Time To Bang Some Pans

101 California Street Shootings is the name given to a mass shooting that took place July 1, 1993 in San Francisco, California, claiming the lives of nine people, including the shooter. The killings sparked a number of legal and legislative actions that were precursors to the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, H.R.3355, 103rd Congress (1994). The Act took effect in 1994, and expired on September 13, 2004, through the operation of a sunset provision. (Wikipedia)

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In 1993 I worked as a claim's assistant for an insurance brokerage firm on the 22nd floor of a San Francisco high rise at 50 California Street. It was mind numbing work, but it paid the rent. The brokers I worked for were young, ostentatiously rich, foul mouthed and loud, politically and socially conservative, yet surprisingly supportive of this liberal psychology student processing claims to get through graduate school. I was a fish out of water in that world of designer suits and three martini lunches.


But on the afternoon of July 1, 1993 all differences between us were temporarily erased. On that afternoon we were all simply human, all equally vulnerable, and all stunned as we stood in our conference room, watching stretchers with the bodies of dead and wounded people being carried out of the office building across the street. 


It began with an alert that shots had been fired in the 101 California Street building. As a precaution, our building was locked down. Radios were tuned to news stations in an attempt to figure out what was going on. My friend Wayne worked in the 101 California Street building. I repeatedly tried to call him but phones were not being answered. Wayne's wife Sarah would not hear from him for some time. Fortunately, he was safe on another floor of the building. It would be several hours before the police would discover the gunman in a stairwell, dead from a self-inflicted gun shot wound, after he had taken the lives of eight people and wounded six more. No clear motive was found, only a largely unintelligible letter left by the gunman including a list of odd complaints and bizarre accusations. 


The recent shooting spree in Aurora, Colorado, took me back to that day in 1993. I experienced the same horror and outrage I felt on that frightening summer afternoon. And shame too. Shame for my country. How is it possible for a mentally ill man to obtain a semiautomatic assault rifle more easily than a motorcycle driver's license? I don't know how Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of and spokesman for the National Rifle Association sleeps at night, or how he or anyone else can use the second amendment to justify the sale of assault rifles to the general public. We can all point our fingers at the NRA and the politicians beholden to them (and we should), but we also need to look at other cultural influences that lead to these tragedies.


While the vast majority of people with mental illness are not violent, we need to look at how we as a society view, treat, and contribute to the type of mental illness that would lead a young man like James Holmes to open fire in a movie theater. While mental illnesses occur all over the world, definitions, understanding of cause, stigmatization, treatment, and even the expression of symptoms are culture bound.


In a January, 2010 article in the New York Times magazine entitled, The Americanization of Mental Illness (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html?pagewanted=all), writer Ethan Watters says, "we can become psychologically unhinged for many reasons that are common to all, like personal traumas, social upheavals or biochemical imbalances in our brains. Modern science has begun to reveal these causes. Whatever the trigger, however, the ill individual and those around him invariably rely on cultural beliefs and stories to understand what is happening. Those stories, whether they tell of spirit possession, semen loss or serotonin depletion, predict and shape the course of the illness in dramatic and often counterintuitive ways."


We are a culture that places rugged individualism over interdependence. We are a culture where celebrity is highly prized. We are a culture that marginalizes our mentally ill and regularly cuts funding for treatment, resulting in higher and higher numbers of mentally ill people living on the streets untreated and self medicating their symptoms with alcohol or illegal drugs. And, sadly, we are a culture that cares more about protecting our individual "freedom" to own any kind of gun we choose than protecting our citizens, particularly the most vulnerable among us. Is it really any surprise that this tragedy occurred? I think it's surprising that it doesn't happen more often.


I do not have any easy answers. But that does not mean I should sit on my hands and do nothing. I agree with writer Anne Lamott's response to this recent tragedy when she says, "All I can think to do is what we've always done. We work towards peace and non-violence. We register voters. We create art and music in the face of madness. We light candles. The praying people pray: Lord have mercy. The meditating people meditate. We create Love and beauty as radical acts. We take care of the poor, and teach people to read and write. And as Molly Ivins would urge us to do if she were still here, we bang our pans. We rise up, peacefully, take to the streets and we bang our pans and we make a ruckus, and we stop this war, too." 


May the banging of pans begin in earnest.