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Call it a cycle, call it a script, call it madness. Nineteen children and two adults gunned down in an elementary school in Texas. Collages of their beautiful faces, photos of families who will carry a grief so heavy we buckle at the thought of carrying it ourselves. The lucky parents wrap their bodies around their living children as if it were enough. We read the same headlines, see the same hand-wringing, criticize or call for the same prayers and find ourselves desperately having the same debate. Until we move on, and a moral imperative evaporates.
This is a political story, but it is a psychological one, too. A story about what some people say they value but refuse to protect, what some people claim they want but never demand. It’s a failure of American democracy, a failure of humanity, a “learned helplessness” whose only antidote is a demonstration that change is possible.
“Learned helplessness is a mental state that occurs when people find out that nothing they do matters,” said Dr. Martin Seligman, director of the Penn Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “Its main consequence is that people give up and stop trying. It applies quite apparently to the majority of Americans who, for years, have shown they want more checks and balances about gun control. … And in spite of that, the American voter and the Democrats, in particular, have found out that nothing they do works. That predicts that people would give up.”
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