Violence

What are we afraid of?  We have the understanding of human behavior to dismiss the overwhelming majority of violence in America, and we instead talk all around the issue.

No thinking person believes we can eliminate all harm caused by the truly crazy.  Those who are hearing compelling sinister voices telling them to kill have been around maybe forever, and may have been burned as witches or banished to the wilds in more primitive cultures, and today they're often institutionalized.

Making weapons harder to acquire might have some nominal effect on the frequency of mass shootings.  But if we're serious about severely curtailing repeat offenses, it will take a generation of effort returning to a healthier culture.

HEALTHIER CULTURE.  That's a loaded term.  All my experience and exposure to life has made it clear that the more we are separated from the fundamental realities of life, the more adrift we are and the more likely we are to become ill in nihilistic ways.  People who are centered and grounded, by definition, do not "just want to watch the world burn."

We make life here in 21st Century America an artificially stressful endeavor, particularly in the teen years.  With the best of intentions, of course.  We want our children to grow up able to take on the world, so we put them into a factory-school and heap upon them the expectation that they conform and obey because we say so.  This disconnects them from themselves and each other.  It creates an ersatz compulsion without encouraging them to own their situation.  They are disconnected from the natural community where we are all working together toward a comprehensible common goal, like living a normal family life.  The several conceptual steps between "normal family life" and a typical school experience seem pretty clear for most adult minds, especially those in education who have, over the years, internalized the idea of literacy >> knowledge & skills >> occupation & breadwinning & parenting >> something called success.  For a teenager, they may be able to intellectually grasp the concept, but as studies from neuroscience and psychology make abundantly clear, the part of the brain that ties those trains of thoughts together and which ultimately connect it to our emotions and conscience to make us tie it to what we want for our future is the last and most complex part of the human brain to develop.  In fact, it is what separates us from other life forms on earth.  So what you have are many adolescents going through their middle school and high school years (those critical formative years) without a sense of who they are and what they're about as people.  Enough time and with enough intensity in that confusing and often angst-ridden time, varying greatly by individual depending on their personalities and life circumstances, and you create a pervasive and persistent metaphysical crisis.  If I were to brainstorm the list of factors that greatly increase that confusion and pain in the developmental years, based on 15 years of working with youth (including several years with homeless and street kids, and 10+ years teaching in a tough urban environment), some of the most common are broken homes, learning problems, disengaged parents, bullying and ridicule, schools not meeting student needs because of the focus on test scores and fear of getting into kids' lives, superficial relationships exacerbated by remote communication replacing face to face interaction, lack of free play time.

To go deeper into the insidious phenomenon of a disconnected education system, students are taught that if they are not engaged in school, they are bad.  They are supposed to try to learn what we're trying to teach them.  There are no alternatives to students who aren't interested in academic pursuits.  Yes, we all know that reading and basic arithmetic are important survival skills in modern culture, but punishing a low desire to learn it WHEN WE TELL YOU TO, or punishing a disability by failing students who aren't getting it on time neither improves their will to learn nor increases learning.  Instead it drives home the point that you are bad.  One natural reaction?  "I'm bad?  I'll show you bad."  We don't say "you're bad" verbatim.  We don't have to.  The system brands them bad by its very nature.  Your grade screams it loud and clear.  The body language of the teacher and the parent speak more lucidly than any words (whether agreeing or trying to mitigate the negativity of the grade and body language) is a mere whisper compared to the non-verbal message.  You are bad because you are not learning what we want you to learn when we want you to learn. Do we really expect children to trust us when we tell them they should learn this for their own good when we send the unmistakable message that if they don't, they're in trouble.  Many people fear clowns because their painted-on smiles contradict their real expressions making them viscerally creepy.  We, as a school, are doing the same thing when we say we love and respect you, but we contradict ourselves when we tie our approval to their ability to comply with our demands regardless of what they think and feel about their education.  There are ways to bring our message into coherence, but that's for another blog.

Most of us emerge a little dilapidated, but eventually come to terms sometime in the next two or three or four decades without some sort of deep break with reality.  But some of us don't and we kill ourselves quietly, or join a gang or hate-group, or expire in some act of defiance against the world, or end up in prison.  Or, as we're seeing more of, kill ourselves and take as many as we can with us before we end it.  Again, it's a combination of one's personality and their environment that leads our behavior, including the most severe forms of expression.

If making the weapons of mass destruction harder to get can prevent some of the carnage, then altering the environmental roots that cause the urge to do harm would go much further in curbing continued violence.  And though the cost would be way cheaper in fiscal terms, the changes we would have to make in how we respect and honor our children's lives are much harder to pay.  When we grew up with one way of thinking (about what it means to come through our sturmy und drangy wonderyears), looking critically at how that led to what we have today in this crisis of conscience in many of our youth is tough.  Even now, you readers cling to your sacred beliefs about [gun control, what you believe the founding fathers wanted for our country (even if it's way different than what I think -- like your opinion is so much better and more informed than mine even if you haven't spent years of trying to understand it from many different perspectives -- really understand it, I mean, NOT just continuing to pick up evidence for the opinion you got from your father or that you developed when you were 20 and so it must be right). In fact, it's that attitude that creates much of the surreal quality of modern life, that clinging to your beliefs without honestly (HONESTLY) studying how someone else could grow up, be intelligent, and come to a different conclusion, that DISCONNECTS from a grounded center which is a huge contributor to angst.

But, there's more.  Fixing this very fundamental quality of life would not only greatly reduce the industrial disease that makes people "go postal," but it would raise all our boats.  Who among us wouldn't like to have a little less stress and closer connection to our purpose and each other?  The same germ that causes Adam Lanza to lose it over time and do what he did causes you the occasional bout of road rage, as if someone else having to merge because they're unfamiliar with the local traffic person is worth letting your blood pressure rise.  The same low self-esteem that makes someone tie a gay person to their bumper and drag them to death makes you relive a moment earlier tonight when someone criticized your lipstick or beer belly. The only difference is in degree here.  The degree of environmental influence (positive and negative) and the degree of one's ability to rise above it (which, again, is a function of the interplay between an individual's personality and life experience).  If we were all a little less-whelmed by societal expectations and more comfortable with our own sense of how we ought to live our own lives, and more supportive of others and how they might want to live their lives (ESPECIALLY during the essential formative years!), we'd be living in a different place where there are a lot fewer people offing themselves and others.  A LOT fewer people with the idea that they should want to get a gun in the first place, and so a lot fewer guns.

Back to the point of the last paragraph.  It's a virtuous cycle.  (Opposite of a vicious cycle.)  If fewer people were overly stressed in their formative years, leading to fewer drop-outs and less antisocial behavior and crime, there would be less perceived need for people to arm themselves for protection and fewer guns.  Less crime, more confidence, less "What's this world coming to" mentality.  Pretty soon (or in 20 years), things are discernibly better, like New York's crime rate.  Maybe Chicago and Detroit and New Orleans can get there if people are willing to do the work to make it happen.  In any case, crime is down and who would know if you watch the news for the big stories.

Anyway, as cogent as this argument is, it begs the question: How would a country go about changing one of it's characteristics that derived naturally from the forces that be?  Are we smart and willful enough as a free society to do that?  We're not the Iron Curtain or Red Square, so how would a democracy go about influencing itself that there is another way of being that would be more productive on many levels, but would take a real and relatively rapid sea change in some of our fundamental beliefs?

Good question, but if you ask me, it starts with a reversal of public education policy, away from the monomaniacal reliance on a single domain of achievement metrics around common core academic standards, and toward a whole child, developmentally based, both literacy- and character-centric measurement of school success.  We have the ability, now, to really longitudinally measure those hard-to-determine domains of human behavior that we would like to see.  Healthy in body and mind and spirit/emotions throughout our lives.  Are we willing to go there and share the low-hanging fruit of multiple-choice test scores with the more difficult self-management?

I think it's time.