Mourning sickness: Americans have learned from Hollywood and Capitol Hill to seek revenge when tragedy strikes. We would all be safer--and saner--if we could just grieve.

WHEN FUNNYMAN ADAM SANDLER STARRED in Reign Over Me (Sony Pictures, 2007), reviewers praised the comedian for stretching his acting chops by portraying a man crippled by the loss of his wife and daughters on September 11. Sandler, famous for playing goofy and gross adolescents, got kudos for portraying a middle-aged widower paralyzed by heartbreaking sorrow. What critics did not notice, however, was how Mike Binder's film asked American audiences to stretch their own comfort zone by spending two hours with a man mired in grief. Nor did reviewers seem to notice how uncommon it is in America to see a movie about a man who suffers the murder of his wife and children and does not set out to avenge them. In American films and TV shows, deaths are avenged, not grieved.

Grief is a rare and unwelcome emotion in American cinema and television. It makes us feel powerless and sad--sentiments repugnant to our national character. Once in a long while, in movies such as Ordinary People (Paramount, 1980), we are willing to keep company with a protagonist who must wade through the deep and frightening waves of grief that wash over us after the death of a loved one. But in the vast majority of cases, we prefer stories where our heroes respond to the death of a loved one by taking action. We want protagonists (especially men) to get over their grief and get on with life, preferably by hunting down and punishing the people responsible for this sadness.

For while grief is uncommon in American movies and TV shows, vengeance and rage are not. Our films and television programs are riddled with the bodies of murdered spouses and children, but the storylines in these dramas rarely pause to explore the grief and sorrow of those left behind. Instead the camera moves swiftly from the gore of murdered bodies to the manhunt for the killers. We are interested in what happens to the killer and the cops who hunt them down, but not in spending time with those who grieve.

THE SAME IS TRUE OF OUR REAL-LIFE CRIME STORIES. Ever since Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, true-crime bestsellers have been obsessed with the murderer and the man hunter, but have had little or no interest in the survivors.

And yet there must be a sea of these grieving souls in a nation where murder is an epidemic. In the past two decades, nearly 400,000 people have been murdered in the United States, more than the number of Americans killed in battle in World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined.

For over three decades our response to this murderous epidemic has been to declare a war on crime, to build the largest prison system in the world, to put more than 2 million people behind bars, and to spend over $40 billion a year keeping them locked up. And after the murderous attacks of September 11, our president and Congress declared a global war on terror and have spent more than half a trillion dollars so far prosecuting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In America we like our heroes and leaders to react to violence with swift and deadly action. We are angry and we want punishment.

But in this rush to anger, we take little time to grieve for those who are killed. Our government is unwilling for us to see the bodies or caskets of dead soldiers coming home from Iraq, lest anyone make political hay of these photos. And now it is impossible to get a body count of dead Iraqi civilians. Such a number might disturb us. On PBS each week we see the photos of the brave young men and women who have died in combat for just a moment, that is all.

I cannot help but wonder how different our response to crime and terror would be if the American psyche could make more room for grief; if we could, like Ecclesiastes, recognize that there is "a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance" (3:4). When I was a child, most weekdays the priest said the Mass for the dead and we mourned and remembered our lost ones. In many of the countries our parents and grandparents came from there was more room for grief and mourning in social and public life. Widows wore black and mourners hung crepe. Today, however, grief rarely surfaces in public, and then only for a moment or two of silence.

COMMENTATORS REPORT THAT AMERICANS SUFFER from more sadness and depression than ever before, and take phenomenal amounts of pharmaceuticals to combat this malaise. Could it be that part of this unhappiness stems from our unwillingness to make room for grief in our public space? If we had more permission to explore and experience grief in our shared stories, perhaps we would not be so quick to take up arms or declare war against every enemy, or would not put such misguided faith in vengeance.

In Reign Over Me Adam Sandier plays a man overwhelmed by grief, paralyzed by his loss. Such grief is excessive, and Sandler's character needs help to move beyond the sadness that has imprisoned him. But couldn't something similar be said about America's response to 9/11 and other losses? Aren't we a culture trapped in our violent and punitive responses? Anger, like grief, is a response to loss, and we seem to be stuck in this stage of our mourning. Perhaps if we could learn to admit our own sadness and powerlessness, we might be able to move beyond anger into something more productive. That would be a nice stretch.