by Dr. Donny Johnson
I am a psychologist. A doctor, in fact. In my lives as a performance poet and television showrunner, it doesn’t come up much. And, frankly, there’s no need for it to. On a day like today—which does not seem like a day at all, but a gasp in time—I believe that it is a must to share my thoughts from the point of view of a mental health professional. In that capacity, I’ve treated children and adolescents, families, including survivors and perpetrators of crime. The curse of a good memory is that I house all of their stories. Still. The blessing of that experience, however, is being unafraid to help people look for answers in scary places. In an afternoon text to a friend—the mother of school-age children—I declared today “unspeakable.” I realize that I was quite wrong; today is a day when we must speak up. A man who slaughtered 20 children and their guardian angels has asked the children in our lives a question. They are counting on us to answer. Every child who becomes aware of this event will ask. Some will ask out loud, others with the brutality in their play, the vanishing of their appetite, the impossibility of their sleep. Some will ask by saying nothing in a room that still echoes their voice from the day before. Every child wants to know. Assume this. The worst question I’ve heard so far is from a child who asked her father: “Is this going to happen again?” Not one of us would want to fill such a small life with an answer so massive it threatens to explode her. Yet, this child is the voice of millions of other children today. “Make sense of this for me”, they plead. Tell me the world has order. And, that you, adult who loves me, know the code. Tell me that I am safe. That the day after this day will not make you cry as it swallows me. Tell me that I can be happy. 
And, here is where we must not lie. Here is where we prove that we are worthy to take care of them. I would not accept the invitation to call this act “evil.” Evil teaches us nothing; it is an enormity, an inhumanity that does not impel is to do, but avoid. Rather, I would focus on the essentially human of this day. Before he was a man that we do not understand, he was a teenager someone did not understand, a child not fully understood. Misunderstood people sometimes do bad things. Being misunderstood excuses nothing, but can explain much that can help us help the other misunderstood among us before they attack our lives. Consider telling the children in your life that trying to understand people is an act of love, and that the more we practice this act—an art, really—the fewer people there will be in the world who want to harm others. Tell them that, unlike the bad behavior of others, they have full control of their desire to understand others. They do not have to be passive and wait for the next time the day implodes. They have control of their generosity of spirit, and that such largesse changes people. And, that changed people change others. Tell the children in your life that you do not know what other people will do tomorrow, but that days like today are rare. Tell them that you do not understand these rare days either, but that you know exactly what will happen tomorrow and every new day after. Tell the children who love you that you will love and try with all that you are, to protect and understand them every day of your life. When tragedy corrupts the day, the children in our lives have questions.
We are the answer.
Donny Jackson
December 14, 2012
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