The Unspeakable, that is to say, evil acts of murdering twenty children and six of their defenders has left me--like everyone else, the president included--speechless. Evil does that. Awe does that. As poet Adrianne Rich put it, "Language cannot do everything--chalk it on the walls where the dead poets lie in their mausoleums."

But we do communicate in words and after the shock wears down a bit, one struggles for understanding and for learning from this horrible event. Politicians are beginning to talk again about gun regulation vs NRA and especially regarding automatic weapons, which are the weapons the killer used on his mother and all the kids. And that conversation is long overdue.

But I want to talk about something else. If you look at all the perpetrators of this kind of violence whether in Aurora or Happy Valley or Virginia Tech or Tucson or Newtown, what they all have in common is this: They were all young men. What is it about young men that makes them so prone to such violence?

I recall once being at a gathering and sitting with Melidome Some, the spiritual teacher from West Africa, when a young man got up and started raving and ranting at everyone in the room. Melidome leaned over and said to me: "See what happens when young men do not have rites of passage." Continue to read the full article here.