Who's gone mad?

Today I heard about a massacre at Ft. Hood in Texas. My first thought after processing the sense of suffering for all involved was that people will view this as an isolated act of violence by a sick or evil person. Much focus will be placed on the history and specifics of the alleged killer. I immediately thought that this is absolutely the wrong place to look for rhyme or reason for the killings. Of course the killer must be removed and dealt with BUT to focus on that person is to miss the much bigger truth. I noticed that Ft. Hood also has the distinction of being the military base with the largest number of suicides since the start of the Iraq war. Are the suicides and the killings today connected? I think so. What' more I think that my own general depression over many months and even years has some connection. The connection is that we are all related. The world is not a collection of individuals acting in isolation. It is one body acting out in a multitude of ways. Whenever I hear of situations like this killing I think of my own training in systems theory in marriage and family counseling. Many families have a black sheep. The person who gets in trouble and never seems to make good. In my family it is my brother. I recall work by systems therapists that showed that an acting out teenager, the identified patient when visiting a therapist, will stop acting out when the underlying family dynamic (often the dysfunction in the parents’ relationship) is addressed. This is a quality of complex systems. Action at one point will result in effect at a place in the system that may not appear at first glance to be logically connected. I say “at first glance” because, as with systems theory about economics or weather patterns, it is possible to see trends and relationships if the larger picture is seen.

Getting back to the killing in Texas, what if the killer is, like the acting out teenager, who was my poor brother in my own family, funnels the energy of the larger suffering, which is the pattern mirrored in the individual. It is that quality of self-similarity that complex systems display – the same pattern or structures at the large scale are evidenced at the smallest scale of the individual (and perhaps in systems within the individual, etc.).

In this country, I believe it is the fact that we don’t look at what we are pain and suffering we are creating in our own and others lives. We lie to ourselves in small and large ways about the reality of who we are. We are a disconnected suffering society. Yesterday I watch a video about community and wonder what the word “community” means. I spent several years reflecting on that word and how people throw it around so loosely. I haven’t thought as much about it in recent years partly, I think, because I realize that people won’t look at the core of what it means to be in community and what we have to “give up” of our privileged existence to own our relationship with each other, including those who we label our enemy or, at the very least, “the other.”

SO what to do? My current belief is that no one faces any of their suffering until they are good and ready to do so. If someone (or a group of people) is forced to face what they do not choose they will do whatever they can to escape it. It requires their decision, their motivation to change in order to open to the possibility.

I believe that we all hold a piece of the solution and we all hold the shadow, the ability to kill our fellow (many, animal, nature or whatever the “other” happens to be).

My own requirement is to recommit to my own healing, to be honest with myself and those whose lives I touch and to deepen my practice of quiet and reflection. For me it is to return to my meditation practice and to find ways to relate to others more in deep ways.

I also have to forgive myself for not “doing more” to help – a delusion that is deep within me that I have more individual power to effect change than I do have. The place I can definitely effect change is in the life of my daughter and my wife and the work I do no matter how small it appears. I can never know what effect any act has. I know these are not original thoughts but I also know that thoughts and actions focused on healing and truth must be repeated and amplified throughout the system. It is very much like neurobiology. Patterns that are sustained in the human brain are repeated over and over and appear in multiple locations within the brain. The more they are repeated the stronger they get and the more they become the norm. At the same time, those patterns that are not repeated and amplified will whither away and die. Use it or lose it. Unfortunately, hate and violence is being repeated and amplified and so is love and compassion. From a purely systemic perspective either one could gain strength and overwhelm the other. It is definitely not a linear process and baring ”divine intervention,” which is not my belief about divinity (i.e. the belief in a God external to the workings of the universe) then either can destroy the other. Yet, perhaps there is greater power in the truth since I just cannot fathom a universe in which hatred and disconnect has a greater strength than interrelationship, simply because the first is false.

So, I will leave my circuitous ramblings right there, not correcting any redundant thoughts or dangling thises or that’s.

And where do we go from here?