How Not To Be An A**hole to Someone With Tourette Syndrome

/ Wintersong / 3 Comments

Dealing with difficult people is part and parcel with having significant Tourette Syndrome. While the overwhelming majority of people ignore my tics, or at least pretend to, there are always going to be people who, for one reason or another, feel the need to have some sort of interaction around them. To be completely clear, this does not automatically make someone a jerk. There are good reasons why someone might need to address the subject of my tics with me, but how this is approached has an enormous impact on my perception, and perhaps that of the other people present, with regards to whether or not you are an asshole.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Tourette Syndrome (TS), or whose knowledge doesn’t extend past corpolalia (the relatively uncommon “swearing tics” that the media is so very fond of), allow me a brief explanation to ensure that we’re all on the same page:

Tourette is a neurological condition that causes repeated involuntary movements and sounds, or “tics.” These can include sniffing, grunting, throat clearing, head jerking, facial grimacing, or just about anything else you can imagine. Both motor and vocal tics must be present (or have been within one year) for a diagnosis to be made, and the symptoms wax and wane without a great deal of discernible rhyme or reason. Over time, new tics can develop and old tics can fade away. I have a host of symptoms, from the largely unnoticeable, such as painful dystonic back and neck tics, to more obvious tics like head jerking, or the barking from whence my person website and blog take their names.

There are virtually no medications designed expressly for treating TS. There are a host of drugs that have anti-tic properties in addition to their original purpose, and for many Touretters medicine can reduce the severity and frequency of their symptoms. Relatively few people achieve full tic suppression through medication, and it is vitally important to strike a quality-of-life balance between the impact of the Tourette, and the impact of medication and side effects on one’s life. A very limited number of people have also had varying levels of success treating Tourette through the use of implanted electrodes in the brain, but the treatment is risky and relatively uncertain in outcome.

Nine out of ten people who choose to address the tics with me in public are jerks about it, saying things like “stop that,” “would you cut that out,” or my personal favorite: “can’t you see I’m on the phone.” Honestly, it’s a rare but awesome day when someone doesn’t assume that my neurological condition exists solely to screw up their day.

I’ve been astounded, especially as I’ve gotten older, by how many people continue to believe by default that a business traveler, fellow shopper, patient, etc, would make noises or twitch/squirm simply to annoy strangers around them. From my perspective, it comes across as rather  narcissistic to imagine a total stranger would want to put out that much effort on the off chance that they might piss you off. Leaving aside the issue of why they’d consider pissing you off to be a goal in the first place.

Although as a rule I believe that I owe it to other people, and particularly my fellow Touretters, to take the high road in interpersonal conflicts around my symptoms; when people have been especially confrontational or verbally abusive, I’ve been known to retort with something along the lines of “do you really think this is my idea of a good time?”

Fortunately there’s a relatively simple tweak that can help prevent escalation and confrontation, not to mention defensiveness on my part: rather than instructing someone who may have Tourette, or another involuntary condition to cease their behavior, instead ask if the behavior in question is within their control.

This sounds like a tiny detail, but in reality that simple change in language can help effect a change of thought pattern. You’re mentally taking the situation out of the realm of something that is only impacting yourlife, and acknowledging that it may be an even bigger burden on the person with whom you’re talking. From my perspective, asking if rather than telling me to instantly takes you from being a potential threat to being a potential ally, which probably won’t have any impact on whether I can control my symptoms, but it sure makes my day a whole lot better.

That’s probably the number one thing you can do to not be an asshole to someone with Tourette, but for those of you looking for a bit more guidance, I’ve put together a handy list of dos and don’ts:

Note: all these examples are drawn from personal experience

Don’t:

  • Yell at me to stop ticcing, particularly from a distance too far to make a conversational explanation plausible. Trust me, shouting “I have a neurological disorder” across a crowded store in response makes me feel bad, and you look bad.
  • Call me names – I’ve heard them all and they weren’t all that clever the first dozen times
  • Tell me how envious you are of me having Tourette because it seems so awesome. Even in my thirties I still get this frequently, and it’s pretty hard to get back out of the “asshole” box in my mind once you’ve said it to me.
  • Call security/try to have me removed from a public place
  • Hit me (yes, really)
  • Inform me that I’m being rude
  • Call my (not present) mother nasty names, my neurological condition has nothing to do with “not being raised right.” 
  • Mimic my tics back at me. I really thought this would end when I became an adult, but sadly no.
  • Speak to my companion(s) as if I wasn’t there. This is a problem for just about anyone with a visible disability.
  • Tell me that I’m bothering people. I promise, I know that, and already feel crappy and self conscious about it.

Do:

  • Approach/address me in a conversational tone of voice
  • Introduce yourself (especially if you’re in a position of authority)
  • Give us the chance to have a polite interaction – I can tolerate a certain amount of ignorance or confrontation if it’s civil from the start, and you’ll feel like less of an ass when you find out that I have a medical condition if you didn’t lead from a place of rudeness or aggression.
  • Acknowledge the tics from the outset, I know that they’re weird. Trying to work the conversation around to them circuitously comes across as duplicitous and smarmy (I’m looking at you TSA/airport security).
  • Unless the symptoms are incredible noticeable or intrusive, just ignore them. Having it pointed out that one’s behavior is outside the norm can make someone feel really self-conscious, even if it’s not done in a mean way.
  • And as I said before, ask me if my symptoms are controllable – “so I couldn’t help but notice that you’re barking, is that something you can control?”

I realize that as not only someone with Tourette, but someone with significantly noticeable symptoms, I’m a tiny minority among the people of the world. It’s not entirely reasonable to expect people to understand something completely out of their experience. But then, that’s why I thought this was an important post to write. One of the first questions I get asked when people find out I have Tourette, is how they should respond when they encounter someone in public who might have TS.

If you’re reading through this post thinking “well… duh,” just remember, everything I mentioned here is drawn from my own first-hand experience. We don’t always react to new situations the way we’d like to imagine we would.

Adrift And Looking For A Clue

/ Wintersong / 6 Comments

There are days when I frankly have no clue whatsoever about what I’m doing.

Maybe I simply don’t have the right kind of faith, the right kind of relationship to deity, or maybe I’ve been delinquent on my payments and my god-phone has been shut off.

In the years since the dissolution of Asrik, Fire, and my partnership, I’ve frequently felt a lack of purpose or goal in my spiritual and magical work. Some of this was clearly driven by the faith-quake brought about by the complicated end of our relationship, (fun note: just as I was typing this sentence, REM’s “Loosing My Religion” came up on shuffle. Because subtlety isn’t really how my gods roll) although there was a lot more to it than that.

I spent a decade of my life working very hard in the pursuit of the aims that They had set me. First to become a dedicated and highly proficient magic and energy worker, and then to submit to, and persevere through the traumatic death and rebirth process that made me a shaman. Just before Asrik left, Fireheart and I both passed the final test to be consider Masters in our magical tradition (which is not the highest level of proficiency, but was a huge achievement). I came out the other side of my shamanic rebirth changed in ways that I’m still discovering, but confident that I had the tools and talents to begin working in earnest at the tasks the role entailed.

But then… nothing. Or so it seems at first blush.

 Just over two years ago we were given a clear directive from the Lady and Var: keep our heads down

That’s it. All She had to say on the subject, just keep our heads down.

There has been little of the familiar Work that shaped the preceding decade in the long intervening months. The vrescht that Tashrisketin claims here in Gorham has little need of our attentions, and while it doesn’t offer us much in the way of power, it meets our basic needs. There was some excitement for a couple of months when we were given a challenging magical task, one suitable for two Vreschtik masters, but once it was completed to the best of our abilities with the resources available to us, silence reigned again.

I journeyed to the Underworld a month ago, to the boarders of Helheim (I am forbidden from entering any boarded land of the Dead without escort) to carry a message. It felt good and right, but then the job was done and again I had no Work to do. Moreover, I know that I was rusty. No journey to the Underworld is safe, but this one was more dangerous for than it should have been for someone who always has one foot (or hand) in Death.

For his part, Fire’s task at the moment is personal, and deeply bound up in his own journey of destructive rebirth, as the hormones he takes weekly remake his body, and in many ways his mind as well, in to new patterns of being.

Into this silence, elements of the mundane world have flowed in. I have a paying (part-time) job that I love, and which puts me in a position to help shape and provide for spiritual/magical opportunities for a couple of thousand people a year (not that all of them avail themselves of said opportunities, but they are there). I’ve also slowly established a strong voice and position for myself as a blogger in the queer/LGBT community, something that feels incredibly important to me on a personal and spiritual level, but again doesn’t look anything like the “real” work my spirit-worker colleagues do.

Our relationship with our gods doesn’t look like a lot of people’s. In the absence of Work to do, keeping our heads down, we’ve often felt abandoned by Them. It doesn’t help that in many ways the community of spirit-work colleagues we once looked to for reciprocal support has largely shattered into jagged splinters that will cut you if you get to close. Aside from that loss of camaraderie, a lot of the Work we’ve done over the years has come out our interactions with other people and their gods. 

I had a meltdown this morning on the phone with my lover, fellow Clan member, and spirit-work colleague Del Tashlin. Fire lost his job yesterday, less than a week after he and I had gotten legally married, in part to provide for my health insurance needs. We’re facing more severe financial hardship than normal, and the physical, mundane things that make our lives feasible, like my glasses and his car are desperately in need of costly repairs. Some level of poverty has been our companion since our divorce from Asrik and the implosion of our failed design firm.

 And the truth is that I fucking hate it.

The overwhelming majority of my fellow-spirit workers I’ve talked to feel that poverty and deprivation are essential elements of being servants of the divine. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not asking for a Porsche in the driveway, although I doubt I’d say “no,” but I would love to not have to worry about our card being declined at the supermarket check-out line. Or lie awake at night wondering what the hell we’ll do if Fire’s right front wheel bearing catastrophically fails at 65mph.

Yet, for all that these things feel counter-productive to my spiritual health, the argument I’ve been hearing is that those very stressors are what makes one a spiritual being. The idea is that if our lives lacked these sorts of trials, we’d be distant from deity. Without the need to pray to the gods every time we get into Fire’s battered Toyota, the gods would not feel like imminent presences in our lives.

Which brings us back to having no clue whatsoever about what I’m doing.

I don’t know if what I’m doing with my life is in anyway right or not. If the Lady told me tomorrow to give up blogging for the LGBT community I’d be crushed, and something blossoming in me that I didn’t know existed before would die. But of course I’d do it, that’s the nature of being a godslave. Likewise, I’ve devoted a large amount of time and energy over the last several months to relearning my craft as a photographer, one of my first deep passions. I believe that I can serve Them through my art, although I’m not sure how, and photography just isn’t a medium we think of when the topic of sacred art comes up. If we have to sell off my camera gear to keep the lights on we will. But I find it hard to believe that doing so will make me a more spiritual person.

It’s very tempting to say:

My/our Work has never been conventional. Our relationship to our gods doesn’t look like other people’s. How we serve, and what They value in us has always been a bit different. Which isn’t to say that we’ve haven’t drifted a bit, but in general we’re where we’re on the path we’re supposed to be.

But because that is so tempting, it also is hard to accept. For all that we’re in a really rough spot at the moment, and I’m personally having some additional issues that I’m struggling with, there are a lot of ways in which we’re in a really good place in our lives. The idea that we’re clearly screwing up because our lives aren’t total shit is very hard for me to wrestle with. Which, it has been pointed out, may be the whole damn point of our current situation.

I’ll own up to this: there are clear ways in which I’ve let some of my Work slide. I know that there are some hard and scary things that I’ve not done in my Work because they are hard and scary. Baphomet has asked some things of me that I don’t know if it’s within me to do, and there is a final physical mark of my shamanic transformation that I’ve not gotten because it is so terrifying to me. Which is no excuse, particularly for an Ordeal Path shaman. But pushing through those deeply human places is one place where the power in Ordeal comes from.

There’s no way to talk about my failings without acknowledging that I’ve not had the level of public presence in my magical and spiritual capacities that They require of me. This is in part because of the potential damage it could do to other parts of my career (BAD WINTY – this is a great way to loose those parts of my life for good), but also in part because what I see in the broader pagan and polytheistic communities saddens and sickens me. The Lady hasn’t quite given us leave yet to stop keeping our heads down (though we have a timeline), and I don’t know that one can be involved in modern pagan discourse without stepping right into the line of fire. 

It’s funny, in the thirty five minutes it’s taken me to write this post, a lot of my perspective on what I had to say has changed.

I opened this document in part to write about the fact that I/we weren’t doing any Work and felt completely adrift. But as I typed, it became more and more evident to me that at least some of what we’ve been doing could be construed as Work of a sort, even if it looks different from what we might typically picture a shaman or magician doing.

As to the poverty question though, I just don’t know. I have deep respect for the value of asceticism, and believe it or not, there are ways that I work to incorporate those values in my own life and practices. However, the idea that one can best achieve a state of union with the divine through constant fear that the precarious infrastructure of daily life could come crashing down at the slightest nudge doesn’t ring true for my own spiritual self. Of course, that could just be my privileged upbringing speaking.

Likewise, while it’s possible that I could make a case to the government for getting on permanent disability, that has never felt like what I was supposed to do. Continued engagement of some (certainly unconventional) form of interaction with the working world and currents of monetary exchange feel like how I’m supposed to be living and practicing my faith and power. Again though, I perhaps lack the distance to see if that’s the ghosts of my upbringing or the tides of Wyrd speaking to my heart.

See early comment about my god-phone not getting such great reception I guess.

 

Re-Framing The Discussion Around STIs

/ Wintersong / 2 Comments

This post originally ran on Bilerico.com on 12/30/12

As a sex & BDSM educator I spend a lot of time talking about sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Over time, I’ve noticed that how we talk about some STIs can be deeply problematic, and in ways that have serious consequences for public health.

Before I dig into that topic though, I’d like you to stop for a moment and try to guess what the most common illness transmitted by sexual activity is.

I’ll wait…

If you guessed Gonorrhea you’re not in the ballpark.

HSV1 & 2? You’re getting closer, but still not there.

HIV? Go to the back of the class.

No, the most common STI by a long shot would have to be the Rhinovirus, also known as the cause of the common cold.

Before you call “bullshit,” take a mental step back from the cultural box we usually put sexually transmitted illnesses in. Instead, think about the kinds of erotic encounters you personally enjoy (assuming that you enjoy erotic activity). Surely you can see how easy it is to catch a cold from a lover. In fact, I’d wager that the majority of you have at some point contracted or infected someone else with a Rhinovirus during a night of romance or lovemaking.

However, I’ll also wager that you didn’t think of the cold as an STI, which only goes to show that there’s something off in how we think about sexually transmitted infections.

That isn’t to say that you wouldn’t have every right to be mightily pissed off if a lover knowingly had sex with you without disclosing that they were getting over the flu.

It’s hardly news that in the LGBT community, and especially among gay men, there’s a ton of baggage when it comes to STIs. A lot of that has to do with the AIDS crisis of course. At the same time however, LGBT people also have a long history of being identified by society as sick, damaged or dangerous to the general public, a perception that the AIDS crisis unfortunately fed into perfectly. After all, before AIDS there was GRID, and frankly in the back of many people’s minds, in and out of the LGBT community, the stigma of GRID never really went away. Our enemies have not been quiet in their belief that HIV/AIDS is our “punishment” for being queer/LGBT, a belief that some of us struggle to put aside even after years or decades of living authentic gay lives.

Keeping that baggage in mind, I believe that there are two distinct, yet interconnected issues we as a community must work through.

First and foremost, we have to uncouple shame from the medical reality of contracting a sexually transmitted infection. This shame can spring from many places, including internalized homophobia, puritanical views of sex, and even the feeling of having “failed” at remaining STI negative. I recognize that this view is not universal within our community. After all, some people reason, if contracting an STI is seen as a shameful thing, surely that would encourage safe practices.

I’d argue instead however, that the air of shame around the topic of STIs can make reasonable conversations around risk and prevention more difficult than they should be. I cannot count how many young people I’ve talked to who’ve chosen to have unprotected sex out of a fear that their partner(s) would be offended by the (perceived) implications inherent in wanting to use protection. Likewise, all to often I hear variations on “I wouldn’t be involved with one of those sorts of people,” as an explanation for why protection or precautions simply aren’t necessary. When we build up a mythical image of the “kind” of person who contracts a sexually transmitted infection, it becomes easy to believe that the only precaution we need is to avoid being intimate with the “wrong” type.

Of course this cultural meme causes terrible harm to people who do have some form of STI. Even the language our community tends to use: “clean” for someone who is STI negative, with the implied antonym of “dirty” for someone who is positive, can be incredibly destructive. Moreover, we don’t tend to impose these same sorts of moral filters onto other illnesses, contagious or otherwise.

Which brings me to the second issue I wanted to address.

Due in no small part to a pervasive shame around the whole topic of STIs; rumors, misconceptions, and assumptions about the risks and spectrum of sexually transmitted infections remain rampant in and out of the LGBT community. Here is a short list of myths I find myself addressing at least four or five times a month:

  • The idea that sero-discordant people cannot safely have sex.
  • The belief that if someone contracts or develops symptoms of HSV1 or HSV2 it means that they have been promiscuous, unsafe, and duplicitous.
  • Even more disturbing: the belief that HSV posses a serious and potentially life-threatening/ending risk to an otherwise healthy person.
  • All sexually transmitted infections are incurable.
  • One can’t contract a sexually transmitted infection if it’s their first time being sexually active.
  • Condoms are ineffective at preventing the spread of HIV (thank George W. Bush and his friends for this one)
  • Receptive anal sex is the only way to contract HIV
  • HIV is only transmitted through homosexual sex (yes, people still really believe this)
  • For the sake of brevity, I’ll leaving out all the BDSM-related STI myths that I also encounter, but they are extensive

I’ve come to realize that as part of the Challenger generation, I was born into a narrow window during which there was good information and a will to educate youth about HIV, but before the doctrine of abstinence-only-education become pervasive.

This, combined with coming out young, while HIV was only really beginning to be tamed by modern drug cocktails, gave me advantages over the generations that followed mine both in terms of knowledge and particularly in openness of dialog. Of course, talking about sex for a living doesn’t hurt either.

Many young people have only the barest knowledge of HIV, and none at all of other STIs. In the lack of proper knowledge, half-truths and assumptions get taken as fact, as they always have.

For instance, as far as I can tell, the belief that HSV can kill an otherwise healthy person exists solely because the virus is often transmitted sexually, and people have been taught that sex kills. This rather than being provided with detailed information on the spectrum of risk and how to have a healthy sexual life as safely as possible.

Of course, nothing I’m saying here is new. But therein lies the issue facing our community: we’ve been having these conversations for so long, it’s hard to imagine that we still need to.

The fact that we do should be a sign that we’re doing something wrong.

Please don’t imagine that I’m suggesting that we take a laissez-faire attitude towards STIs or safe sex. The reality is that sexually transmitted infections range from the annoying to the seriously life-threatening, and with the growth of anti-biotic resistant strains of familiar illnesses, our level of care and concern should only be increasing.

At the same time, the risk of contracting an illness cannot continue to be a wedge with which an attitude of shame around our sexual desires are driven home. For very understandable reasons, the HIV/AIDS crisis fostered an element of sexual puritanism within the gay community that does not universally serve us well. After all, sexual promiscuity and adventurism is a natural facet of the human condition. We must find better ways to educate people about STI realities, and engage in productive dialogs about informed and risk-aware sexual behavior.

To get there though, we first have to shift how we think about and discuss sexually transmitted infections back foremost into the medical realm, hence the earlier thought exercise around the Rhinovirus.

There should be no more shame in contracting HSV, HPV, HIV, Gonorrhea, etc, than there is in any other preventable medical condition. I’m not saying we should remove the concept of personal responsibility, but when a smoker develops lung cancer we don’t call them dirty; and when a skier breaks their arm we may tsk at them, after all skiing carries the risk of injury, but we don’t assail their character, tell them they deserved what happened, or imply that their skiing injury reflects poorly on their worth as a person.

Especially not if we’re out on the slopes every weekend too.

It IS The End of the World

/ Wintersong / 3 Comments

note: this originally appeared as the opening essay for Bilerico.com’s What You Need To Know on 12/21/12, but is probably better suited to NFABS. 

Due to a common misunderstanding of the Mayan’s concept of the nature of existence, there’s a rather tongue in cheek meme that says the world is due to end today. As I’m writing the What You Need To Know at 1am EST, I’m pretty confident that there will still be people around it when it posts at 10am. And again, the end of the world isn’t what the Mayans predicted, if you’re inclined to worry about one particular Mesoamerican people’s calendar over any others.

That said, our world certainly is being transformed at a remarkable rate. In the words of celebrated sci-fi/fantasy author Catherynne M. Valente, I’m a “Challenger.” That is, I belong to the short and somewhat overlooked age cohort that is pre-Millennial, but post-Generation X, defined by Ms. Valente as those of us who watched the Challenger disaster unfold live in our elementary school or early middle school classrooms.  

Every generation since the dawn of Industrial Revolution has seen radical change in their lifetimes of course. My own great grandfather was born in the era of the horse and buggy, but died after seeing humans leave footprints on another planet. Things are no different for the Challengers.

The most visible changes in our world of course have been information oriented. I was ten when ARPANET was officially decommissioned and commercial ISPs began piping internet and World Wide Web access into people’s homes. I don’t have hard figures, but I’d be surprised if any but a few of the most powerful computers on earth when I was born could rival the computing power most of us carry in our pockets today. And for better or worse, the connected nature of the internet age has created a global community with both the good and bad characteristics of a small town or village.

I also grew up from the fourth grade on with the specter of global warming (now global climate change) hanging over my head. My peers and I were told time and time again of the consequences that would come to pass if the threat posed by global warming to the planet wasn’t addressed. Challengers, and the generation after us, grew up with the knowledge that the planet was sick, and we came to realize that older folk didn’t have all that much in the way of will or resources to do a lot about it. We’ve watched in mounting horror as climatological changes that as children we were told our children or grandchildren might see in their lifetimes, have come to pass already or are predicted well within our own.

At the same time, there have been positive changes too. I first learned of the AIDS crisis as a boy at my great-aunt’s house for Thanksgiving, where on the TV I heard a news report about Ryan White. My mother, a teacher, was simultaneously outraged at the unfairness of his treatment, and sympathetic to the scared parents of his peers who were trying to protect their children from an unfamiliar and terrifying illness.

But while HIV/AIDS is still with us, we’ve managed to chain it and remove much of its destructive power (at least in the wealthy first world). HIV/AIDS is not unlike Fenrir in the Norse cosmology, it took all our cunning and know-how to mitigate its destructive power, though even bound it still poses a danger. And should it outsmart us someday, the consequences could be beyond dire.  

Along the way, the crucible of the AIDS crisis helped force the creation the modern LGBT civil rights movement. Just as advances in computer and communication technology over the last thirty years has been inconceivably fast, the changes in freedom, rights, and our place in society as queer/LGBT people is staggering.

Part of the reason that the conservative right in America, and other nations, fight against our equal place in society so doggedly, is that they aren’t entirely wrong about what’s happening to society. The world they knew is vanishing. Some of that is because their world was always an illusion, a mutually agreed upon suspension of disbelief in which white middle class Christians pretended their experience was universal, and in exchange for being somewhat left alone, everyone else tried not to upset the balance of their imaginings.

But beyond that, our culture and understanding of the world has changed, as it pretty much continually has for the last two hundred years or so. Change can be terrifying. The End Of The World, at least if you’re deeply invested in your world remaining exactly how it’s always been.

So in that, maybe the prognostications of the Mayans (or what people think of that way) are correct. The world is ending today after all, but only because it is perpetually ending and being made anew. Perhaps now more so than ever.

A Gun Owner’s Response to the Tragedy in CT

/ Wintersong / Leave a comment

This post originally ran on The Bilerico Project on 12/14/12

I suppose people consider me something of a gun nut, and I’ve written on here before about firearms ownership and the LGBT community, which is why I felt it was important to write this post. You probably won’t hear from most “gun nuts” or 2nd Amendment groups today, and when you do, there’s a decent chance they’ll have something incredibly insensitive an unproductive to say.

This is a problem.

The tragedy today in Connecticut is incomprehensible to me as a human being, as it probably should be to anyone with a soul. What I do know is that it wouldn’t have happened the way it did if guns were harder to acquire in the United States, which likely isn’t what the firearm advocacy groups are going to say today.

I know that many on the right and left might find it hypocritical of me to say that as a law-abiding gun owner, I don’t particularly wish to give up my 2nd Amendment rights, while also saying that we need more regulation of firearms and far greater penalties for violating gun laws. And like it or not, at some point, we as a nation will have to delve into the Pandora’s Box of mental illness and access to deadly weapons.

The reality is that in many but not all countries where guns are far harder to get, these sorts of tragedies just don’t happen with the clockwork-like regularity with which they do in the United States. Although they do happen, as we learned in Norway last year.

At the same time, we also can’t let ourselves get solely bound up in a debate around guns, when we need to be looking at the much larger question of what causes these terrible things to happen. It’s far easier to make this a sterile discussion of policy and law, or to sling mud at our ideological opposites, than it is to try to look for sense in the midst of a senseless nightmare. While there can be no doubt or debate that guns make it easier for madmen to take dozens of lives, focusing solely on the gun part of the equation is a distraction from looking at the bigger issue, that stories like these point to where we’ve failed as a society.

I spoke to my mother today, an educator for nearly four decades. She told me that a common refrain she hears is that we should have police officers in every school in America. Yet, there doesn’t seem to be any will to have a meaningful discussion of how terribly that very idea reflects on who and what we’ve become as a nation. We want easy solutions so we can go back to our ordinary lives in comfort, but both the issue of guns and the far broader issue of why these situations are happening, require more depth than that.

The broader issues of society go far beyond the scope of this post, but I do want to take a moment and talk about guns.

There needs to be an acknowledgment from the pro-gun community that there is something about our firearms laws and practices in this country that simply isn’t working. Moreover, people on the conservative right who argue for greater firearms access, even beyond the point of reason (such as the gun show loophole), while simultaneously favoring severe cuts to the social safety net, including the funding of programs that provide physical and mental health care for disadvantaged Americans, need be be called out for the conflict of their positions. You don’t get to say “it should be easier to get a gun” and “people don’t need mental health care.” Finally, the fact that the pro-gun position and argument in America is deeply rooted in issues of race and class privilege, needs to be talked about and addressed by advocates of responsible firearms ownership, rather than just opponents.

At the same time, those on the Left who see a story like today’s and think that things will be all better if guns are taken away from everyone except the police and military, have to start looking beyond simple solutions to what is clearly a complex social problem. Remaining fixated on gun prohibition as the only acceptable outcome distracts from the possibility of real, constructive change. People opposed to gun ownership also need to understand that there are many good people in America who own guns for recreation, sport, or personal protection. Many, if not most of us, are open to a meaningful dialog around how we can work together through legislation and public education to help make guns safer for everyone. However, the all-too common rhetoric that paints all gun owners with the same brush as mass murders makes cooperation and compromise seem impossible.

I wish I had a good conclusion to this post, but I don’t. My abilities as a writer are not up to the task of talking about the shooting today in language that truly does justice to the scope of what has happened, and after many abortive attempts, I’ve decided not to try.

All I can do is ask that we all acknowledge that there are complex issues involved here, and little to be gained by looking for one-size-fits-all solutions. Whether we are advocates for or against gun ownership, we owe it to the victims not only of this tragedy and ones past, but also to potential victims of the future, to have a meaningful dialog and work together for real and lasting change.