NIU shooting: compassion over fear
After suffering yet another painful school shooting last week Thursday at Northern Illinois University, our country has been forced to attempt to make sense out of the event and decide how to react to it. While school shootings are incredibly tragic events and unavoidably elicit emotions of heartache and sorrow from people all over the world, it is less obvious how events like the NIU and Virginia Tech school shootings should affect our attitudes about the way we subsequently approach our daily lives. One specific reaction that is likely to follow from the NIU shooting that I would like to address is the attitude of fear.
The attitude of fear is a common reaction to traumatic events, and naturally so. Indiscriminate acts of violence like the shooting at NIU carry an especially high potential for a fear response because of the worry that it could happen again anywhere and at anytime. Given that we are members of a university, the fear can reach even higher levels since our daily setting mirrors that of NIU and Virginia Tech’s. This fear, while natural, must nevertheless be handled carefully.
The way I see it, fear is a very useful short-term emotion. In the event that a dangerous situation arises, the fear that kicks in can enhance a person’s ability to deal with imposing threats. However, if fear becomes a long-term emotion, one’s ability to ration and think critically is curtailed by the intensity of the fear emotion. It is this long-term fear response that we must be cautious about.
The unpredictability of a school shooting very easily leads one to the conclusion that more security measures are necessary to prevent future shootings from taking place. Possible examples of this include the demand for an increased police or security presence, harsher consequences for criminal behavior, or more pervasive surveillance systems that reveal more of a person’s private life to authorities. Alternatively, if one does not have confidence that any preventative measure would be effective, they may decide to heighten their own suspicions around unfamiliar faces or even attempt to withdraw from society altogether.
Even though all of these reactions are more or less understandable given the tragic nature of a school shooting, there is another reaction that I feel is even more important than the fear-based reactions: compassion.
In the face of severe violence, it is difficult to find feelings of compassion for others besides the victims of the violence, your own family and your own friends, because suspicions are likely to run high. When we are afraid of what happened, or of what might happen, we are more likely to treat each other with suspicion. This suspicion, in my opinion may, in turn, diminish the amount of compassion we feel for one another. This, if accurate, is a counterproductive attitude to hold toward the strangers around us. I say this because humans are inherently social creatures, and, for that feature of humanity to be realized, we need to be optimistic about our ability to trust one another. If we decide to react with an increased feeling of compassion toward each other instead of fear and suspicion, we may, at least in the long-term, develop a stronger, safer community in which extreme violence is less-common.
Now, I realize that compassion may not seem like much of a solution to the problem of indiscriminate school shootings—in many ways, in fact, it isn’t—but, with all things considered, the more immediate and overt fear-based varieties of reactions do not seem all that promising either. Unfortunately, the nature of school shootings is an incredibly complex psychological problem to which there is no simple, straightforward solution. What I propose is that we embrace the complexity of these events and attempt to think about them as calmly and clearly as we can. To do this, we must find an antidote to the fear we often carry with us because the fear can distort our thinking. The more attention we devote to the positive aspects we find daily in one another, the more likely we will preserve the qualities of trust and civility that make our communities worth living in.