If you read only one thing today, read Andrew Solomon’s essay in the New Yorker. Then go hug your kids and your parents.
In it, Peter Lanza has broken his silence for the first time since his son Adam killed 20 children in a mass shooting at Sandy Hook school in Newport, Connecticut. Solomon met with Peter Lanza six times for extensive interviews and the result is a heartbreaking story of colossal loss.
“Interview subjects usually have a story they want to tell, but Peter Lanza came to these conversations as much to ask questions as to answer them. It’s strange to live in a state of sustained incomprehension about what has become the most important fact about you. “I want people to be afraid of the fact that this could happen to them,” he said.”
Solomon interviews psychiatrists and scientists in his exploration of Adam’s crime.
“Scientists are sequencing Adam’s DNA to see if they can find anomalies that might explain what was broken in him. And yet, if someone has committed heinous crimes and is then found to have bad genes or a neurological abnormality, should we presume that biology compelled him? It’s a circular argument that conflates what describes a phenomenon and what causes it. Everything in our minds is encoded in neural architecture, and if scanning technologies advance far enough we’ll see physiological evidence of a college education, a failed love affair, religious faith. Will such knowledge also bring deeper understanding?”
Good journalism goes back to the scene long after the yellow police tape is gone. It uncovers the truth that headlines news organizations and social media cannot. It takes time to unwrap layer upon layer and is careful about easy answers. It is longform journalism worth fighting to protect in the heavy traffic of rushed deadlines.
What Solomon’s essay studiously outlines is that Adam Lanza was a troubled kid from birth and his parents struggled for years to help him. Neither of them could ever have predicted such a violent act but that they loved him is clear.
For parents and families everywhere in this muddled modern time, this article will resonant and remind us of our vulnerability. We aim to be caretakers of one other but we can never truly know the privations that linger and take root.
Sometimes love is not enough.
