Monday, July 23, 2012

We are Powerless . . . or are we?



A tow boat floats offshore from the scene where a small plane crash landed on the beach of Palmetto Dunes along Hilton Head, S.C.
AP

It's been 4 days since I woke up to find my community in chaos.  MY life has been pretty normal.  I didn't know any of the victims.  I know only a few people who were in the theater that night, all of whom are safe and sound.  As far as I know at this point, my immediate circle is ok. 
But it's not ok.  The uproar has begun.  Debates over guns.  Mayor Bloomberg of NY calls for people to demand that gun control be debated in the upcoming elections.  (He has what to do with Aurora, Colorado exactly?  Go pimp your politics somewhere else, Mike.)  I read about plans to increase security at movie theaters.  I guess pretty soon we will have armed security guards posted in every public venue just in case someone decides to open fire.  Good for the economy, perhaps unemployment will go down as more and more people attend 6 weeks of training to handle deadly force situations and watch me eat my dinner in a restaurant, but not so good for my appetite. 

 The bottom line is that events like this shatter the illusion that we walk around the world knowing for sure we are safe.  We don't know we are safe.  Robert Gary Jones went out for a run one March morning in 2010, along a beach in Hilton Head, SC.  An airplane crash-landed on him.  A colleague of mine lost a family member to a lightning strike last year.  That person was out for a run too.  Regularly in our world, people out for some exercise are hit by cars, attacked by mountain lions or bears - or people.  In line with current reasoning, it would follow then that you shouldn't go out for a run, and then you'll be safe.  In fact, we shouldn't leave our homes . . . 
Dominique Thomas

In September, 2011, Dominique Thomas was sleeping on the couch in her living room when a car crashed through the front wall.  She died. 

We live in a society that doesn't know how to accept.  Anything.  We are a society founded on the idea that if you don't like something, CONTROL IT.  We didn't like the rules in England, so we made our own nation.  We build better houses, come up with more technology.  We fight to have control over our environment.  Emissions testing, Ozone alerts, pollution advisories.  We fight biology.  I tried to find a ballpark figure for the number of medications available on the market today.  It wasn't easy, so I'll settle for "A LOT."  We devote A LOT of our resources to fighting biology.  Have a cold?  Whatever you do, don't rest and drink fluids.  Take a couple of (insert favorite cold medicine here) and get to work.  Injury?  Forget RICE, tape it up, take an ibuprofen and keep on going (admittedly, I have to totally own this one).  I have recently heard two stories of parents who CUT A CHILD'S CAST OFF EARLY so they could participate in some sporting event.  And forget accepting death.  We fight it to the end.  Please, tell my kids that if I am 96 years old, have been sick for years, and have a stroke, let me go.  No life support.  Direct them to my copy of "Five Wishes."   

We are powerless in many ways, and we don't like it.  Instead of working to accept our powerlessness, and to develop skills for being able to live in the fragile uncertainty of life, we play tricks on our minds.  When faced with a tragedy like 9/11, like the Columbine Massacre, like the Aurora School Shooting, Virginia Tech, Hurricane Katrina, the collapse of the 1-35W bridge in Minnesota . . . the list is long . . . we don't want to believe it could happen to us.  We don't want to believe it could happen ever again, in fact, so we spend our mental energy figuring out a way to prevent it. 

Let's go back to biology.  This is an adaptive response.  Let's say our pal Joe Caveman and his crew decide to set up their little hunting village in a beautiful valley.  Looks like some nice real estate, and just around the bend is a small river where the deer come for water.  Easy pickings for Joe and the rest of the hunters.  Fat times to come!  Except the first time it rains, that babbling brook becomes a raging torrent and washes Joe and whoever survives from the village miles downstream.  It makes a lot of sense for Joe, in that instance, to spend some time thinking about the factors that created the tragedy.  Heck, it might take centuries for humans to decide that they are safe to build civilizations on the banks of rivers again, or on beaches, or on the sides of mountains.  By then, humans will have perfected the art of BLAME.  And it will be the engineer's fault when the levvy breaks, or the house on the mountainside gets taken out in a mudslide.  If we can point a finger and figure out whose fault it is, we can get mad at them.  Anger feels so much better than powerlessness.  We can wave our hands in the air and proclaim indignantly that if only so-and-so had or hadn't done such-and-such . . . well this wouldn't have happened. 

I agree completely that there is fault in this tragedy.  However, might I suggest that if ONE PERSON hadn't decided to go shoot people at a movie theater, we wouldn't be having this conversation?  That person is in court this morning.  If you HAVE to be mad at someone, be mad at him.  Then again, you might consider he is a victim too, and have some compassion.  I'm not sure how I feel about Gov. Hickenlooper refusing to speak his name during the vigil last night.  I would be interested in the thinking behind that, and I am currently going to give the guy the benefit of the doubt that perhaps since James Holmes hadn't been formerly charged yet, he didn't want to step into that minefield.  What bothers me is that he presented it in a way that indicated Holmes wasn't worthy of being mentioned by name.  At best, Hickenlooper manipulated a gullible public. 

When I first started as a therapist, I had a whole list of people I just KNEW I could NEVER work with.  Sex offenders, batterers, ANYONE who had EVER hurt a child . . . what I've learned over 15 years wading through the horrors of people's experiences is that you can be pretty sure that most of the time, the more egregious the offense, the more pain the offender is in.  I guarantee none of us would want to have been in this kids's head.  Of course, perhaps he managed to get himself firmly rooted in anger and hatred, which doesn't feel bad.  It feels powerful.  It's charged with adrenaline and endorphins, which are highly addictive, sought after by many in the form of alcohol and drugs. 

Over the next few weeks, if other tragedies are any example, we will see lots and lots of blame.  We will see anger, and outrage, and indignant proclamations about how to make the world right.  And we will see public figures show up, put in their two cents, smile for the camera, and go home to their million dollar lives. (by the way, public figures, PLEASE come up with something else besides "Shocked and Saddened."  Warner Bros. is saddened.  The President is "shocked and saddened"  Mitt Romney is "deeply saddened."  Cinemark is "saddened."  Even Queen Elizabeth is "saddened."  Get out a thesaurus, folks.  Saddened falls a little short of what we're experiencing here.)   President Obama was in Colorado visiting the injured.  Thanks, B.  Where will you be in 2 weeks when the victims are out of the hospital and the medical bills start coming in?  Camp David?  Martha's Vineyard?  Oh yeah - that's why we have lawsuits.  Wouldn't it be cool if Warner Brothers, or Christian Bale, or anyone on the planet out there who has way more money than they will ever use kicked in a couple of million for hospital bills?  Or helped the families whose incomes will suffer because their wage-earner is in the hospital?  Just out of the goodness of their hearts?  But that's a whole 'nother blog.

What we won't see is any focus on the real issue, which is the fact that we have become so disconnected as a society that someone can see PEOPLE as target practice.  Fish in a barrel. THAT is the real tragedy.  So you can look at this in 2 ways.  You can get mad and blame, and nothing will change.  Or, you can experience it, and think of ways you CAN make changes.  We ALL can.  Present company included.  And things might start to get better. 

Do me a favor?  Don't get angry.  Don't politicize, don't blame.  Sit in the powerlessness for a moment, and really feel it.  It's scary isn't it?  Then a) consciously recognize that fortunately, these things don't happen very often, so you don't have to be afraid every time you leave the house . . . or stay in the house . . .  b) ACCEPT that sometimes these things do happen.  Sometimes there is fault, sometimes there is not.  Most of the time, it's our own fault and we don't want to admit it.  c)  fight against that powerlessness by doing what you can.  Let me break it down a little more.  Be nice to people.  Willy-nilly.  Be understanding and give people the benefit of the doubt.  Someone was nasty to you at the grocery store?  Well, maybe they had a bad day.  A smile might help them more than a dirty look.  When you need to say something, be assertive, not aggressive.  Use good communications skills and have good boundaries

My best guess is that either this young man has been wounded in some way that drove him to need that wall of anger and hatred around him all the time or he's got a mental illness. People aren't born like this, in my opinion.  Either way, the answer is compassion, not outrage.  (and before you write me off as a bleeding heart, you will probably at some point hear me rant about the justice system not being tough enough, and how I believe people should have significant consequences for their actions, up to including losing their own lives)  Even in circumstances where I'd support some outrage (most of which has to do with politics) I do have to take a step back and admit that assertiveness and collective action is a better answer than outrage. 

Anger and outrage are the way we can avoid the reality of our powerlessness.  Do what you CAN.  What we can do to keep this from happening again is start building a community.  Aurora Mayor Steve Hogan has been quoted as follows:
"We’ve got to start that process; we can’t let this guy win. We have to start healing and we have to start creating a better Aurora today."  "We will take this experience and use it to strengthen our commitment to each other. We will reclaim our city in the name of goodness, kindness and compassion. Let our city be a place where our vulnerable our supported by our strength. We will care for the families and we will care for each other,"
Awesome, Steve.  Got a plan for that?  I'm all ears.

1 comment:

  1. Simply amazing...as always, your words hit the nail on the head. Much love and support and here's to not giving into the fear these people want us to have. I am also very curious to know how Aurora will rebuild and reclaim. I hope they can figure it out.

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