Today I wanted to think about rejoicing in Advent hope, of the coming of the light. I did not want to think again of a senseless slaughter of innocents. I did not want my imagination polluted with the terrible thoughts of little children too disfigured by violence to be identifiable. Sometimes circumstances encroach and dictate a different direction than planned. After my son called me Friday morning with the terrible news, I felt an awful psychological numbness. To be truthful, I had been feeling mildly depressed for most of the week. Talking things over with Jane, we agreed early Friday morning that my discomfort was likely due to cumulative vicarious trauma. Psychologists use the term to refer to the affect that long term caregivers feel after being repeatedly with those who have suffered life's traumas and abuses. Over the last several years we have cared for—more or less without a break—numbers of kids who have been victimized and abused. However "professional" you try to be, it gets to you. Empathy, so desperately needed for a compassionate world can have consequences for your mental and emotional health. There are strategies for dealing with vicarious trauma, the first being to recognize it for what it is. Then to find ways to deal with it. A spiritual practice, mindfulness, meditation, exercise, rest, connection to nature, a kind and understanding soul friend are all helpful to me. These strategies recharge the batteries to enable you to continue. It was these I needed Friday morning.
Then came news from Connecticut. It was just too much. I scanned Twitter to get the facts straight, as far as anyone knew them. But then I deliberately steered clear of the scandalous exploitation of suffering that passes for reporting. I skipped, too, the easy pre-packaged political solutions. I was numb. I had nothing to say. Nothing to add. I needed to be silent.
Two days on and the authorities have released more reliable information as the fog of confusion clears. Twenty little children and six adults were killed by a deranged young man with assault weapons.
A few thoughts:
a) I wonder if as a society we can suffer collectively from vicarious trauma. With mass communication technology we are spared nothing of the violence and traumas of the world on a daily basis. The symptoms of vicarious trauma are many, from managing emotions, to difficulty in making good decisions, to loss of meaning and hope. (If you are interested take a look, for example at the Headington Institute.)
b) For the fall semester I taught two classes "Philosophies of Nonviolence" and "The Ethics of Love"—seventy-five hours in class, and many more in tutorials, reading ten books together on love and nonviolence, trying to consider with students how we might understand our cultural obsession with violence and how we might work toward a more loving world. After this semester of concentrated work our firm conclusions were few, but with no exceptions all the students had moved in their understandings. All had been conscientized to the violence implicit in our culture. All had begun to think of loving ways forward.
c) The age old human love affair with violence has been fetishized in our mass media. This contemporary fetish of violence is a deep cultural malaise. (The number of violent acts the average American kid has watched on TV by age 18 is something like 200,000.) No doubt in the United States we need to have an intelligent and considered public conversation about guns. But changing gun laws—though a necessary middle axiom—will not get us to Martin Luther King's Beloved Community. Martin King knew, as we ought to know, that to end racism, poverty and violence requires a change in hearts and souls. Laws do not change hearts and souls. Laws define the acceptable limits of human behavior, with consequences for transgressors. To change a culture requires a shift of a different kind.
d) The difference between concentrated and diffuse harms is important to notice. Concentrated harms bring media attention. Twenty six people killed by a gunman in an elementary school brings out the world's media. Diffuse harms pass by with little comment. In the course of research for our forthcoming book Welcoming Strangers: (Re)Parenting Child Victims of Violence, Jane and I discovered that every year in the United States around 1,500 children are killed by their parents or caregivers. Each and every year. That violence solves anything (the myth of redemptive violence) is a narrative that needs to be challenged at all levels of society. But that is for another day.
Today in silence and solidarity we mourn with families in Newtown Connecticut. Love the ones given to you as gift—families, friends, neighbors and colleagues. Be kind to all, for all suffer.
Watch and wait for the coming of the light.
+Ab. Andy
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