How can we handle tragedies like the Connecticut school massacres?

From Kirtibhai

You might heard about the mass killing here in America where 20 children under the age of 6 were killed and 6 adults age ranging 26 to 52. My question is how do one handle a tragedy like this?

What can one do to help families to whom this happen over come their grief?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
the holy name, by giving them prasad. Question from Kirtibhai Prabhu. What is the Vedic perspective on the recent school massacre in Connecticut where 20 children under the age of 6 were killed and 6 adults ranging from 26 to 52? How does one handle a tragedy like this? What can one do to help families with whom this happens to help them overcome their grief? And sir, such tragedies are heartbreaking to say the very least.
First grader children are shot down for no fault of theirs. And the really tragic thing about such shootings is that they are being repeated. It is at times like this when the fragility of life at the material level is understood, that we can feel the need to recognize and realize our spiritual identity.
Because that alone is eternal. And at that level itself, alone we can have eternal existence that is immortal, not destructible just by one shot from a gun by someone. So if we are personally acquainted with any of these unfortunate victims in terms of their either survivors in the casualties or their relatives, then we can offer solace to them and offer our prayers for their emotional recovery as well as physical recovery for those who are wounded.
And in a non-proselytizing, proselytizing means trying to convert to our faith, in a non-proselytizing, assisting way, if we can share the knowledge of the eternality of the soul, we can offer some solace by telling them that their loved ones are still alive, they have just been transferred to another plane of existence. We are eternal beings and the bodily shells are just coverings, dresses that have to be abandoned. Of course, philosophy has to be presented within a context of sensitivity and respect and caring.
Otherwise, if in such situations we seem to be opportunistically trying to foist our philosophy on someone else, that can be extremely alienating and counterproductive. So beyond the specifics of how we can help them, incidents like these raise the more generic question of how do we make sense of such events. This particular boy who did this ghastly act committed suicide and left no notes about why he did what he did.
So it may not be traceable. And similar incidents have happened in the past. Even if some causes are found out for some specific incidents, you have to look beyond those causes to broader patterns.
The Bhagavad Gita explains that human behavior is shaped by the three modes of material nature and the modes of passion and ignorance create impulses within us which incite, provoke, prod us, force us to behave in thoughtless ways. And although what this particular boy did was ghastly, demonizing that particular individual while exonerating everyone else, including ourselves, exonerating means saying that we are not responsible, is short-sighted and uninformed. We have all created a culture that stimulates and aggravates the modes of passion and ignorance.
The modes from the Bhagavad Gita 14th chapter are described as subtle forces that act on the mind and shape the interaction of consciousness with matter. So the modes are like ropes that pull us through our minds. Now in the mode of goodness we are thoughtful, in the mode of passion we are impulsive, gaining short-term pleasures and in the mode of ignorance we are impulsive in a destructive way.
Now throughout history these three modes have always been there and people have been subjected to these three modes throughout history and they have accordingly acted. What is gravely and grievously different in our times is that the external stimulation of our impulses is unprecedented and also the external facilitation for acting on those impulses is also unprecedented. So external stimulation of these impulses means that scenes of violence are regularly, almost incessantly broadcast in the media like television and ways of committing terrible crimes like murders can be found out by googling on the net and in this way because of the events of our life, because of the tendencies of our mind, of our acquired nature, all of us will get impulses but when those impulses are stimulated in an extremely provocative and multifarious way by external technological gadgetry then those impulses become extremely powerful, far more powerful than what they would have been.
So earlier if a person becomes angry, a person may just beat up somebody else but now what to do when one becomes angry? We have imagery from all over the world and sometimes imagery with high-tech special effects which shows how different people can vent out their anger. So naturally anger gets stimulated and the imagination for how anger can be vented out also becomes wildly uncontrollably provoked. So first is that having our culture where the lower modes like passion ignorance, especially we are talking about ignorance because more of ignorance is the primary cause of violence is aggravated but after aggravating it through external stimuli if the culture further facilitates people to act on their destructive impulses then it is a recipe for social disaster.
So in America according to the gun laws all citizens can possess guns and this boy’s mother you know she was a gun buff and she had trained her sons in shooting guns. She would probably in her wildest dreams not have imagined that the son whom she taught how to shoot guns would turn and shoot her dead with four bullets in her head of someday but that is what ultimately happened. Now the mother was homeschooling the child and obviously the mother cared for the child if she was going out of the way to rather than keep her in school but homeschooled him and the child may have been a loner and was suspected to suffer from some sort of autism or whatever but the important point is here everybody has impulses and it’s possible that people can become angry but when there is facility to act on the anger in extremely destructive ways then the consequence can be horrendous and this is what happened.
We don’t have to go into the specific causes of why this particular boy did what he did to understand that to understand the underlying principle that impulses are something which will be inevitably generated but after they are generated if we have easy and destructive easy access to destructive ways of acting on those impulses then it is disastrous. So for whatever reason this boy got angry he became cold-blooded but he had three four guns ready with him and he just went to a school and shot down dozens of children over there. So who knows what was the cause why he targeted those particular children but beyond the specifics of the cause the point here is that if we make it easy for people to act on their impulses in destructive ways then this is what is going to result in society.
So President Obama has caused for us has called for a serious rethinking about the right to gun laws and right to possessing guns and now all the lobbies that promote free access to guns have refused to comment but they have tremendous political and financial clout so that’s how in the name of freedom they have been peddling selling guns to large number of citizens in America. America is among the few countries in the world which has free access which has free access to guns as a legal right for its citizens. I mean almost all traditions whether it was Vedic tradition or the Chinese tradition Japanese tradition warriors had their weapons and warriors had serious codes about when and where and how the weapons are to be used.
So if we look at the Mahabharata war one of the reasons why Drona was implicated was that he was using divine divine astras against ordinary soldiers and that is considered to be akin to a war crime it is violation of the law code that governs warriors so this is just one sample but the point is that those who had a possession of weapons were trained to and were instilled with the education that weapons were not meant for indiscriminate use on impulses. Of course it is no society is ever ideal and even at those times people the warriors may also sometimes misuse their weapons against those who are not competent but in today’s society we have a systematic usage of weapons against those who are utterly defenseless this is of course happened in the form of terrorism where which is actually the exact opposite of the fighting in a war while fighting in a war the opponent has to be equal the opponent has to be equipped and the opponent has to be alert whereas in much of modern warfare the opponent is certainly non-equal whereas a gun equipped person on one side and they first grader child on the other side and certainly they were not equipped the children did not have weapons and they were not alert so now we may say it is utopian to expect Vedic Kshatriya codes to be followed by modern hot-headed youths that’s true but then the point here is that there has to be a limitation for access to weaponry this is not the solution at the root level but it is a very important and indispensable solution at the shoot level shoot means branch level so if we make it easy for people to access destructive ways of acting on their impulses then we cannot avoid destruction we cannot avoid a horrible destruction like this so at an immediate level if devotees are there in situations where say voting takes place for those cutting down the free access to guns for everyone then devotees can support that now guns may be required for self-defense but the point is very often those very guns are get used for committing terrible crimes on impulses and at a broader level and this we need to recognize that beyond governmental policies there has to be a change of consciousness from the mode of passion excellence to the mode of goodness the more people come to the mode of goodness the more they will behave more sanely rationally and responsibly and the krishna conscious culture certainly aims to take all people back home back to godhead but even from this world of this worldly perspective it enables us to cultivate the mode of goodness and there are various spiritual cultures in the world of different religions and they also encourage people to rise towards the mode of goodness so it is extremely important that overall we devotees recognize that our chanting our practice of spiritual life may not seem to be offering any tangible solution to the urgent problems of the world but we need to recognize that there are no quick fix solutions certain specific crimes require certain specific punitive measures specific punishments and specific preventive regulations but beyond these punitive and preventive measures the real solution is elevation of the consciousness of people the establishment of people in the mode of goodness and by our practice of krishna consciousness that is what we are trying to do and this is actually the most important solution because without cultivating the mode of goodness without learning to evaluate and regulate and subordinate our impulses which is what we do when we are in the mode of goodness without doing such evaluation regulation and subordination of impulses there is no hope for preventing the recurrence of such events in fact they will increase more and more in future so therefore at an individual level and we discussed three main things over here if any devotees are connected with those who are relieved by this tragedy then non-personalizing sharing of the immortality of the soul can be consoling if there are some political measures that are assisted by this then at a broader level social level devotees can support the laws for curbing the free access to guns and further at a individual level we need to recognize that our chanting our cultivation of krishna consciousness goes to the root by contributing to the establishment of the mode of goodness. Sri Prabhupada writes in the 14th chapter that of the bhagavad-gita that earlier in the past ages mode of goodness was considered to be the sign of progress now the mode of passion and the lower modes are considered to be the sign of progress so we may not be able to reverse the social current completely but by our individual practice and example we can encourage others to come to the mode of goodness and as more and more people see that living in the mode of goodness is beneficial gradually this will have a chain effect chain reaction effect by which the mode of goodness can be restored even if it is not restored in the mass of society if it is restored among those who are the influencers of the mass of society today the influencers are not so much the intellectuals as the business magnates and the politicians and the more the good the mode of goodness comes among them gradually gradually by that sanity and stability can be restored to society thank you so why don’t