perspective. In the case of gun violence on our campuses I feel this re-occurring to a great extent.

Think about it, when we align with a group, we tend to generalize and seek to apply similar logic to the problems we face:

If we are politicians, we seek to legislate, rule, and govern, yet, with fear that we will lose popularity with those who align with us if we go against the perspective of their will.

If we are religious minded, we seek to pray for and send thoughts to those in need, seek to change others to our way of thinking, and we hope for change, while we often do not seek to address the other prevailing issues of the day that need changing through purposeful legislation, or remedies that are truly actionable for each member of our society.

If we are educators, we seek to teach, support and guide, care for, and yet we are corralled by the rules of the system, limited by fiscal resources, and told to do better. (Take up arms in classrooms to protect students? Really? Is this the answer, arming teachers on campuses? I think not.)

If we are first responders, we seek to protect, act, and ensure safety, at the risk of our own lives, and yet, we cannot be everywhere, protect everyone, and stop time to mitigate and solve problems that have yet to occur or that are well hidden from society, such as the case with mental illness.

I know I am generalizing on a grand scale, and thoughts and actions are not always aligned to certain ways by groups, and still, my point is, when we seek to solve a problem from our current perspective, we tend to come up with the same actions for many problems, rather than to build our perspective from a wider view first, and work towards attacking the current problem in a multi-faceted manner.

In the case of our children, who engage in heinous and anti-social acts, who are focused on the destruction of others, I ask again, “What’s missing? What are we not seeing? What must we do differently to curb these violent acts from being perpetuated on others? What’s missing?”

I think we all should be asking this question to help us understand the problems better, to identify what led students into this path of destruction, and how can we discover alternatives that we might be able to provide that could have derailed their focus before they got to this point of committing the unthinkable. I think this approach might help us to realize that there doesn’t exist just one answer, to the problem!

Unfortunately, I do believe this: The legislative body of politicians from both sides of the isle will never allow the masses to rid the world of guns!

Unfortunately: No matter how much we provide thoughts and prayers, while providing comfort to many, will not bring people back to life, nor heal all who may contemplating acting to harm others.

Unfortunately: We can’t just lock everyone up who we believe has some type of mental illness! Quite frankly, many of us are far too accusatory and we would fill up our prisons with anyone who is different from ourselves

I must say that the idea of arming educators to me is an insane idea. I do not believe that there is an appropriate way of arming teachers, having a security guards at the entrance to every school, or having a good kid, bad kid scanner that will buzz whenever someone is having negative thoughts. Simply put, turning schools into military zones will not protect everyone inside from the outside, or the broader community.

Many, smarter than I individuals, have said it, we must have a multi-faceted approach that seeks to support each person with finding balance within their heart, soul, mind, and actions. We must then work towards appropriate, sensible, logical, parameters to ensure, as best we can, that if a person’s heart, soul, mind and actions are not in balance, and if they are seeking to impact damage to others, that we have safeguards in place to help and stop them, and that we can rest assured that we have done everything we can do to protect them and others!

Some ideas:

Socio-Emotional Learning:

We must invest in a multi-pronged approach to provide services at all of our schools, through trained professionals, through our medical providers, and through our governmental agencies for individuals at all stages of their lives. With curriculum programs that focus on building positive and strong mental health development, we would then allow for our children to grow in peace, and to build their personal resilience skills, problem solving skills, and to develop an approach to life that is well-balanced. These types of services are needed throughout our lives. Thus, we should work to ensure that mental health services are provided through medical care providers to all, free of charge, and that everyone within our governmental agencies are trained in also providing levels of service that seek to guide, support, and assist with making healthy choices.

Hope, Inspiration and Goal Building:

There is a difference between providing mental health services to ensure that individuals are developing positive mental health strategies, and in building individuals who aspire to greatness, through a positive style of living, have internal hopes, dreams and goals, and who want to make our world better for themselves and others. Some might say that religion is the owner of this arena, yet, I would say that the ideas of supporting each person to have hope, be inspired, and to develop meaningful, relevant goals, can also be owned by individuals, our educational institutions, health organizations, and community and service-oriented groups. Yes, hope, inspiration and goal building can come from a variety of sources, and we must build opportunities for more positive to exist in our world than negative.

Legislation, Rules, and Governance:

If you are still with me, thanks! Here is the tricky part!

We must continue to build a new way of thinking that will create a tipping point in the mind of our collective bodies of legislators! It appears to me that many of them have solidified their beliefs that there are simply far too many people who have bought guns in the past, or who will buy guns in the future, who back the National Rifle Association (NRA), so strongly, that they can never rise up against them!

This must change! As a society we own the responsibility of helping them to see there is a different possibility, a new paradigm, a different perspective. We must help them see that they do not need to continue to be beholden to the NRA. They do not need to sustain their mis-beliefs that everyone feels the need to own a gun, and that somehow, these weapons of mass destruction that were created to cause ultimate death and destruction to enemies on the battlefield of our governments, must be allowed into the hands of our average citizens!

This must change! Real and complete background checks, limits on types of weapons, registration and review of licenses to continue to own weapons, safety training, and possibly even gun buy-back programs for destruction of weapons are some ideas. I am not fool hardy enough to believe that we can rid the world of guns, but for the love of God, we must have real limitations that seek to protect the masses, rather than to protect the rights of some, that are not truly rights listed in our constitution!

Safety:

School facility funding is far too low, and practically nonexistent from the federal level, and simply doesn’t meet the needs of a society that needs to protect its most valuable resources, our children. When each district in each state is left to its own to design and to pay for the design, development, construction, and safety of schools, there becomes another field of inequity for the children of our marginalized communities. If we truly believe that we must have consistent levels of security at each of our schools, such as: closed perimeters, access through a limited secure entry, guards on the outside of our schools monitoring the perimeters, safety locks to protect those inside at any moment, school-wide communication systems that can be used by many at the drop of a hat, then we need an enormous infusion of dollars to accomplish this! It is far too easy to say, we need these things, and then to leave the responsibility to local authorities to fund these ideas, with no new resources. Dear legislator, put your money where your mouth is, and invest in all of our schools to ensure the safety of all of our children!

This issue hits home!

Far too often we see these horrific scenes play out on our televisions, and far too often, we see the aftermath, the arm chair quarterbacking, and the retreat to old ways of thinking to protect our perspectives.

What I call for is a new way of solution building.

I ask that you ask, “What’s missing?” Take time to review, before jumping into a solution that is based in your current perspective, and seek new ideas, all ideas, to combat these types of heinous acts at all levels. Please, now is the time! If not, us, then who? If not now, then when? If not you, then who? We all must own this problem. If we do, then we have a better chance at working together to solve it!

Let’s take the lead of our children, who have had enough

#NeverAgain

Let’s work to let the life our children live be the measure of our success!

Dr. Rob Martinez is the Superintendent of the Mt. Diablo Unified School School District, and is well known as “ResiliencyGuy” Please follow in on @Twitter, @Instagram, and @Facebook as @ResiliencyGuy