Echoes from Blacksburg

Following is an edit from The Carrboro Citizen:

Echoes from Blacksburg

Grief is immediate and lasting at the same time. In Blacksburg, a community much like our own, it has settled in while the town and the world stands in shock.

The echoes sounding on a survivor’s cell phone had barely faded when the conversation veered from anguish to politics and what to do about guns.

While not conceding any point in the debate over the parameters of the second amendment, it is doubtful that even the depth of this grief and the magnitude and horror of this crime will budge firearm policy a hair’s breadth.

So while we’re having that conversation, maybe we ought to have another one about the other part of the deadly equation — about people. More than a decade ago, and again all too recently, this community witnessed painfully similar circumstances.

The common thread running through each incident was a disturbed young man who did not get the help he needed in time.

Advocates for the mentally ill are understandably reluctant to tie these events to the chronic underfunding of this state’s system. The stigma of mental illness is already a barrier to people seeking help and there’s no reason to think that all the funding in the world could stop a deranged individual bent on murder and suicide.

But if Blacksburg offers us any wake-up call it should be that we need to stay true to our ideals when it comes to mental health reform. It is distressing to see this week that the state is cutting back on funds for the very local programs that are to be the backbone of a more community-based system.

In the wake of the shooting here many years ago and the Pit attack, scores of lives were affected and the need to comfort the survivors and offer some help to those unable to work, sleep or cope is real.

We cannot continue to degrade our mental health system and still consider ourselves a compassionate society.