violence

February 10, 2014February 10, 2014

No safety when people are disposable commodities

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One of the events organized at URI last week was a panel discussion on Alternative Strategies for Maintaining a Safe Campus. Here is an updated informal version of the notes I prepared for the occasion.

Outline

Identify the problem: how does one create a safe campus in a society that idolizes violence on all scales?
What can we do about it?

Societies breed the sociopaths they deserve. The following two are manifestations of the systemic violence:
- the lone-nut on a shooting rampage
- police departments militarized with perpetual-war surplus
The physical abuse we teach in military training and employ abroad in expanding our empire sets the standard for oppression we use at home. This is what happened to non-violent protesters of Disarm Now Plowshares when they resisted our nuclear weapons of mass destruction:
- They —nuns, priests, and a nurse— were arrested, cuffed and hooded with sand bags.
- At the trial the marine in charge testified:
  
  When we secure prisoners anywhere in Iraq or Afghanistan we hood them … so we did it to them.

The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world
- home of 5% of the world population and 25% of the world’s incarcerated.
- 5% of black men; 2% of Hispanic men; less than 1% of white men are incarcerated.
- Read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow or watch this this video. Here is a panel discussion called End Mass Incarceration; it provides the missing links required to find alternative strategies.
With guns as god on our side we have 30,000 gun shot fatalities per year and 70,000 non-fatal shootings. These statistics dwarf the spectacular events that feed and are caused by the corporate media complex.
Pro Publica had an article about the effects of violence: The PTSD Crisis that’s being ignored:
- vicious cycle: neighborhood violence → PTSD → compromised public safety → neighborhood violence
These are the effects on children when they grow up in poverty and violence:
- learning disabilities
- lifelong negative health effects
- intra-uterine growth retardation
Pediatricians refer to this violence to which children are subjected as toxic stress. The solution of the corporate media complex assisted by the United Global Union Busters? Blame teachers for their under-performing students and call in the privatization troops!
Death preventable by effective health care: If we had the French health care system in US, there would be 140,000 fewer such fatalities per year.
The real numbers are a state secret, but a good estimate is that US national “defense” costs $4,000 per person per year. This amounts to a lifetime expenditure of more than $250,000 per person.
Martin Luther King in his Beyond Vietnam speech at Riverside Church onApril 4, 1967, a year before his assassination said:

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

The system we have created is what spiritual death looks like: we are all zombies now! Two atomic bombs worth of fatalities each year, but nobody notices and nobody cares because it produces no gripping pictures on the home page.
This is an abbreviated list with lots of victims of systemic violence, but it’s all peanuts compared to the violence of global inequality, which kills about 25,000,000 people per year. Global climate change, which barely registers in the corporate media, may cause a number of fatalities bigger by one or two orders of magnitude. How can we begin to solve that problem, if we collectively ignore statistics like these?

What can we do?

There is the eternal question: “How do we deal with the danger of increasing crime?”
A famous Dutch criminologist, referring to a newspaper notorious for its sensationalism had a simple answer: “Read a different morning newspaper.”
My reply 30 years later:

Tune out of the stupefying pap served up by the corporate media complex.
Get used to the idea that the brain acts as if it has two parts: (fast forward to the seven minute time mark in the video)
- System one responds to pictures and anecdotes; it can barely count or reason and is easily mislead, but it’s fast and can save us from immediate danger.
- System two can think systematically and critically; it can understand statistics, but it’s lazy, slow and painful to engage.
- The corporate media talk to system one. Tune out and there will be fewer hysteria driven events such as the lock-down at URI last year.
- Engage system one and you’ll realize that there is a war on the poor and people of color in America. The lone-nut shooter in a nice white, affluent neighborhood near you is responsible for only a minute fraction of the total number of victims.
How can an individual help solve problems of global scale? Follow Gandhi when he said: “Be the change you want to see in the world!” Maybe I’ll get to that, for now I’ll follow Martin Luther King with his:

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
Once again, for the academic year 2013-2014 URI is in the bottom twenty of LGBT unfriendly schools.
According to government statistics, the most prevalent hate crimes by far on university campuses result from bias involving race and sexual orientation. Drawing attention to their manifestations on campus is encouraged as long as it results in nice photo ops for administrators. As soon as the message become a threat to the corporate brand image, the messenger is disappeared.
It happens all the time and it is what happened to my dear friend Andrew Winters at URI. First people get MLK peacemaker awards, but then something goes wrong and silence at URI sets in. Andrew’s disappearance was covered in
- CCRI’s Unfiltered Lens
- The Brown Daily Herald
- The Providence Journal
- Options, RI’s LGBT community newsmagazine
URI’s Good Five Cent Cigar, the Student Senate, and the Faculty Senate have all deliberately participated in the URI code of silence. Blessed by the Board of Education and the Governor’s office, the tactic of choice remains loyalty to the corporate Think Big brand. As always, the tactic of choice is saying one thing in public, and doing the opposite behind the scenes.

A perfect example took place when URI was featured in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The university’s CEO wrote in his blog of March 9, 2011 under the heading Another Special Moment for URI:

Many of your [sic] have heard me say that one cannot solve problems while trying to hide them, or by pretending they don’t exist.

Sounds good until you find out that the photojournalist working on this article for The Chronicle was ordered off the URI campus.

Violence makes most of its victims one by one; the vast majority remain nameless. The corporate media complex reports only on the spectacular outliers that produce juicy pictures. Is it surprising that this feeds mass hysteria?

Meanwhile, capitalism keeps alive a health care system run by death panels consisting of criminally overpaid CEOs. The system perpetuates violence and oppression in the workplace, in the streets, in the prisons and a global scale. The alternative strategy that we are looking for has been formulated by Camus:

In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.

February 26, 2013

Externalities Kill

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I can almost stretch my memory back to the day of Dec. 14, back through the fog of politicized media spin, the miasma of special interests spreading to capitalize on crisis and grief in one way or another. I can almost remember the overwhelming flood of empathy, the consolation, the unconditional love, and the deep soul searching. It played through every news and Twitter feed.

Before debate was pigeonholed into gun control and divided into topics like assault weapon bans, magazine clips, background checks, and good guys with guns on every corner, there were calls for deeper reflection. There was a question that was on everybody’s lips: “What is wrong with us, how do we stop our violent madness?” Where did that conversation go?

Because let’s be really honest with ourselves: Gun control is not going to stop the mass killings, nor the individual ones that tick across the news wire in the background of the television screen. They’ll not be stopped by a lot more good guys with guns either. It’s not about mental illness, bloody video games, violent movies, or poverty, although how we handle all of these may fuel killing.

Can we get back to that original conversation and talk about the black heart of our violence? Can we explore it with that original feeling of empathy guiding us?

We can begin by accepting that we live in a culture of violence. There is a pervasive acceptance that violence can solve a problem, not merely that it can but that it is in fact often preferable to trying to work things out peacefully. From here, we might reasonably conclude that a better way to stop the killing would be to effectively educate people that violence exacerbates more problems than it will ever solve. Let us question the glory of war and encourage the practice of placing ourselves in the shoes of our opposites. We could teach conflict resolution and give people the skills to de-escalate situations that have turned violent or are in danger of doing so. We can build and nurture healthy communities to raise healthy, happy, loving children in. On a large enough scale, I believe we would prevent more killing by these methods. (This is the essence of the proposed Department of Peace.)

I want to have an even deeper discussion than that though. I want to get to a point where the impulse to violence against one another is thwarted altogether. We can begin by accepting that such violence is unnatural. The most terrifying thing to experience whether as aggressor or defender is human violence. As proof, I offer the amount of training it takes to convince a person to go to war and the number of people it mentally breaks in the process. Like nearly every animal on the planet, we humans avoid killing our own kind by nature.

From here, we might reasonably conclude that there is something unnatural about our culture that nullifies our peaceful nature, and that it is more prevalent in the United States. Military theory and history teach us that in order to inspire men (and women) to kill other men and women who are no different in reality from their own brothers, sisters, parents, and children is to dehumanize them until they are truly inhuman, nullifying the natural revulsion to killing people. So, what makes it so easy for us to dehumanize each other in the U.S.?

Oversimplified as it may be, my theory is that it’s basically our overdeveloped sense of separateness. The environment we callously and infamously regard as an external repository of resources for our insatiable consumption. The universe is other, and we have the scientific and religious research to prove it. This belief in the superiority of humanity above nature is not uniquely American, but we do seem to have taken it to a new level, a level where the individual is superior to society.

Our individuality is legendary and prideful. We operate as though we are in competition from birth until death to see who can end up at the right hand of Jesus, Yahweh, or Allah, and the only way we can measure our place in the competition is through the acquisition of wealth. We suffer from a bad case of materialism, deeming one another to be human resources, objects to be manipulated for our personal benefit.

My theory says however there is no competition. It’s all illusion. We are not separate; not from each other, not even from the environment. We have better measures than accumulated wealth or earning power to value ourselves, if that’s truly our concern. One of those measures could be awareness of how interconnected this universe and our shared experience of it really is.

I am not alone. You are not alone. We are not alone. We are human, and we are all one. Let’s stop the killing.

What’s your theory?

(this post appeared first on Huffington Post)

December 17, 2012December 17, 2012

Newtown Tragedy, and the Wages of American Cruelty

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I really don’t know what to say about the events in CT today, so close to where I grew up, at precisely the time my own children were in school. Tragic events like this are, in the end, inexplicable — but much like the 9/11 attacks, to simply describe what happened as a consequence of ‘evil’ is, frankly, a moral cop-out.

We live in a society that lays claim (sometimes a unique claim) to loving our children. But we don’t. Not really. We love our own, yes. But not other people’s children.

Our children will learn and practice love when we provide them with institutions, laws and communities that reflect and reinforce it. We are cruel to the children of the poor, the undocumented, and the incarcerated, more so than any other developed nation. We tolerate — even revel in — breathtaking levels of violence and inequality, giving our young people a sense that using other human beings as a means to our own ends is OK. Its Ok in our foreign policy. Its OK at work. And its OK in our relationships.

Silenced by a patriarchal culture that reproduces and rewards male aggression, and that devalues and denigrates humility, doubt, interdependence and vulnerability, we underfund the treatment of mental illness while living in a society that produces it in great quantities. We continue to allow the free flow and use of firearms, far beyond any reasonable definition of self-defense and constitutional protection, ensuring that our children — especially our poorest children — will grow up experiencing daily stress and insecurity, perpetuating almost everything I’ve described above.

I don’t know what lessons we’re supposed to draw from the events in CT today. But I do know that the cruel and bitter edge of American society, there at its very slave-owning birth as a kind of original sin, seems to have become even sharper in the last two decades. Cruelty is all of a piece, woven together, constricting all of us, even the most privileged and safe. But love is all of a piece, too. And it simply isn’t enough, in the end, for us to hoard it, household by household, like one more zero-sum game we’re trying to win. Once we commit to loving ALL of our children, the society we construct out of that love will finally make this country — finally — a source of great hope in the world.

For more of Mark Santow’s writings, click here.