My heart grows heavier each time I read about another school shooting. Another young gunman who goes into a school and starts shooting and ending lives too soon. Immediately the news media starts painting a picture of mental illness that stigmatizes everyone with a mental illness. (Studies show people with mental illness are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators.)
Right away, we look for someone to be right and someone to be wrong. We look for someone to blame, to be afraid of or to punish. We rarely see, as a community, that everyone including the shooter, is a victim. It is easier to see them as a psycho or a crazy man than a human being. This saddens me more and more each time. It is easier to use terms for people that remove their humanity, create enemy images and lead us to a place where people lose compassion and empathy for others. A place filled with violence we could avoid.
The past fews years of studying violence, nonviolence and peace have shown me a few things so clearly, Americans have little or no conflict management skills. We also have limited skills in our own emotions. Half of the time when we ask someone how they feel, the answer is not even an emotion. We say things like “I feel like…” or “I feel as if” or “I feel you…” and rarely are those words followed by a real emotion we own. Our vocabulary of emotions and words to describe our feelings is limited at best. When asked how we are feeling we say, “good” but “good” is not an emotion, so how exactly are we feeling it?
These unrecognized feelings, buried angers and repressed resentments are killing us as a society. Complimented by a steady stream of messages to our youth that violence is hip, cool and trendy. Violence and force mean power, they get you a higher score. This is a recipe for disaster. That disaster is playing itself out on school grounds. When will we wake up and try something new? Perhaps teach them as young as we can to have conflict management skills, feeling sills and need skills.
We would fare better if we learned ways of connecting with each other rather than putting each other on the defense. It is when we feel we need to prove things to defend ourselves that violence follows. Men feel they need to prove their manliness and end up in prisons for beating their wives. Young girls are trying to prove the strength to other girls by vicious rumors on myspace pages driving other girls to suicide.
I would love to see us stop seeing each other based on the notion of what each of us deserves. For those we love, we tell them what they deserve. We say “You are so good” which is a simple way of saying you deserve good things, you should be rewarded. On the other hand we have it embedded in our minds what those we see as bad deserve. We can move past this. We can learn better ways. We can live our lives without moral judgments like good, bad, right, or wrong.
We create enemy images of each other based on the labels we have given them. We call them right, wrong, good, bad, Godly, ungodly, holy, unholy or worthy or unworthy. One site I had left a comment on called me a reprobate. These are labels that predetermine what we deserve. Who are we to think we can determine what people deserve?
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