Cats, Dominant Thoughts, Channeling Peace

In my last blog, I questioned our collective focus on violence, our mutual obsession with what threatens us, what causes us fear. But our collaborative, cultural dis-ease—which permeates the air we breathe, which we teach to our children and our children’s children—is, I realized again today, only part of our problem. At least it’s only part of my problem. My own focus in my own daily life is a large slice of my inner unrest as well.

I live w/ a bunch of rescue cats, who all showed up at my front door and who’ve made my daily life constant chaos and frustration. I, w/ 3 other good-hearted individuals, also feed strays in a community in the South where I constantly confront not only a general attitude of apathy toward animals, but a determined resistance to animal welfare. There’s also a culturally common disregard for the environment and a love for gas-guzzling machinery that makes my heart hurt. And there’s an all-to-prevalent, constant, concerted, deliberate resistance to new information or change. I don’t mean the kind of resistance to change we all have w/in us; I mean a hard core distrust if not hatred of new facts or transformation, of anyone who brings those new facts or seeks even slight transformation. I constantly wallow in such frustrations, seeing no end, no solution, no possibility for change. But that’s not all that plagues me.

I regularly read Facebook posts that glory in what’s wrong w/ everyone else and in the world. Admittedly, I find my own soul energized by the negativity: encouraged by the negativity of those who share my views; righteously inflamed by those with whom I disagree. Further, when colleagues lament about work “issues,” I’m all too eager to jump on the complain train. And while some of the issues are legitimate and troubling, I’m too eager to stew in them…and pass them on to others. Plus, like so many people in this country, especially as a 60+ single, childless woman fearing the future as an aging American in today’s economic climate, I let my fear depress and paralyze me.

Despite occasional efforts to see the cup half full in the midst of my daily obligations and difficulties, I naturally tilt toward the half-empty perspective. I wallow on all that’s wrong w/ me or my life, all that’s rotten or missing, swimming face first in a pool of “stinkin’ thinkin.’”

I’m also a Christian, but the state of the world plus my own stinkin’ thinkin,’ have wreaked havoc on my faith, on my belief that there’s an eternally big God who’s simultaneously involved personally in each of our lives. It’s hard to see ANY evidence of the active presence of a loving, powerful God: either in the world, or in the people who say they know him. I don’t expect God to solve my problems and woes for me, but some light, an occasional nudge in the right direction, would be helpful. Yet it seems all my prayers are met w/ silence. The cup not only appears half empty, it’s bone dry. Which leads me to today.

Just getting over a bad, energy-draining cold, I began today cranky, coughy, and touchy; the smallest irritant set me off. Cleaning litter boxes, overwhelmed by relentless cat dander, wiping up one too many hairballs and feeling utterly alone, lost, and purposeless in the world, with litter scoop in hand, I prayed. From the depths of my soul erupted my common prayer these days: “H E L P, damnit! PLEASE…HELP. I have NO where else to turn.”

I sat there awhile—expecting the usual response from the God who tenaciously never lets go of me, but who also seems to never stand in the breach for me…silence. However, when I sat up, facing me at my desk were the words of Soren Kierkegaard: Our lives always express the results of our dominant thoughts. No magic: I had posted those words there years ago, but I never saw them anymore they’d been there so long.

I saw ‘em this morning. MY life always expresses the results of my dominant thoughts. My life always expresses the results of my dominant thoughts. What I focus on, I become. Always. I knew the words were God’s response. The idea behind the words obviously wasn’t new to me; the timing of my re-seeing the words was impeccable.

It’s so easy to get weighed down in our daily lives as individuals by very real concerns, threats, demands pulling us in multiple directions, pressure upon pressure until this toxic web becomes all we see…our dominant focus…and our lives and well-being pay the price. Especially if you’re a person like myself who tends to take herself too seriously…at least the parts of herself she doesn’t like, as if those parts are the full essence of who she is.

Later today, in my crankiness, I made a snide comment on a friend’s Facebook posting, to which one of her other FB friends took some offense. When I read his counter-snide comment, along w/ my friend’s defense of my comment (only feeling remotely guilty that I’d put her in that position), I was ready for a word war. Clearly I hadn’t yet entirely embraced the answer to my prayer, b/c my thinking was still flowing in the wrong direction. I tried 3 times to post a reaction, wavering between passive-aggressive and outright nasty retorts. Somehow, thankfully, I was able to pull myself away from submitting any post. My first post was unkind and self-righteously judgmental enough and quite unnecessary; the second one would’ve been just ugly, by design.

How can I live in peace if I’m overwhelmed by the heaviness I make of my daily life? If peace doesn’t dwell within me as a main ingredient in my “dominant thoughts,” how can I channel any peace to those around me, to my community, to the world?

The ONLY person on this planet over whom I have ANY control is myself. And I can have NO positive, healing, restorative, peace-building influence on anyone if I am overcome by the inner turmoil and darkness of my own dominant thoughts. As long as I have cats, the hairballs, cat dander, and chaos will continue. As long as I live in a society and work in a statewide institution, there’ll be people, policies, practices with whom/which I disagree, or that require challenge or change. As long as I interact—online, in print, or face-to-face—with real, fabulous, flawed human beings, I’ll get my feathers ruffled. Only together can we transform our world. But only I can bring peace within my own soul—and thoughts…well, I with the occasional subtle nudges from God.

What We Focus On...Who We Become

"The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer."

— D.H. Lawrence

The death toll from small arms “dwarfs that of all other weapons systems — and in most years greatly exceeds the toll of the atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

— Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, 2000

“A lot of gun owners indulge in childish fantasies about the ways in which weapons protect life. That’s hardly surprising when as an icon in American culture a gun’s power is invested in the finger on the trigger, not the kinetic force of metal ripping apart flesh.”

— Paul Woodward (“Bearing Witness to Gun Violence in America”)

“If it is not acceptable to risk the lives of the three billion inhabitants of the earth in order to protect ourselves from surprise attack, then how many people would we be willing to risk?  I believe that both the United States and NATO would reluctantly be willing to envisage the possibility of one or two hundred million people…dying from the immediate effects, even if one does not include deferred long-term effects due to radiation, if an all-out thermonuclear war results from a failure of Type I Deterrence.”

— Herman Kahn (“supergenius” cold war nuclear strategist)

[i.e. A lot of U.S. Defense policy makers indulge in deadly fantasies about the ways in which nuclear weapons protect life…]

“That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

D. H. Lawrence, above, seems a bit harsh in his description of the American character.  Then I turn on the news.  Then I wonder if his observation has a serious element of truth, especially in these days of deadly drone warfare and fiery verbal defenses of firearms.  Ralph Waldo Emerson has an eloquent way of stating the adage that what we focus on is what we become.  Are we focusing so much on guns and gun violence because it’s happening far too much on a daily basis, and chronically on a mass scale?  Do “we” have a hard, killer’s soul??  OR are we reaping the consequences of our own obsessions, our own idols of worship?

We’re not alone of course.  Just this week North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test, while fears continue regarding Iran’s nuclear goals and capabilities.  And over the past several years North Korea has been testing the range of its long-range missiles, thankfully without much success…yet.  Perhaps we should dust out the old fallout shelters and renew the “Duck and Cover” educational programs to prepare us for an atomic attack.  When I was growing up in Salt Lake City, Utah, my mom set up a potential bomb shelter in our basement; I tended to see it more as a giant tomb, knowing even as a child that the basement would not protect us from deadly radiation…it was a step up, however, from the ridiculous air raid drills at school where we’d crawl under our desks. 

I recommend the film Testament about life after a nuclear blast.  It takes place in a small Northern California town.  You see no bombs or blasts; you simply see the realities of coping w/ mere survival let alone radiation poisoning.  Australian writer Neville Shute’s novel, and the film version, On the Beach, offers a global look at the aftermath of nuclear war. 

Meanwhile, debates about the best solution to gun violence continue, as do gun deaths, with too many children involved.  Just last week I heard two stories that simply stunned me.  In the first, a three year-old little boy was recently killed while playing with his seen year-old sister, when they came across a pink gun at home and thought it was a toy; he was shot in the head.  In the second, two 5^th grade boys were arrested for planning a murder of a classmate; they were found at school with a knife—the intended murder weapon—and a semiautomatic, in case anyone tried to stop them.  They didn’t like the way the little girl had been treating them.  Their plan was foiled by a 4^th grader who saw the weapons on the school bus and reported them as soon as he got to school.  According to the NRA, these “bad guys with a gun” simply needed to be stopped by “good guys with a gun”; I guess now we not only need to arm teachers at school, we need to arm students on the way to school…of course only the “good guy” students. (too sarcastic?)

Wayne LaPierre is right however when he says we worship at the altar of violent entertainment; we do amuse ourselves far too often by humiliating others and with violence: in our jokes, in our music, on our screens, in our games, in our sports.  Again, we are not alone; the rest of the world watches much the same programs, surfs the same Web, plays the same video games, listens to much the same music. 

What sets us apart in the U.S.?  It is our virtual obsession with, if not worship of explosive fire arms.  I am currently reading the book, America and Its Guns: A Theological Expose, by retired Presbyterian minister, James Atwood, who has also been involved with the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence for over 30 years.  He calls America’s obsession with guns outright idolatry, and he quotes NRA leadership to help him make his point.  “You would get a far better understanding of the NRA if you were approaching us as one of the great religions of the world” (former NRA executive, Warren Cassidy; 19-20).  Sure enough, an NRA enthusiast also cites Cassidy’s words to promote the 2009 NRA annual meeting.  Tying Cassidy’s words into meeting attendance, Sebastian” on a pro-gun rights Website enthuses: “The more you get to know of the issue, the more you think the metaphor actually fits.  One aspect of NRA [sic] that takes on a religious nature is the Annual Meeting…We’re expecting 50,000 of the faithful to make the pilgrimage, something every NRA member should do at least once in their life.” 

We become what we worship.  We become what we focus upon.  Atwood holds nothing back:  “Part of America’s national creed is that the tools of violence, be they large [as in nuclear arms]…or small, as in handguns and assault weapons, will keep us safe, secure and ‘free’” (24).  But are we safer, Atwood asks, with all our armaments and personal arsenals?  Do we really feel more secure (25)?  Or are we just unwilling to take our altars of violence down and instead seek to live in peace with our God and with each other?

OK, so y’all have your homework: 

• Watch Testament
• Read &/or watch On the Beach (I did both; last movie scene's chilling!)
• Oh, and also, there’s this really cool video, if you can still find it:  Kurt Sayenga’s Explosive Situations which does this most excellent job of connecting the explosive power of bombs with firearms.  I got my copy from the Discovery Channel about 12 years ago.  It’s worth it if you can get it!
• Consider what it is you think we focus on and worship, then reflect upon what YOU focus on and worship.
• Then let’s work together to find more peace-building obsessions.

"Good Guys" and "Bad Guys" with Guns, Oh My!

On Friday, December 21st, in his position as CEO and Executive Vice President of the National Rifle Association, Wayne LaPierre offered the NRA's official response to the December 14th shooting massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary. In explaining why the NRA would not be supporting any federal gun safety policies or legislation--not even universal background checks for all gun purchases, which LaPierre in the past had publically endorsed (May 1999, U.S. Senate Testimony)--LaPierre insisted that "the only thing that will stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

In the first print edition for February 2013 of the college newspaper where I teach, several students were asked to discuss gun safety regulations as a means of decreasing if not preventing gun violence.  Sure enough, there was LaPierre's argument, verbatim, as one student's answer that gun regulation was not the solution:  "the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy...blah blah blah."  It was a hollow, thoughtless, lazy argument when it came out of LaPierre's mouth last December, and it's still an incredibly poor defense of guns, particularly for guns as the best solution to gun violence.  And clearly others are blindly internalizing LaPierre's claim without any interrogation of what his claim really means.

As a rhetoric scholar and a teacher of non-fiction writing, I hear LaPierre's words and waver between laughing out loud and annoyance at such simplistic, unexamined thinking.  I mean seriously: what, for goodness sake, is a "good guy"?  what, exactly, is a "bad guy"?  at what point does a "good guy" become a "bad guy"?  Can a "good guy" do "bad" things?  Can a "bad guy" do good?  And who gets to decide: is there a "good guy/bad guy" committee?  Does it go to the people for a vote?  Is there a once-for-all good guy/bad guy taxonomy?  If not, what happens when my definition of "good guy" differs from your understanding?  which of us is the good guy?  And btw, "good guy"??  What about women...especially women with guns? 

Such a universal, mutually-exclusive moral category for complex, regularly flawed, multi-faceted,--and gendered-- human beings is a fiction.  And to base an argument supporting the need for a deadly technology on such a fiction is unproductive at best, downright ignorant at worst.  Further, where is the objective, quantitative evidence for the claim that good guys with guns are the most effective, if not the only, antidote for bad guys with guns? C'mon y'all: surely we can do better than this!

Meanwhile, we humans are killing each other in significant numbers on a daily basis with an explosive, deadly technology that is not as morally neutral as gun rights proponents want everyone to believe ("guns don't kill people; people kill people"--nevermind that guns and ammunition are designed for just one purpose: to kill).  I said it last week, and I'm sticking with it this week:  we need to refuse superficial, unexamined, absolute arguments; we need to ask ourselves the difficult questions and meet those questions with appropriate answers that we work out together, even though arriving at those answers is difficult and occurs over time.  

If we don't, we'll continue to be devastated by ugly if not deadly problems, passing them on to succeeding generations.   Peace is simple, y'all, but it's certainly not easy.  So let's mind our p's and q's and get busy confronting our difficult issues in more productive ways. 

Guns in America: A Matter of Interpretation?

We're now about six weeks post-Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting in which 20 six and seven year-olds were murdered plus six school employees.  Since then the ongoing debate about guns in the U.S. has been revived and is thriving, as are gun sales, in the wake of fears about government confiscation of guns in the name of “gun control” or “gun safety.”  Dueling identities for guns and gun owners--and even U.S. culture--have been constructed in the process, especially a seemingly defining national character as a “gun culture.” 

Just today, on the Peace and Justice Studies listserv in which I participate, someone posted a link to a Politico article in which former President Clinton discusses a pro-gun culture.  This culture, from Clinton’s perspective wields real power in U.S. politics and policymaking.  According to Clinton, speaking to Democratic party donors, “the issue of guns has a special emotional resonance in many rural states” and refusing to acknowledge that reality “is counterproductive” to any gun regulation effort.  He warns gun safety regulations advocates that even with polls showing broad public agreement with their efforts, “it’s not the public support that matters—it’s how strongly people feel about the issue.”  I’ll post a link to Byron Tau’s Politico report below.

In her 1986 book, The Creation of Patriarchy, Gerda Lerner, writing about gender identity constructions, that “the matrix of any idea is reality—people cannot conceive of something they have not themselves experienced or at least that others have before them experienced…images, metaphors, myths all have expression in forms which are ‘prefigured’ through past experience.  In periods of change, people reinterpret these symbols in new ways, which then lead to new combinations and new insights” (10).  While she’s speaking specifically of gender identity, I’ve been thinking a lot about her words in the context of gun identity constructions in the U.S. virtually every time a new episode of mass gun violence is reported on the news.

• What images, metaphors, and myths about U.S. guns and gun owners have been dispersed out into the historical, social, cultural atmosphere from which our own if not the world’s perceptions of “America” arise?  
• What are the realities in which such strong American pro-gun narratives and identity constructions were prefigured?
• How did the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights gain virtually sacred status, seemingly surpassing in priority these days the First Amendment right to free speech—including apparently, the right to question or protest the divine authority given to guns in America by the most aggressively vocal pro-gun advocates?  
• How has the idea of “common sense” gun safety legislation and regulation become equated with treasonous betrayal of “the” American ideal and Constitution, worthy of threats of violent rebellion if not all-out “revolutionary war”? 

The U.S. seems to have become a culture constrained by fear: fear of some threatening other invading our homes, schools, and even places of worship, not to mention crossing our borders to inflict harm to us as a nation; fear of a tyrannical government coming to confiscate all the guns of “law-abiding citizens.”  Clearly some of our fear is warranted since we can’t seem to escape a plague of violence and death perpetrated on a daily basis.  But we also seem to rely heavily on rather hypothetical fear to justify our need, if not right, to build personal arsenals of the most powerful firearms and rounds of the most explosive ammunition.   What is the idea-reality matrix that has brought us to this place of constant fear?

 How do we move beyond this fear-filled place?  How do we begin to re-identify and reinterpret the symbols defining our priorities, needs, and individual and national identities in truly life-preserving and life-affirming ways?  How do “we the people” create “new combinations and new insights” for ourselves and for the U.S. that allow us to meet and deal with conflict in less deadly and more productive ways?  I guess here would be as good as any place to brainstorm and build new possibilities, yes?

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/bill-clinton-to-democrats-dont-trivialize-gun-culture-86443.html