It’s time we face some uncomfortable truths. Last Friday, as the news poured in about Sandy Hook, I was teaching my peace studies class with my
high-schoolers. It’s a class which
investigates the roots of violence and war on personal, as well as
international levels (if that doesn’t sound important to you this week, I’ve
got some questions for you.) When I
heard that those gunned down were largely 1st graders, I lost
it. I’m a dad. All children are my children. And while those with the nation-wide
microphones begin clamoring for answers and causes, responses and policies,
oversimplifying the problem to gun control, or mental illness, I say we need to
look with broader eyes at our culture.
In America,
we have the blissful luxury of pretending we’re somehow different from the rest
of the world. Call it American
exceptionalism if you like, the notion that somehow we don’t have to follow the
same rules as everyone else; call it a sort of national Peter Pan Syndrome; or
perhaps you prefer Jean Baudrillard’s simulacra—the
idea that our simulations of reality have more meaning than reality itself. (Think
“reality TV”). Whatever we call it, it’s
time we face some uncomfortable truths.
TRUTH: Children die. Around the world, kids get gunned down every
day. They get killed during drone
attacks on wedding parties in Pakistan. They get hit by Israeli airstrikes taking out
Palestinian batteries that were set up in schools. They get forced at gunpoint to shoot family
members to make them child soldiers.
It’s brutal, it sucks, and most Americans, if they hear about these
things at all, might think “that’s brutal and it sucks,” but don’t take the
time to put themselves in the place of those parents, or get pictures of the
children’s faces to make it real. And if
we can ignore that reality, we will, because it’s brutal and it sucks.
TRUTH: Our culture is obsessed with violence. Consider cage matches, Call of Duty, snuff footage on the
internet, a century-long foreign policy that thinks it appropriate to bully
other countries with military force into doing what we want them to. We are a
nation of children with guns, given only the tool and driven by a foolish fuse
to use it for a powder-flash of power that ignores the hour of
consequence. People like this guy in Newtown, or that guy in
Aurora, or those boys at Columbine, or this kid over in Thurston (I won’t say
their names)—they’re just acting out a national drama. Feeling powerless, they’re trying to find
power in the only way our culture appears to respect. And until we can work on consciously evolving
our cultural definition of power, we’re stuck in what Gandhi called the “law of
the brute.”
TRUTH: It’s a male thing. The simple fact is that it’s not women who do
these things. Sure, we occasionally see
a Squeaky Fromm or a Nannie Doss, but overwhelmingly it’s men who respond to
conflict with brute force, who launch the missiles or pick up the assault
rifles and go for a shooting spree. As a
man, I refuse to believe that there’s something inherently violent about
testosterone, though I could be fooling myself. I do, however, think we’re facing an epic
crisis in masculinity. If we cannot figure
out, as men, how to evolve past that “meet you at the
flag pole after school with our patriot missiles,” mentality, then putting an armed security guard at the door of every school in America will not prevent the next Sandy Hook. The
problem is not a lack of adequate defenses.
It’s a lack of adequate consciousness.
I wish I had better answers—I wish I had any answers. Speaking as someone who has spent the last
ten years trying to create educational models that reduce violence and teach
kids peaceful ways of being, all I have are suggestions:
1) Pay
attention to how you speak to other people—especially your kids. Do you use your words to dominate, manipulate
or belittle?
2) Pay
attention to what you and your kids watch on TV or play on their Xboxes. There are clear relationships between violent
video games, saturation of violent images and a desensitization to violence in
life. What entertains us reveals a lot
about what’s going on inside of us.
3) Pay
attention to how we create culture.
About 75% of our State standards for teaching history in high school
highlight some war or another. Is this
because war really is the dominant force in history or because that’s what
we’re taught to focus on? Eisenhower
didn’t coin the term “military-industrial complex” to be cute.
You might notice that all three of these suggestions start
with paying attention. If human beings really are conscious
creatures, which I sometimes doubt when cynicism gets the better of me, then we
are responsible for living and developing consciously. That’s
why I work in education, which is not about teaching Stuff, but in helping kids
figure out how to ask the right questions.
And asking the right questions invariably requires us to face uncomfortable
truths.
