Tag: violence

Crossposted at Daily Kos and The Stars Hollow Gazette

Crossposted at Daily Kos and The Stars Hollow Gazette

copyright © 2011 Betsy L. Angert.  Empathy And Education; BeThink or  BeThink.org

Once again, Americans are up in arms or perchance, better armed and dangerous.  Only little more than a week into 2011, citizens have had to confront their fears, feelings, all at gunpoint.  It began on a calm, clear Saturday.  In a Safeway Store Tucson parking lot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords held one of her customary Congress on the Corner events.  It was January 8, 2011.  Friends and admirers from each political Party turned out.  Suddenly, cordial chatter turned icy cold. gunshots shattered the calm.  People were slaughtered.  Some survived.   However, as a nation, we were all wounded.

Retorts followed.  Seemingly, a culture was changed, or was it?  Just as has occurred, many times in the recent past, people quickly took sides.  Blame was ballied about.  Solutions were also presented.  Some argued for stricter gun control laws.  Others used the occasion to validate a need for less restrictive restraints on gun ownership.  Persons who held a position similar to the most prominent victim proposed a need to protect themselves.

This report was aired on the PBS News Hour last night.

AIR DATE: Jan. 14, 2011

Giffords’ Staff Keeps Office Open While Coping With Shooting’s Aftermath

SUMMARY

Members of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ staff have kept her office open, even as the Congresswoman fights to recover from a gunman’s attack. Tom Bearden reports from Tucson. Transcript

No definitive profile of the Arizona shooter, Jared Loughner, has yet been complied.  Nevertheless, what has been released thus far shows a profoundly troubled individual in desperate need of adequate help and treatment.  Yes, medication and therapy alone are not necessarily a silver bullet in all circumstances, but something should have been done well before Saturday.  From what I have already read, it is not as though warning signs had not been present for quite some time.  Every single time a tragedy along these lines takes place, we mourn, we try to make sense of the carnage, we seek to understand the reasons why a violent act took place, but we stop short of proposing solutions to keep them from reoccurring.      

Last week, a friend invited me out to dinner.  Also present was one of her friends, who happened to be hearing-impaired.  Throughout the whole of the evening, I found it very interesting to observe two forms of communication going on simultaneously—one that I heard and another that I saw visually by way of American Sign Language.  As is true with spoken language, there are instances in sign languages when illustrating a particular idea proves difficult or beyond the speaker’s level of expertise.  It is at this point that a creative communicator will often formulate his or her own signs to be understood.

Every action has a reaction, every destructive action has destructive reactions!

This report is just a part of the legacy we’ve left to an entire small Country of innocent people, as well as their neighboring countries, whose doctoral leader was under our thumb, right up till his hanging, as to the policies of that whole region we push in the names of Freedoms and Democracy!

As we move towards becoming a more empathetic society, certain regrettable characteristics must be directly addressed.  The eye for an eye sorts would have us believe that we are opting for weakness, regardless of our efforts to establish fairness and equality.  The paradoxical ferocity of our impulse for justice would seem to belie these fears, but they still remain in the minds of many.  Unless we honestly take stock of how each of us is negatively impacted by a noxious undercurrent of violence, we will only be treating secondary symptoms of a larger disease.  In the end, it doesn’t really matter how many degrees separate our complicity.        

In this country, a long tradition exists of individuals who have refused to perform a particular duty or task, citing their religious beliefs as justification.  The very definition of Civil Disobedience, of course, depends on the person, the situation, and how it is applied.  The latest incident has opened up a discussion which has never really subsided, only dipped underneath the radar from time to time.  In this circumstance, a Texas bus driver, who is also an ordained conservative Christian minister, claims that he was fired for not taking a women to Planned Parenthood.  His decision is in the same vein as those of pharmacists who, stating moral reasons, will not dispense the morning-after pill to women who request it.

The concept of masculinity as a societal construct has been consuming my thoughts recently.  Whether we’re talking about Mel Gibson’s brutal rants, Al Gore’s alleged sexual exploits, or any number of recent instances where men fail to act in a responsible fashion, I think it’s time men took a long hard look at ourselves.  American masculinity has never desired to truly examine itself in any detail.  Seemingly obsessed with looking and acting the part, men rarely do the hard work of self-reflection.  We are, in many instances, just as reactive and instantly defensive as the people we criticize.  Though we feign strength, more than a few have confused true empowerment with a cheap imitation–one which is about as deep as the average beer commercial or men’s magazine article.      

I am and have always been a vocal proponent of therapy, medication, and introspection.  All three in tandem have proven to be invaluable to my own understanding of self, as well as an effective treatment plan.  I am not the only person who has reaped great benefit from them, too.  Recent developments, however, have given me a greater understanding of the limitations of each of these methods of attaining mental health.  By this I mean that a friend recently pointed out once again my infamous difficulty in setting adequate boundaries for myself and alongside it, unintentionally exhausting people with my need to constantly reach out.