Thinking About Newtown

The year was 1962 and I was ten years old. My mother stood up to my father. That was something she never did, and it was a conversation I never forgot. I am thinking of it today, as I, like the rest of the nation, try to make sense of the Newtown school shootings.

Nineteen sixty-two was a time of national paranoia. The Cuban Missile Crisis had brought the Cold War tensions to a boiling point, and the spector of nuclear war appeared immanent. It was the era of bomb shelters and practice drills with children hiding under their desks to avoid fallout. 

My family lived in the suburbs, and my father was an attorney. He was, as usual, declaring intentions and giving orders. Specifically, he was going to buy a generator and he wanted my mother to begin to stockpile canned goods. He wanted to make sure that his family would survive.

My mother was not a courageous woman, and in the conservative South in this conservative era of “father knows best,” she devoted most of her energies to appeasing her husband. But this time she did something unusual. She told my father that, if the neighbors were not going to have the supplies to survive, she did not want to have them either. 

My father, for once, had nothing to say. The subject was dropped, and I remember feeling a rush of gratitude for the sense of sanity and safety that accompanied my mother’s perspective.

Why am I thinking about this today? Because I am reading in the news how the mother of the Newtown shooter was a survivalist and part of the “Doomsday Prepper Movement” that advocates the stockpiling of guns, food, and ammunition in preparation for an impending economic collapse and the end of civilization. In the words of her former sister-in-law:

"Nancy had a survivalist philosophy which is why she was stockpiling guns. She had them for defense. She was stockpiling food. She grew up on a farm in New Hampshire. She was skilled with guns. We talked about preppers and preparing for the economy collapsing…”

  She had a collection of guns and according to some reports, would take her sons target shooting. Three of the guns from her collection were found at the scene of the shootings.

Many things are being written about factors contributing to this massacre. The murderer had a prior history of mental health issues, which appear to have been inadequately addressed. He was a gamer, and there have been studies linking violent video games with the acting-out of violence. And, of course, there was the easy access to assault weapons, and the glorification of and desensitization to male violence that is a staple in our culture.

It's not my intention to downplay the significance of any of these factors, but I want to say, from my experience that the kind of “end of the world” paranoia expressed by my father during the Missile Crisis and by this Prepper Movement can be tough on the psyche of a child. It was, in fact, overwhelming in my experience. I will always be grateful to my mother for restoring my sense of belonging and my faith in humanity in a situation where I was feeling terrified, helpless, and thrust into a hostile, callous, and competitive dynamic with my neighbors and friends.

An adult might experience a sense of reassurance and mastery from strategies of dominance and hoarding in the face of an imagined national catastrophe, but a child or someone with mental health challenges might not feel so secure in these “preparations.” In fact, revisiting the conversation of that night, I remember an overwhelming loss of bearing which was dangerously close to an existential crisis.

We know from studies of suicide, that one of the biggest motivators for self-destruction is a loss of a sense of identity, or self. Folks who jumped off buildings during the Depression were less motivated by the loss of their wealth than they were by the existential terror of not knowing who they were or who they would be without their wealth. Losing one’s orientation to others can constitute a tremendous assault on one’s identity. Ask any incest survivor whose family has denied her experience.

So I am thinking of a child, homeschooled and growing up in an environment with a single parent who is propagating the beliefs, attitudes, assumptions, and orientations of a “Doomsday prepper movement.” And who is taking her son out and teaching him how to shoot, specifically to prepare him to kill others—neighbors perhaps—who might be attempting to access their stash of food.

How could a child or a disturbed adult cope with an environment suffused with this end-of-the-world mindset? Were these measures generating the very anxiety they were meant to control? How does one wait calmly for something so horrendous? And was this young man less confident in his ability to survive than his mother? Was he experiencing relationships as potential liabilities in a post-apocalyptic world?

My own brief brush with survivalism is etched indelibly in memory, and with it is one of the only good memories I have of my mother. I have blogged on the potentially devastating effects on children of being taught to believe in hell, and today I am aware that it may be even more devastating to teach children to live in anticipation of the immanent arrival of this hell on earth. In fact, today it seems possible that preparing for Doomsday may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.