Courtesy Discovery Networks
Roughly around 1 p.m. yesterday afternoon, Pacific Time, I got a call from my husband that a gunman had taken over the Discovery Communications HQ in Silver Spring, Maryland. I was working on a project outside my office and couldn’t get to my internet connection for a few hours. But, trust me, my heart was in my throat.
I know folks over at Discovery, mostly publicists, but, hey, I’d been talking to the Science Channel’s general manager just a day or two before. I was scared to death for them. I like Andrew and Joshua and Debbie G. and others and even Dustin, who is based out here, but I was remembering a Facebook post recently about being at HQ, and I couldn’t remember if he was saying he was leaving or arriving.
Thanks be, none of the three employees who were held hostage for almost four hours – whose names have not been released to the best of my knowledge – were hurt. Sadly, gunman James Jay Lee was killed.
But it does lead to an interesting media-related problem for parents about what to do when the news is scary. We don’t want our kids to be perpetually frightened of the outside world. But there are times when it isn’t so safe. Those times are very rare – which is why they are “News.” But ever since radio and television expanded the reach of the average human being, we started hearing a lot more about these events a lot more quickly.
In fact, news about the incident at Discovery Communications went online almost instantaneously thanks to people tweeting about it as it happened.
Our littlest children don’t have the years of perspective we have, and so it can seem like another such incident is right around the corner, which isn’t helped when we’re afraid of same. But there are two great lessons you can teach your children when these things happen. One is that you will always love them and do your best to keep them safe and that will be enough. Yes, scary things happen sometimes, but they don’t happen very often or to very many people.
The second is a more difficult lesson, even for many of us grown ups, and that is the lesson of compassion – even for the messed-up puppy who did this. You have to wonder just what kind of psychic pain Lee was in to do something like this – and based on information coming out about him, he was not a happy person. You can feel sorry for the guy without approving of what he did. Understanding and sympathy are not the same things as approval or endorsement of his twisted point of view that we humans are filth.
Too often, in our anger and shock, we come down on the side of revenge – and I’ve heard a lot of “he got what he deserved” in connection with this. That’s not for me to decide. But I do know that revenge rarely leads to peace, whereas compassion and forgiveness do. Did Lee do something horrible that will be permanently etched in the psyches of those three employees held hostage? Are these folks looking at a long, difficult recovery from PTSD? Are the employees who survived going to be dealing with many of the same effects? Yep. Without question. And I will be holding those folks, especially the many people I converse with via email in my heart and in my prayers for healing and peace, because it isn’t going to happen easily.
But I also hold in my heart the man killed. It doesn’t diminish or lessen my prayers for his victims.
We can teach our children compassion. And maybe if we do, there will be fewer of these kinds of incidents.
