Christmas will soon be upon us. Sometimes it is hard to be joyful on that day when we think about those who have financial and emotional burdens to bear. Thousands of victims of Hurricane Sandy will be without their homes. There are the families of the slain Connecticut children and adults. There also hundreds of Detroit families who will not have a loved one at the Christmas table because he or she was murdered.
But if we remember the Christ child, we recall that Herod slaughtered children in an attempt to stop Christ from saving us. And Christ himself did not have Christmas morning in his house, but rather in a manger as there was no room for his family at the inn.
Christ left us with the admonition to love our neighbors, and perhaps that is the lesson to be learned from recent American tragedies. We have seen many stories about the goodness of Americans who volunteered to help out the Sandy victims. We are now hearing about how Americans have been moved to charitable acts in response to the Newtown tragedy. The acts of kindness are to be applauded. But we must also have staying power. Once the events of the past few months are no longer 24/7 news, we will need to redouble our efforts to make life better for those who are less fortunate than we are. We should – as Crosby, Stills, and Nash sang – teach our children well.
This means we should make sure our children do not shun the kid in school who is a little bit, or even a lot, odd. We need to tell our children that everyone is our neighbor. No one should be made fun of or excluded from our friendship circle.
Mass murderers are certainly not emotionally stable. But they may not have become mass murderers if they had lots of friends. Dr. Michael Stone, professor of clinical psychiatry at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City, has closely examined the minds of 208 mass murderers.
“Usually you’re dealing with an angry, dissatisfied person who has poor social skills or few friends, and then there is a trigger that sets them off,” he told The Daily Beast last July.
Dr. Stone found that majority of mass murderers are not clinically psychotic, but rather suffer from paranoia. This means that we aren’t likely to end mass murder by expanding mental health care by government agencies. We are also not likely to end mass murderer by attempting to eliminate assault weapon -, although there may be other reasons to do this.
It seems like our natural reaction to tragedy today is to have government do something about the problem. But it is often the case that government cannot do something about the problem without creating unintended consequences that may make the situation worse. As Bastiat wrote in The Law: “The solution to the problems of human relationships is to be found in liberty.”
We cannot shun our responsibility to love our neighbor. This means going out of our way to ask the person over to dinner that no one else seems to socialize with at work. It means making sure our children include the kid no one else hangs out with when they go to the ballgame. This will not be easy at first – but after a time we will come to like the person no one else seems to like, or at least they will come to learn that someone cares about them.
So this Christmas let us honor the victims of Aurora and Newtown and the Christ child by making sure that no one that we know feels they are alone in this world. And let us impress upon our children that the world is a much safer place when we go out of our way to make friends with those who don’t seem to have any.
(Dr. Gary L. Wolfram is the William E. Simon Professor in Economics and Public Policy at Hillsdale College. Find him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/GaryWolfram. And on Twitter at @Gary_Wolfram. Originally posted on The Michigan View.)
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