Violence: the Gift that Goes on Giving

Seattle, this very nice city in the beautiful scenic Northwest, is still reeling from a rampage murder last weekend, when a 28 year old man killed 6 young people relaxing after attending a rave party the night before. No one knew the man. He seemed innocuous, although some have mentioned he had a bad vibe. He was a big man, a quiet man. He attended the rave, was invited to the house party, came and smoked some dope, drank a bit, and then at 7 o'clock in the morning on this quiet, residential street went out to his truck, got an arsenal of weapons and came back into the house and started shooting. He was reported to have a smile of his face and to have said, "There's plenty for everyone," before killing himself as a police officer arrived on the scene.

The aftermath of this stupid and senseless killing has left people groping for something, anything to try to explain it, to make the insanity of it go away. The youngest two victims, girls, were fourteen and fifteen years old. Initial editorials in the local newspapers called for stricter regulation of teenage dance clubs, as if by controlling the whereabouts of your teenagers you could magically save them from ever crossing paths with a homicidal killer because homicial killers only come out after midnight, right? Duh! The rest of the local commentary focused on wanting to understand the motives of the killer, the frustration of ever being able to get a fix on that because of his suicide and the resigned and almost helpless collapse into one rhetorical response: there is evil in the world and there is nothing you can do about it.

Curiously, I happened to spend the evening before this happened watching the DVD of the movie A History of Violence. And the intersection in time of these two events, this rather powerful, though aprocryphal movie experience, and this real life tragedy, has left me thinking a lot about the American love affair with violence this week. The movie, incredibly well acted particularly by lead actor Viggo Mortenson, is about a quiet, meek husband and father in a mythical small town American, who overnight becomes a media hero when he kills two thugs who invade his diner and threaten everyone inside. Turns out that Tom, our hero, is not all he seems to be, for East Coast mafioso types turn up who insist they know him from the past and that he is ace-killer Joey Cusack. And little by little Tom's life falls apart. The gentle guy's disguise begins to crumble and finally we begin to see that in fact, he has been living a lie and no one, not even his wife, suspected the truth, of the past he had left behind. By the time the movie ends, at least nine more bodies have piled up and we see that Joey/Tom is in fact a superb killer. The guy has fabulous reflexes. But wait, why is he killing? What is he killing for? In defense of his family and his way of life? To survive? Or is it something else? Does it have something to do with the fact that maybe he really likes it, that maybe it gives him a rush and makes him feel really alive? At the end of the movie, once his shy, well-behaved son has also been bloodied in combat, Joey/Tom slinks back home and creeps back to the family dinner table. The movie ends enigmatically there. Will Tom/Joey be able to be a regular family man now that he has killed off all the bad guys from back in Philadelphia? The movie hints that his wife is more turned on to him sexually knowing that he is a real man who will kill to defend her. Maybe their marriage will have more pizzaz! Will this family stay together happily ever after? How much do you wanna bet?

We have some crazy ideas about violence in this society, really, really weird ideas. Like killing makes you strong. If you are feeling powerless, weak, trapped or pushed around by other people, grabbing a gun and threatening other people and shooting then is a massively powerful feeling, a real rush. Too bad it only lasts a brief time, as long as you have the gun in your hand. For as we have seen (see my first post on power vs. empowerment) true power has nothing to do with force and everything to do with effectiveness in the world. We also think that violence run amok, rampage killing is crazy, and can't be understood but that so-called crimes of passion can be understood. A crime of passion is something we can imagine ourselves doing if we were provoked strongly enough. But a rampage killing is something we would never do because we are good people. The bizarre thing is that in our society we train people to be killers in our military and we think that by putting very tight rules around who you are supposed to kill and when (e.g. only when your superior officer gives you an order to) that you can control and contain the impulse to kill that you have cultivated in your soldiers with your training. And then you expect them to turn it off once they have been bloodied in combat, perhaps wounded or lost beloved companions in battle, and then return home. That's weird!

Some of the absolute best thinking of violence that I have ever found has been done by Dr. James Gilligan, author of the book, Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes. Dr. Gilligan suggests that violence has meaning and that if you study the behavior and work with the perpetrator of that violence long enough, you will finally come to understand what that specific action was all about for that individual. Dr. Gilligan used to be the director of mental health services for the state prison system in the state of Massachusetts and is a professor at the medical school at Harvard. He knows what he's talking about. When I was volunteering at a state prison near Seattle and working with convicted murderers, I found his book an invaluable aid in connecting with the men in my group. While the shooter in last week's rampage killings in Seattle is dead, I think that we may be able to make some educated guesses, based on and derived from Dr. Gilligan's approach, that might be helpful in understanding how a man comes to undertake a massive crime like this.

What we do know about Kyle Huff is the following. I am going only by news accounts and the following is strictly conjecture based on my own studies of violence and experience in the mental health arena. But it is a place to start for exploration and inquiry into the subject of violence having meaning. This was a very tall man, about 6'5" who since he graduated from high school ten years before had found no more meaningful employment than making and delivering pizzas. He lived with his twin brother in an apartment in Seattle. Both were said to be quiet, teddy bear-like men who were very polite. News accounts have not mentioned romantic attachments, either gay or straight. In high school this man appears to have been on the fringes, wore long trench coats. The one thing he enjoyed, oddly, was pottery. This doesn't give us much to go on does it? So you have to do a lot of conjecture if you want to inquire into someone's inner life. My penchant for doing this may come from several places: the fact that I was an actress in an earlier life and had to invent a back story for my characters that made sense; the fact that I had a brooding, sometimes violent half brother growing up; and the fact that I have worked with violent men. I want to know, what goes on inside their heart and soul? I know about my own crazy thinking and thoughts and emotions. If my thoughts and emotions run such a wild roller coaster ride, what is going on inside the noggin of a guy who accumulates an arsenal, hangs out at a rave party smiling at people, then goes to his truck for weapons, spray paints "NOW" on the sidewalk and walks inside and starts shooting? I don't think that's meaningless.

Here's my hunch---and I could be wildly off base: I suspect that our shooter never fit in with his peers, never felt part of the group, felt like there was something wrong with him and yet longed, yearned to be part of the in-group. I hazard a guess that he felt apart because of his height and body size. He was a quiet guy, a guy who didn't have a facility for words and because of that, probably didn't find a friendly adult to connect to who could have drawn him out. He resorted to wearing strange clothes in high school. Maybe he thought he could find a peer group in Seattle and moved to the big city with high hopes of connecting, meeting a girl (or a guy?), finally fitting in and being happy. But as time went by, when he kept getting mediocre jobs and not getting anywhere he probably began to brood and nurse his resentments and try to explain to himself why life wasn't turning out how he thought it should. Now here's why strong, silent, polite guys are dangerous. No one knows what they are thinking. They don't talk to anyone. And if they collect guns, you have a potentially violent situation. If they visit internet sites that are full of hate so much the worse. The danger comes when the person stops blaming themselves for their problems and starts turning all that rage on other people. My guess is that what happened in Seattle is that Kyle Huff started visiting the rave party scene and projected his rage on these young people for appearing to be happy, for looking like they were having a good time, or else for looking like they were challenging society's mores successfully when he couldn't do it himself. They were the problem, not him. And so, he could get rid of all the internal self-hatred and despair and rage by one massive act of violence, and he could be powerful, oh so powerful when he did it. Once someone hooks into a plan like this, there is an addictive quality to it and no one can dislodge them from it, particularly if they are the kind of guy that never talks to anyone in the first place. Now, we may find out later that Kyle Huff had schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or some other reason may emerge that will explain this killing spree, but so far no such history has surfaced. So we are left with conjecture. And mine is as good as anyone else's at this point.

Here is what my analysis leaves me with. First we have seven families suffering sudden, incalculable grief and loss, that is the families of the six murder victims and then the Huff family who has to come to terms with the shame of why their son might have done such a horrendous thing. All of these families will be dealing with this for a long, long time to come. When families have had a loved one violently killed, they don't just get over it and move on. The recovery process is long and complex. Some people stay stuck in grief and suffer terrible health problems, their own lives possibly shortened by their grief. Some may get focused on vengeance and payback, a few taking on violence themselves. We tend to forget the costs to the families of perpetrators. But living with the shame of what your child, partner or sibling has done must be an extraordinarily difficult thing to move on from.

Which brings me back to the character Tom in the movie A History of Violence. Granted this movie is meant to be mythic. The story is set in a small-town America that has ceased to exist, with the hero Tom running a diner the likes of which we haven't seen since the forties and nary a McDonalds or Walmart in sight. This is not meant to be reality. Tom/Joey is a guy who is just good at killing people. He has tried to leave his past behind and it won't leave him behind. Once nine bodies are on the ground you are left to think, well, he's killed all those awful bad guys who were torturing him, now can't he go home and have his dinner?? Well, can't he? Uh---think about it. His son, who used to turn off bullies at school by disarming them with words, has now been bloodied in battle, not once but twice, once killing the man who was trying to murder his father. Tom/Joey has killed, and very effectively too, nine times!!! Now that he's a proven killer his wife can't help but think maybe he's really hot in bed. Do you really think he's done with it and he's going back to being Casper Milquetoast? I don't think so!!! Life doesn't work like that. I'm not sure what the filmmaker was trying to say with this movie. I don't know if he was trying to say that Tom could go back to a nice sweet life in small town America now that all the bad guys were dead but fat chance. For there is a terrific price to be paid for each act of violence. Just ask any veteran who has killed in war, that is the ones who will be honest enough to tell you.

Killing is not normal and it is not easy. But you can get used to it and you can turn off your heart and soul when you do it, especially if you do it a lot. And therein lies the problem for us and for Tom/Joey. When you turn off your heart and soul, you turn off your true connection to other human beings and then your ability to love and your ability to create and to stay in community dies. When community dies, that is our sense of being lovingly connected to each other, we are all left wide open to the kind of violence that occured last weekend in Seattle. Eventually more tragedy would strike in the house of Tom/Joey because there has to be a price for the kind of violence he committed. The problem with the Seattle shooter, at least in the way I have analyzed his possible motives, is that he may epitomize a kind of loneliness and disconnection that is endemic in our large, urban, increasingly globalized society. It is curious to me that with all our cell phones, text messaging, My Space, computers and super smart technogy, inside our ultra connected society are so many terribly lonely people, people so angry, and hurting that they are willing to kill to feel powerful, if even for only a few minutes. What an incredible tragedy. What an incredible waste.

Questions of Inquiry:
1. What would a society look like where we were so truly connected that we did not let the loners be loners? What would it be like if we were so committed to connection of everyone to the whole, that we saw it as a fundamental responsibility of all to connect with and check in on the weakest, most fragile members (the quiet ones!) and know how they were doing all the time?
2. What is the payoff, the positive side of the gun culture? What keeps it going? What feeds it? Why do we Americans so love our guns?
3. How does the movie and entertainment industry play into and keep this appetite for violence going? What would happen if the public started to be a demand for alternative ways of handling conflict being expressed on film and TV?

The Possibility of Ending War

I was watching a CNN show about the future as I exercised at the gym on the eliptical machine. The show featured several commentators talking about what the future will look like, the promises it holds for longer life for human beings, great advances in health and healing, the end of hunger, extraordinary leaps in technology. The only guest I recognized was Ray Kurzweil. I have read his new book, The Singularity is Near. When the moderator asked the question, "Will human beings still have war in the future?" I paid attention. I wanted to see if perhaps Kurzweil had evolved from his negative position on the future of warfare that he takes in the book. As I had thought, Kurzweil stuck to the same position that he takes in his book, and asserted that despite all the utopian and miraculous dreams of healing coming true in the future (the blind shall see, the crippled shall walk!), you guessed it folks, we will still have wars. But wait! In the future our wars are going to be conducted by robots and cyborgs and by all kinds of smart weaponry and our guys (the good guys) will have to hardly shed any blood at all! What was amazing to me was that the other guests on the show accepted Kurzweil's position as the guru of the future unblinkingly and didn't question this assumption. No one on the program called him on it! There was an unspoken assumption that the people who would be dumb enough to make war would be inferior to us technologically and of course, we would win because our weapons would be far superior to theirs. There is something very crazy going on here and I want to take this apart and look at it.

I came away from the program shaking my head in bafflement and amazement. Amazed at the degree of cynicism and resignation among human beings about armed warfare and the utter impossibility of ever giving it up. What's up with that? All anyone with half a brain has to do is look at the body count from armed conflicts in the twentieth century alone, to know that war is not a good thing for human beings on this planet. But that's the simple and facile answer. I'm not going there. I'm interested in inquiring into the much more difficult and complex question of why we human beings hold onto a behavior that causes us so much pain, grief, suffering and loss. But we can't help it! We're just born that way! Human beings are just naturally violent! That's the way we are and we have to accept it. Oh give me a break. The people who used to kill each other and eat each other for breakfast said the same thing and they don't do it anymore. We used to keep slaves too and we told ourselves that was natural and normal and we finally woke up and saw there was nothing natural about it. We have evolved as a species. We have decided to give up those forms of behaviors because they no longer serve us. Neither does war.

There is nothing obligatory about violence. Humans don't have to solve problems by hurting each other. That is just plain crazy. I've been working in the field of mental health and conflict resolution for the past twenty five years or so and I can tell you that it's just a story that people have made up to justify and excuse their behavior and keep it going. Just ask a couple of domestic violence perpetrators why they beat up on their wives and when they get honest with you they'll tell you: because they can and the law doesn't stop them. When people want to stop their violence and choose to stop it, they do. That's the wonder of having a will and intention. That kind of acting without thinking may have made sense in the earliest days of humankind when isolated communities were literally fighting for their survival from armed marauders. We're not there anymore. At this point in our evolution, our violence to each other is more a threat to our continued existence on this planet than anything else and if we want to survive here we have to get a handle on it. If we don't deal with it soon, we're not even going to be around to deal with global warming because this planet will be gone, gone, gone.

Human beings have a brain and we understand today how that brain works. We know how the mid-brain works and sets off cascades of emotion and we know how these cascades of emotion are triggered by thoughts that are usually triggered by stories and interpretations that we have about things that happened in our past. Someone says something that we don't like; they remind us of someone from our past and wham! we've decked the guy or at least stored up a grudge or a resentment for the future. It's totally possible for human beings to learn the skills of how to live with the kind of brain we have, to cooperate as it were, with being in a body that has storms of emotion and makes meaning in a language making brain. We can learn how to calm ourselves down. We can learn how to take the meaning out of stories that we made up about people. We can learn how to forgive people and live peacefully in family and in community. We don't have to go to war. I recently heard a story about a tribe in Africa (I don't know the tribe or the location, perhaps it's apocryphal), where anytime someone does something wrong in the tribe everthing stops and a ceremony is held. During this ceremony everyone tells the wrongdoer everything good he or she has ever done in their life. The ceremony continues for days and days until every one runs out of memories. Needless to say, they don't have many wrongdoers and they don't have these ceremonies very often. I don't know if this story is literally true or if is something that used to happen in the past. It's hard to imagine such a thing still happening in an Africa beset by globalization, poverty and AIDS. However, whether it is or isn't true, it presents an extraordinary model for what could be true, for a way of life that we could invent for being together based on making each other right rather than making each other wrong, based on inclusion, rather than on exclusion.

I used to volunteer in a maximum security prison with men who had committed murder and I have known men who have utterly transformed themselves into some of the most peaceful beings you will ever want to know, men who go to sleep at night with the picture of their victims by their bed. We can end intractable conflicts with people we thought we hated. It's entirely possible. We could stop violence on this planet if we chose to, if we got that it was in our self-interest to stop it. But we have not chosen to do that because our thinking about it is too confused and conflicted and we have never gotten completely straight about the price and the cost we are paying to keep it going. We would also have to get real and completely honest about how much we love war (come on, tell the truth now---it's glorious, isn't it?). I think the reason that human beings have never had a straight conversation about ending armed warfare on this planet is that we are terrified of what we might find if we honestly looked into it and told the truth about it. Underneath it all is, in the end, such a deep well of despair, that people just don't want to tap into it. To have such a conversation would tear us apart, bring up enormous pain, cause us to question how we spend huge, vast sums of money in our national budget and armaments industries, and tear people apart, having them question sacrifices that they or their loved ones have made. It might evoke or bring up deep and dark fears. It's a conversation we don't want to have. It's too terrifying. It's a conversation we ought to have.

Questions of Inquiry:
1. What's positive and wonderful about war? How do we fall in love with it and get hooked into going to war time and time again, even if we've sworn "never again"?
2. What's the personal cost you have paid in being present in or to violent conflict in your lifetime or from hearing about it from people you know or watching it on television/movies/etc?
3. What's the cost in grief, loss, anguish, injury and thirst for revenge among other people who have been violated or victims of violent conflict? How does the circle of violence repeat itself over and over and over again?
4. What is the financial cost of war? Why are we willing to support the miliatry/armaments/gun and weapons industries not just in the US but all over the world? What if all that money went to building things rather than tearing them down?

Understanding , Blaming and the Mysterious Power of Blind Spots

President Bush had one of his rare press conferences on Monday, March 21st and during it, something very interesting happened. Veteran journalist Helen Thomas asked the President something many Americans have been hungering to know the answer to: "Why did you really want to go to war? . . . What was your real reason?" You could hear the gasps in the room from the audaciousness of her question. What was even more audacious, for those willing to hear, is that he may have actually answered her question--to the best of his ability.

For the past three years people on the left have been screaming about how President Bush lied and led us into war. You can still see the bumber stickers everywhere about how he lied to us. There is a kind of magical thinking in the public discourse that if enough people criticize the man harshly enough then that somehow is going to get him to suddenly be honest and reveal the real reason he led us into war. It presupposes that there is a conscious lie and that he knows that he lied and with enough public pressure he will fess up, admit the lie and come clean. Sort of like a huge version of being called to the principal's office by the American public. But he hasn't come clean and I don't think he will ever do that because he doesn't believe that he has lied, within the commonly understood meaning of the word lie. He doesn't believe that he has done anything wrong and the more he is accused of doing something wrong, the more strenuously he defends himself and argues that he was doing something right. He was defending the country for gosh sakes!

If we truly wanted to understand our president's actions in leading us into an unpopular war, and if we wanted to find a peaceful, humane and dignified way to conclude that conflict, then I believe, a whole new way of understanding our President's actions as a human being is called for. Much political hay has been made of the fact that when President Bush was first notified of the attacks on the Twin Towers he kept right on reading a story about a goat to a class of first graders. Why didn't the Secret Service pull him out of there immediately? Why didn't he race out of the room and jump into action? Why, in photographs does he have that strange glazed look in his eyes as he reads to the children? I understand, I think, what was going on with him, because I have been there myself and it is amazing to me that no one else has pointed it out. I think the President was in a state of trauma, or as one might say, he was in shock. The unthinkable had just happened, something so horrific that the mind could not take it in. And the President was not the only one in shock. Apparently the people surrounding him, his advisers and the Secret Service were in shock also. No one was thinking straight. But the trauma was worst for him because he was and is Commander in Chief. He was supposed to know what to do and he did not know what to do. He was in that numb frozen state where you are in charge and you feel like you are swimming under water and you can't act because you are traumatized. This is not to defend or criticize the man. It is simply how the brain works when trauma happens. It's happened to me during other events in my life and it happened to lots of people on 9/11. Lots of people got caught with their pants down that day, including a lot of people who had been trained how to react in emergencies. We hope that presidents will know what to do in unthinkable emergencies, that they will rise to the occasion if the horrific happens and that they will act wisely and nobly. But boy are we unforgiving if they act like a human being and freeze. Don't forget that President Bush never served in the military. If he had he might have had some training under fire which might have prepared him for an emergency like 9/11. But he wasn't and he reacted like he reacted. My hunch is that September 11, 2001 was the single worst day of his life and that he still hasn't gotten over it. And I also think that no matter how much that the left and liberals may criticize and beat up on him for being an incompetent president, he probably on some level, has never forgiven himself for not having acted more quickly and more powerfully in those minutes and hours after he first heard about the attacks. I also bet that he never told anyone about this, with the possible exception of Laura Bush.

What happens to people who carry a secret, a self-humiliation that they don't forgive themselves for, that they don't work through and let go of? It goes underground, inside the human soul and develops into a strange attractor, a phenomenon that I will call a "blind spot". A blind spot is something that we do or say or need really badly that every one else can see about us but we can't see ourselves. It's like the guy who gets a divorce and tells everyone he's "can't stand the bitch" but everyone knows he's still in love with her. Or the secretary who writes great reports, yet complains about her job all the time, blames the boss and co-workers but who is terrified to admit to herself she really wants to chuck it all and be a novelist! Blind spots! What if President Bush was completely humiliated on 9/11 and publicly embarassed that he froze and didn't do a better job in those first few hours? What if he had an image in his mind of what a good, powerful, manly leader would do after an attack such as we suffered that day? What if he swore revenge to himself: "I'll get you back, if it kills me?" Is condemning him for his reaction, human as it was, helpful?

What if, when he answered Helen Thomas's question he was telling the truth? Maybe he was absolutely right. Maybe he didn't want to go to war because wanting is a conscious choice and he didn't consciously want to take young men and women to their deaths. So no, he didn't want to go to war in Iraq. But anyone who was paying close attention in the fall of 20o2 and early 2003 could feel that President Bush and his administration needed to go to war. It was palpable. It was inexorable. We were going to war come hell or high water because something, some need was driving us to war and it didn't matter that it wasn't rational. It didn't matter that the intelligence didn't fit. It didn't matter that there were no WMD. It didn't matter that there weren't any allies to speak of to work with us. None of that mattered. When you have an unconscious need or drive, one that hasn't been worked through, then that becomes more important than anything. And unfortunately for 2319 young Americans, that meant losing their lives, and for 17,000 Americans that meant wounds that may never heal and we are not even counting here the numberless lives lost, incomparable grief and anguish amoung the Iraqi people themselves. What an incredibly sad, sad state of affairs. And of course, you don't have to buy my explanation, for it is simply that, an explanation, an attempt to understand another human being's actions.

For human beings love to go to war and we seem to be addicted to the phenomenon. During the countdown to the Iraq war I was reading Chris Hedges' superb book, "War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning." I recommend it highly. If we are ever to eradicate the use of war to solve problems on this planet we are going to have to find other ways to deal with this human tendency to have blind spots, to not want to talk about perceived weaknesses and embarassments. We are going to have to find ways to develop the habit of self-reflection. And, you will probably have deduced, that among President Bush and his associates, the habit of self-reflection does not appear to be in abundant supply. How different the world would be if our world leaders were committed to their own growth and development and routinely took responsibility for their own errors and mistakes. Our present leaders are still stuck in the paradigm of you have to be tough and strong and you have to stay the course. There is a time and place for that certainly but there is also a need for humility and sometimes for vulnerability. I wish President Bush well. I truly do. I fear for his emotional and spiritual health once he leaves office. He does have the loving support of an extraordinary life partner in his wife Laura and he does appear to have a solid faith in God. He will need to draw on those sources in the future, as I am sure he is doing already.

Questions of Inquiry:
1. If we wanted to create a climate of openness and support, that encouraged our present world leaders to take such responsbility and facilitated their growth and development, how might we do that?

2. How can we build habits of self-reflection and learn to look at and see our own blind spots?

3. Once a march toward war starts, how can we encourage our media and our leaders to slow down and look for what else is going on, to look for underlying causes and contributing factors?

What's Wrong with Making People Wrong?

From the time we were little children we have been told that we were either bad or wrong: bad girl! bad boy! You're wrong! Or worse: you're stupid! Or worse: you're fat! Or worse: you can't tell your a____ from a hole in the ground, etc. etc. You catch my drift. When I was a little kid in the fifties you could tell the good guys from the bad guys in the western movies by their hats: good guys wore white hats; bad guys wore black hats. Things were so simple back then. Lots of us still want people to be divided up into easily discernible categories of the good guys, i.e. us and the bad guys, i. e. them. The world has grown a lot more complicated since then. But the tendency to categorize behavior as right or wrong, good or bad, and people too, as good or bad, with us or against us, the perpetrator or the victim, friend or enemy is still very much with us.

Once upon a time, the need to divide the world up into strangers and kinfolk and to immediately recognize the difference had a strategic survival value, and there are plenty of neighborhoods in Bahgdad where I probably wouldn't venture today. But the subject of this blog is peace, specifically new conversations for and about peace on this planet and that's what I want to address here. Not only do we humans have a tendency to label behaviors and other humans as good and bad, right and wrong; one might even say we are addicted or habituated to labeling each other that way. It's a very dangerous and chronic habit that I suggest, might put the survival of the whole human race at stake. Think about how casually the police on all those law and order shows refer to their clientele as the bad guys. They are doing something heroic. They are saving and protecting the rest of the law abiding community, the so-called good guys, from the ones who would hurt them. And yet, we all know, that police officers themselves cross over the line with alarming frequency into acts of brutality, racism and domestic violence. The scene in the movie Crash when the racist cop, played by Matt Dillon, degrades and humiliates the African American couple he pulls over on a pretext is almost impossible to watch. Why does that kind of thing happen and why does that scene ring so true?

We have such little patience, understanding, empathy or ability to forgive when our fellow human beings make errors, fail or fall. We are full of scorn and righteous judgment about what they could or should not have done or what we would have done in their shoes. Yet, if the truth be told, how often have we also failed, stumbled, erred, and then excoriated and punished ourselved endlessly for our own mistakes, perhaps for a lifetime? We humans are curiously intolerant creatures. It continues to amaze me how much suffering human beings do. When I look at the natural world, at the wind tossing the tree tops or ruffling the waters of Puget Sound, or watch my cat grooming himself, I realize that the natural world does not suffer in the way that human beings do. The trees, the clouds, the wind, cats, birds, earthworms, they all just are. They do not whine or complain or moan. Above all they do not make each other wrong. Of course not--because they do not have language.

What does all this have to do with peace and the possibility of creating a world that works for everyone? I suggest that a world of violence starts in language, in words that are intended to hurt, to divide, to wound the heart, to separate us and to disconnect. Is it helpful to label our struggle with terrorists a "war on terror?" I heard Zbigniew Brzeznewski speak on Charlie Rose's television talk show the other night and he had some very apt comments to make about President Bush's rhetoric about the war on terror and how this rhetoric is perceived in the rest of the world. No other country in the world, despite having suffered critical losses from terrorist attacks, considers itself to be on a "war footing" or that they are in a "state of war" with this nameless enemy. Brzeznewski was very articulate in explaining his concerns that this kind of rhetoric tended to further isolate the US from other countries and to increase the polarization with the Islamic world. He made a terrific amount of sense to me.

Our problem as a nation is that we don't know how to do two things at once: we don't know how to affirm that violent acts are unacceptable to us and at the same time take a stand that we want to understand why the terrorists would want to hurt us. We don't know how to take a moral approach that also provides room for an encounter with the "other", that is our "enemy", such that he or she can be engaged with, until such time that he/she becomes a former enemy or even a partner or friend. Most of us can barely put two such contradictory thoughts together at the same time. And yet, such things are possible and they do happen in our world with amazing frequency. The question is, how could they happen more frequently and more reliably? My hunch is that if we gave up the rhetoric of "you're bad", "you're wrong", "you're evil" and "we're good" we might find ways of talking that bring us together instead of drive us apart.

We humans, I have found in my 58 years on the planet, long for connection, for laughter and for the ability to make a contribution to each other. When we have done wrong, or made mistakes or failed, when for some reason we are removed or rejected from our communities, that rupture of connection is like death. If we are ever to make lasting peace on this planet, I believe we will have to find a way to bring people who have erred and fallen, back into the embrace of a caring community.

Questions of Inquiry:

1. Some wrongs are just too great to forgive. What should our response be to overwhelming wrong? What should we do when confronted with a person who was a perpetrator in that wrongdoing?

2. If a person has done a great wrong in the past and traveled a path of great transformation and is seeking redemption, or return to the community, what should our response be?

3. What are practices that one can take on to get over the habit of making people/things wrong?

Thinking about Power

As US planes head off into Operation Swarmer with Iraqi forces to carry an offensive against a pocket of insurgents, I find myself wondering about power. President Bush said today that first strikes or the ability to wage pre-emptive war remains one of our most important weapons in the War on Terror. You hurt us or you even threaten to hurt us and we'll hurt you so bad you won't even know what hit you. You know, the old shock and awe idea. If your enemy is all dead they can't threaten you anymore. Sadly, we have found out in the years since 9/11 that this is a tired idea and it doesn't seem to work in reality. The more we bomb and threaten, and the more we lock them up in places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, the more those danged terrorists just keep sprouting up like mushrooms! What's up with them anyway? What makes them stay at it? Why do they keep throwing those IED's, exploding themselves in suicide bombings, kidnapping, torturing and executing people, and for all we know, plotting mass attacks on the USA? Why don't they just get it? We're stronger than they are! Why don't they just give up?

In the present paradigm or level of thinking and discourse that most of us the US (including the US government) operate at, power equals force or might. Power means making people do what you want them to do. We give the police the power to use lethal force, if they have to, to stop dangerous criminals from hurting the rest of us. On the level of nations and politics, we give our governments the ability to mobilize armies and to make war to protect us from other nations or armies that would do us harm. Diplomacy was supposed to be the avenue for a more civilized way out of armed conflict; truly democratic and rational actors on the world stage could talk things out and figure out equitable solutions and avoid the insanity of war. However, as the twentieth century has given way to the twenty first and as the American love affair with technology has deepened, it seems that so too, our love for using violent, and increasingly sophisticated technological approaches to armed conlfict has grown exponentially and our ability to use diplomacy and other non-military approaches to conflict has diminished. As our weapons and their lethality have grown ever more sophisticated, so too, has our willingness to use those weapons, grown. One might even say that we have become less and less creative in our approaches to solving conflict with those who want to hurt us. Could it be that we are so used to our power or so enamored of it, that we literally cannot think of other possibilities to approach the current problem that threatens our world, the problem of terrorism?

Now there is a good reason for thinking that force is a good way to deal with dangerous people. That's because sometimes it works. It works fairly well for our police forces when they are dealing with isolated criminals who are threatening the community. And it worked, or seemed to be fairly effective, in the last good war, the effort to save Europe from the Nazis during WWII. But is it really effective? Let's go a little bit deeper here. I've worked on psychiatric units for over thirty five years and during that time have had to deal with many violent patients, men, women and children, who have lost control of themselves and who were threatening the safety of others. Whenever I was engaged in those events (we called them a show of force) the concerns were always two: how to keep the staff from getting hurt and how to subdue and control the patient so that he/she did not get hurt. In other words, although we were intervening in violence, sometimes with considerable force, the way we conducted ourselves was methodical, disciplined and dedicated to creating no further harm. The problem in the geo-political realm when you have violent people intent on causing harm to others, particularly to civilians, the rules seem to go out the window. In fact, part of the rules are to create harm and if someone gets hurt who was not supposed to be there, well, that's collateral damage. This is because in the realm of armed warfare the paradigm of power as force rules. There is a hidden hope or wish that if we kill enough of the enemy that they will get tired of the fight and give up. That may have worked in Nazi Germany but it is not working with the terrorists. These folks are playing by a different set of rules and our present paradigm is simply inadequate to the task. What we are ignoring or failing to truly understand is that every act of violence fuels a feeling of anger and yearning for revenge in the victim or the survivors. There is something in this whole terrorism scenario that we are simply not seeing and not seeing it is causing many young American men and women their lives, not to mention the countless innocent Iraqi men, women and children who are dying in their own country.

Power in the sense of force is someone telling or making you do something you don't want to do because they hold some kind of threat over you, to hurt you in some way or those you care about. Power like that works in the short run. If we are afraid for our lives and someone is pointing a gun at our heads we will probably do as the gunman asks. But we won't like it. Just recall the last time someone told you to do something you did not want to do or made you wrong or shamed you or criticized you or one of your family. You probably wanted to hit them or at least got defensive. In an emergency, if the building is burning down and I have to evacuate people, yes I will raise my voice and tell them to move it, move it! even if they don't like it but I will be doing it in the interest of saving their life. Other than that power as force or power over as it is sometimes called, is not ultimately very effective. People who have been made to do things they don't want to do, treated disrespectfully or shamed publicly get angry about it and nurse those grievances. People whose loved ones have been killed in wars and armed conflicts don't just get over it and move on. Those kinds of traumas last a lifetime. Whenever human beings experience what feels like an injustice to them, they remember it and it can plant the seeds for future violence.

What I am suggesting here is that the old way of thinking about power is no longer helpful or workable on our ever smaller and inter-connected planet. It may be time to look at a new version of or definition of power. That definition is: power is the ability to be effective in life. Power is the ability to say that we want a possibility or dream or vision in our life to appear and to be able to use our abilities to engage, excite, and partner with others so that our visions, hopes and dreams become reality---and I might add, to do that in ways that are loving and respectful of all human beings. Not many people in our world are really effective in that way. Nelson Mandela was. Gandhi was. Rosa Parks was. But not many people are really truly powerful in that way. They say no when other people would say yes, or say yes to a future that no one else yet dares to dream. They are able to create life the way they want it to be, the way they know it can be. All human beings yearn to love and be loved. All of us long to raise our families in safety with enough food and a roof over our heads. We all long to express ourselves fully and completely, each according to his/her gifts and talents. And we all feel a persistent urge to contribute to making the world a better place and/or to leave a legacy to those who come after us. When we are not effective in this way, we feel frustrated, powerless, trapped and resentful. When the sense of powerlessness is extreme, the person's resentment may build into blame, fault finding and projecting that onto an enemy who must be responsible for this suffering. At the most extreme ends of the spectrum of suffering, the most troubled people take action by committing acts of violence that seem to offer them a shortcut to feeling powerful. I am hurting terribly inside because I don't feel powerful. I am blocked. I cannot love, work or dream as I know I should or could. It's your fault. Aha! I know, I will kill you. I will make you or your loved ones hurt as I and my loved ones hurt. I will be all powerful as I make you hurt as I have hurt! Too bad the sense of power is so shortlived. But people keep taking this drug--over and over and over again. And terrorists aren't the only ones hooked on this drug.

If the US government wanted really wanted to end terrorism the smartest thing it could do would be to seek to empower all would-be terrorists. Find out how to make them feel an authentic sense of power over their own lives! Now wouldn't that be something. Hmm . . . . how would you do that? Well, you might begin by engaging with these young men and women, talking to them about their hopes and dreams and yearnings. How would you do that? Hmm . . . I dunno, maybe you'd have to, like--go to their countries and sit down and talk to them? What a novel idea! I read once about a discussion session the Vietnamese Buddhist priest and peacemaker Thich Nhat Hahn once had at one of his retreats at Plum Village in France. Someone asked him (I believe it was an Israeli) whether it was acceptable to retaliate with violence against suicide bombers. Thich Nhat Hahn's response was approximately the following: we have so over-practiced the arts of violence and war, committed so much effort to developing the technology of weapons and violence and we are so under-skilled and under-practiced in the ways and arts of peace.

Why is it that we would rather shoot a gun at a terrorist or someone we think might be a terrorist than to actually sit down and talk with people who might support them? Why is it easier to raise our voices and yell at our loved ones than listen to their grievances? Why do we nurture our own grievances and grudges rather than seek the routes of understanding and forgiveness. What way takes more courage? What are the roads we need to travel to authentic power? The way of true empowerment is not an easy one to walk but it is exhilarating and thrilling. My sense is that the world's present approach to handling violence and creating peace is unworkable, constrained and uncreative. We need a radically new approach.

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Creating a More Peaceful Planet

We live in a world with a tremendous amount of violence and suffering, much of it brought on by human beings themselves. And yet, with so much grief, loss and pain, caused by our own actions, it seems we human beings have not learned much in the past several thousand years. Yes, we have made amazing advances in technology and health care, gone to the moon and back, but we are still killing and murdering our fellow beings with a ferocity and cunning that is chilling. This is unacceptable to me. We could be having such a different experience of being alive. This planet is breathtaking in its beauty and human beings are capable of acts of grace, generosity and wonder. Why don't we love each other more and hurt each other less? Is it possible for human beings to create a more joyful planet and a world that works for everyone? What would it take for such a thing to happen? It would take creating new conversations, speaking new thoughts, creating new patterns of discourse, interrupting the given and accepted patterns of what we think has been and therefore must always be so on our planet.

My intention with this blog is to use inquiry to open up the subjects of peace, war, violence and terrorism and to ask questions that will take us into some difficult territory, seeking to explore and perhaps shed some light on things that keep us locked into habitual ways of behaving that don't serve us, don't serve the planet, don't serve life itself. My hope is that readers of this blog will join me in asking questions and seeking for new answers and new ways for all of us to be as we live on an increasingly crowded globe. I believe that the present paradigm we are living in as we try to deal with and respond to the pressing problems that terrorism, for example, presents to us, is just too small, too constrained and that if we are going to find workable, effective solutions to these challenges, we may well have to enlarge our present thinking or paradigm. But more of that as we go along.

Who I am: Yes, my name really is Joy and I have spent the better part of 58 years trying to live up to that name! And I can truthfully report that these days I am living into that name with some veracity. I recently retired after a 36 year career as a psychiatric/mental health nurse. During that time I worked with adults, teenagers and children on inpatient psychiatric units and also with chemically dependent patients and those with eating disorders. I also spent many years in psychotherapy dealing with and successfully recovering from my own long-term depression, eating disorder, and childhood sexual abuse. Throughout much of my adulthood I have been fascinated, if not obsessed with trying to understand human violence, the origins of war, hatred, racism, abuse and yes, terrorism. In addition to being a nurse, I've done a lot of volunteer work, and at one point volunteered at a state prison near Seattle, working with men who had committed murder, inquiring into why so few violent men take responsibility for their crimes. I've also studied communication and am currently the President of the Board of Directors of the Compassionate Listening Project. I have been on citizen diplomacy training delegations to Israel/Palestine twice. I did not speak lightly when I said I have been obsessed with understanding violence. However, there is one thing even stronger for me: I am intrigued with the possibility of transforming it. I do not believe that you can just tell people to stop doing those bad things or punishing them into submission. It doesn't work. You have to give them something wonderful to live for or to live into. This is why I am far more interested right now in creating a joyful planet, a planet that is full of fun and aliveness, with enough resources for everyone to have everything they need to live a wonderful life. In a world like that, who would need or want to blow themselves up? You will find me very upbeat, playful, transparent and eager to examine ideas and options. I have a strong spiritual practice rooted in a daily meditation practice of 27 years (non-dual spirituality). I think you will find me a friendly partner and co-conspirator if you are interested in creating new conversations that might take this planet of ours in a very different direction. Please join me in this adventure!