Too many dead, too little thought and not enough action

Too many innocent people are dying. Whether on the streets of Iraq, Afghanistan and Darfur, the schools and households of Canadians, or in the community of the Amish, such horror is intolerable and it’s time for us to do more than mourn.

We need to think carefully about this carnage, of the repressed anxiety, false bravado, and seething repressed rage of too many of our young people, and the imaginations of those increasingly taken over by violent representations. It’s time for all of us to reflect on causes and begin to work on a cure.

Of all the horror of the past seven weeks, the Dawson College tragedy seemed most inexplicable. We know that gun violence emanates not from a single cause and we will need a complex set of responses to begin to address it. While not social psychologists, as citizens we need to begin thinking critically and more probingly about our psychosocial environment. We might start with some brainstorming.

Some believe the problem is simply the availability of guns; that we allow possession of automatic weapons and handguns, the eradication of which would not only take away some of the means of such horror, but may well block the imaginations of those whose fantasy lives appear to require them.

Sure “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,� but guns in the hands of those who wish to kill are a powerful means and they play into a cold, often deeply fear-driven fantasy of absolute power.

Others believe that the horror of Iraq pervades the senses of even the most disengaged of us; that we all sense the death and suffering even if we aren’t tuned in to our TV sets. The gruesome persistent imagery of war can’t be good for the mental health of those who, at home, are at risk of acting out their worst desires. Not to mention what it’s doing to our children.

Some hold that too many men have been unable to make the shift into a world in which women are recognized as equal, where they exercise authority over men and enjoy increased standing in society; where women are free to determine the sorts of relationships they have with men; where men, that is, are no longer as much in control. The women’s movement has seen some of the 20th century’s best progress, but not nearly enough of us are helping those young men, for whom this presents a problem, to see why indeed it is not, and why repressed rage at a loss of power is almost always self-destructive.



Popular culture the culprit?

Perhaps it’s popular culture that is undermining our sense of mental well-being, skewing our human orientation to the world. From empty, soul-numbing television and gun-laced sexual representations to video games that seem to come from some other planet to an Internet that can be an easy vehicle for reinforcing pathology, it’s pretty clear we’re not providing the sorts of images, narratives, promise, locations and perspective necessary for human flourishing. And where we try so to provide, we often patronize angry young men and women whose problem is not at all that they’re dumb, thereby intensifying the threat they represent.

Perhaps we have become too eager to use shame as social discipline; perhaps we’ve lost the ability and desire to recognize other’s real suffering; perhaps parenting has become too ancillary and too disengaged a part of our lives.

Perhaps we have become too keen on the politics of identity, exaggerating our differences, serving those who wish to degrade others (often very subtly) as a way of thinking well of ourselves. Perhaps too many of us feel, as narcissists, the intense desire to be seen as special, or that self-respect is no longer grounded in honest talk, but in a seemingly friendly kind of lying that most of us see through, but repress.

Perhaps far too many of us are compelled to surrender their hopes, dreams and true potential in all-consuming jobs that are alienating and self-denying, that drain the life-blood, leaving the promise, at best, of more of the same. And perhaps too many of us are pursing status, power for its own sake, and money as if they were the keys to heaven.

Sure, not all of these may be on the right track, but it’s time for us to take some kind of thoughtful direction. It could be that small, thoughtful, engaged actions do make a difference.