Community and the Disposessed

“The gun culture permits a dispossessed public, sheared of economic and political power, to buy a firearm and revel in feelings of omnipotence. A gun reminds Americans that they are divine agents of purification, anointed by God and Western civilization to remake the world in their own image."  Chris Hedges, Truthdig.

Any time someone talks about the benefit of community there is a paid-for backlash that laughs at our attempts to do what is healthy for humanity and its environment.

How did this come to be?  Young children see the world through their own lives and observations, but somewhere along the way we dare not express our selves and feed back what we think is expected of us.

"Each culture tends to construct its worldview on a root metaphor of the universe, which in turn defines people’s relationship to nature and each other, ultimately leading to a set of values that directs how that culture behaves. It’s those culturally derived values that have shaped history." Jeremy Lent. Culture Shift.

But capitalist, fascist, or communist cultures are shaped to serve the prescribed ideology - a worship of kings and emperors and the power they wield, along with the court jester who represents the peasantry, the workers, the poor.

Most people do not want to gun down children in a school, nor do they want to stand up for their beliefs and risk being ridiculed as naive. Most people want to live in their private world known only by family and friends. But even this can leave them feeling lonely if they are unable to speak of who they are.

George Monbiot reports "A remarkable experiment (done in Fore, Somerset) suggests that emergency admissions to hospital can be reduced by tackling loneliness."  

There have been other studies that indicate we are healthier when we have community. The sad thing is that people who peddle the toxic machismo are drawn to a promise of omnipotence no matter how destructive that is.

How can we raise our children to deal with this? By encouraging them to honour their own talents rather than feel they must be at the top. By living as though kindness matters - because as I age I have seen that it does. That is the kind of vigilance asked of parents and citizens.

The End of Wisdom? Not yet.

Senator Clemente Pinckney Atlanta Daily

A young white man went into a church in Charlston last week, sat in a prayer meeting then shot the pastor and eight other people because he wanted to start a civil war. How will he benefit from his hate now he is in custody? Of course he won't benefit - he is just another little puppet filled with propaganda, some drugs and sent out to kill.

We could say the white supremacists who filled his damaged mind with hate are to blame. Or the NRA whose members may be sufficiently ignorant to spout beliefs like one of their Board Members who blamed Clemente Pinckney, the murdered pastor, for the deaths of his eight congregants because he didn't carry a gun. Because he voted against a law allowing gun owners to carry concealed weapons without permits?

A childhood friend saw the murderer the morning before the shooting and confessed the pair had never discussed race growing up, but recently heard him spout such racist beliefs as blacks taking over the world. It's an old trope but you don't need new ideas to tear society apart - the old slogans will work for those who are disaffected and who can't do their own research. Puppets that are poor and angry are available in the millions from Budapest to America. What they do know is that life is not fair. They have the scars to prove it.

Rick Perry, a Republican presidential candidate, said the fatal shooting was a drug-induced accident, perhaps meaning to say "incident" but either way this seems to launder the dirt that is racism.

Jon Stewart confessed he could not bring himself to do jokes on his show the day the killing happened. Clearly sickened by the frequency of these incidents.“I’m confident, though, that by acknowledging it, by staring into that and seeing it for what it is, we still won’t do jacksh*t ... Yeah. That’s us.”

Who will call it terrorism when the killing is done by an American who is white - not brown or black or an immigrant from another nation, Stewart asks.

There was an interesting interview on CBC's The Current, where a fellow pastor talked about Clemente Pinckney and how his church had a long history of working for justice.  Doesn't that sound like another assassination - an enlightened soul working for social change, for equality and peace and all those things that make people difficult to manipulate because they are not living in a whirlwind of chaos, fear and powerlessness? 

In the eulogy given by President Obama he said this: Reverend Pinckney embodied a politics that was neither mean, nor small. He conducted himself quietly, and kindly, and diligently. He encouraged progress not by pushing his ideas alone, but by seeking out your ideas, partnering with you to make things happen. He was full of empathy and fellow feeling, able to walk in somebody else’s shoes and see through their eyes. No wonder one of his senate colleagues remembered Senator Pinckney as “the most gentle of the 46 of us – the best of the 46 of us.”

When will we learn the pattern of oppression that is powered by hate? When will we stop rewarding the system that oppresses century after century?