Solving problems or just patching them

I read this question a few hours after I learned about the Connecticut elementary school shooting.

There are so many things wrong in our country, how can we ever fix it?

Here is my two cents.

How can we ever fix it? We fix it by building stronger communities. We fix it by getting to know our neighbors, our neighborhoods. We fix it by not just looking out for our individual children but everyone’s children. We fix it by taking care of each other, by being supportive instead of combative. We fix it by not just looking out for me but looking out for we. This is something much of this country lost a long time ago.

Tragedies are easy to blame on a crazy person, or guns, or terrorists, or poor laws. Our country, our cities, our individual communities need to not place blame, but rather remember how to build a caring community. Build the type of communities that see the fragile human being in each of us. It doesn’t help anyone to become a group of hard asses. In the long run it doesn’t even help the hard ass.

In our quest to be the best, to have the most, to keep up with the Jones’s and yes to try to one up them, we forget some fundamental truths. Fundamental truths like, we are all in this together.

The missing sense of a strong, compassionate family/community is the problem. This is why modern day gangs exist. The primal need to belong to a group, a group that looks out for you, is the driving force. Much of America has lost that strong family unit. There are so many of us that are “on our own”.

It is so easy to blame the incident. It is hard to look at the root cause and fix it.

In fact, this is why our health care system is broken. It tries patch ailments instead of determining causes to the problems. This is what is wrong with the education system. Throwing more money at it isn’t the solution. Finding why, as a community, we aren’t more engaged in educating our youth is the problem. Trumpeting athletic achievements over actual education and innovative thinking is the problem.

So many times when tragedies strike, whether on a personal or community level, we want to blame. We want to “fix” the problem. The real fix is finding out why these situations happen to begin with. The real fix is at a base level that many people don’t want to look at. It is much easier to say let’s ban guns, or make everyone go through naked body scanners when they travel, or give the group more money. These are band-aids that in the long run won’t give the desired result.

Getting involved in other people’s live from a compassionate perspective, this is where we begin to fix the country.