When we secure prisoners anywhere in Iraq or Afghanistan we hood them … so we did it to them.
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.
Tune out of the stupefying pap served up by the corporate media complex.
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
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.
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)
]]>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.
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