“Hey Joe, where you going

With that gun in your hand?
Goin’ down to shoot my old lady,
You know I caught her messin’ ‘round with another man…”

Our grieving over the bewildering murder of twenty children and six adults has barely begun, and already the political cacophony is building.  Soon it will reach a crescendo that will wash over us and leave us emotionally and mentally exhausted.   

I’m not going to talk about that today.  There will be a time for that.  Like most intractable problems it is complex, with people on all sides of the argument possessing at least a little bit of the “right”. 

Where I think we’re missing the boat is simpler.   I’ve referred to it for several years now as “My Theory of Increasing Incompetence”.   It basically states that one reaches a degree of competence and assumes that everyone else has also reached that level of competence.  So we quit teaching.  We quit passing on what we know.  After all, “everybody knows that”.  The trouble is…they don’t. 

Case in point:  The United States Army circa 1978, the year I began serving as a Second Lieutenant of Infantry.  This was not yet the “Be All You Can Be” Army.  It was the Army that “Wants to Join You”.  Or me, in my case.  Only it didn’t really want to join me at all as I soon discovered, but I digress. 

This was the post-Viet Nam Army.  Its senior officers and non-commissioned officers were Viet Nam veterans.  They had seen combat.  They knew how to camouflage themselves; how to walk point without tripping a booby trap; how to set up a night defensive perimeter.  The world their Army was joining though, knew none of that.  We were young kids from Detroit, and Chicago.  Kids from the hills of West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky.  Fresh college grads from Texas and Oklahoma.  We hadn’t been there or done any of that.  We “didn’t know s**t from Shinola” as Major Helmick loved to tell us.

The consequence was that when we’d go through our annual testing—they called it ARTEP (Army Training and Evaluation Program) in those days—we would fail.  Usually miserably.  Why?  We couldn’t perform basic tasks so it was just not possible that we would have any chance of performing the more complex tasks they were asking of us. 

The senior Generals understood that this was not acceptable and they began a program to train soldiers like me at a very basic level.  This is a Rifle.  You can use it to shoot at the enemy.  This is a Map.  It will tell you where you are on the ground.  This is a Compass.  Along with your Map it will tell you how to move from Point A to Point B without ending up in Russia.  This is a Radio.  You can talk to other soldiers on it.  And so forth. 

They broke the program into two sections, Common Task Training, those things every single soldier needed to know, and Skills Qualification Testing, for those skills specific to your job as an infantryman, tanker, truck driver, cook, or whatever. 

Bottom line is that it worked.  And the Army it trained would prove itself capable and ready when the first Desert Storm came in 1991. 

I’ve never forgotten that lesson, but I have at times forgotten that I need to actually implement it, not just know it. 

Which brings me to my point:  This is one of those times.  Our society has got to gather itself together and go back to teaching the basics.  This time last week I would have told you that “everybody knows you don’t go into an elementary school and start shooting”.  Today, sadly, that is obviously not true.  At least one of those among us apparently did not “know” that. 

And the first point I’d teach is that “actions have consequences”—not just here in this world, but in the Universe as well.  Most societies have developed some idea of being held accountable for our actions here on Earth and in the Cosmos, but lately we’ve gotten away from teaching that. 

So today, and in the coming days, as we grieve, and give our kids and grandkids that extra hug, let’s take a little time and teach them about good and evil, right and wrong, and that actions have consequences, not only for now, but for eternity.

Yes, for me with my Judeo-Christian background, I’ll talk about Heaven and Hell, and the final Judgment Day.  But if you prefer to talk about Karma, do that.  If you prefer to explain that you must not disgrace your Ancestors, do that.  How you do it is far less important than that you do it. 

The alternative is to “gun up”, because unless we start teaching our children the stories of values—of how humans throughout recorded history have groped for ways to peacefully co-exist—these terrible things will continue to happen.