Self
Examination
“Why do
we focus so intently on our problems? What draws us to them? Why are
they so attractive? They have the magnet power of love: somehow we
desire our problems; we are in love with them as much as we want to
get rid of them...Problems sustain us—maybe that's why they don't
go away. What would life be without them? Completely tranquilized and
loveless...There is a secret love hiding in each problem.”
James
Hillman (A Blue Fire)
Always, in the aftermath
of one of our mass killings, we soul search, we look for motive, for
what/who to blame, how to explain it in terms that give us a modicum
of comfort. We want simple answers—he was a terrorist, he was
jobless, homeless, mentally ill, angry, on and on. This latest
mass-murderer is, so far, defying any of the neat categories we
typically come up with, and we are loathe to look at the possibility
that he was simply a thrill seeker looking to try out all his
dangerous toys—an old, rich, white guy, with multiple properties
and lots of cash on hand, who just wanted to see what it would be
like to shoot human beings like ducks in an arcade.
What we don't want to do
is look at ourselves. America is in the midst of the most tumultuous
period I have seen in my seventy years—even having lived through
the Vietnam war and civil rights era. Here is what the late James
Hillman, Jungian Analyst, and author of many books on psychology and
the soul said of us: “Of course, a culture as manically and
massively materialistic as ours creates materialistic behavior in
those people who've been subjected to nothing but destruction of
imagination that this culture calls education, the destruction of
autonomy it calls work, and the destruction of activity it calls
entertainment.” We cannot separate out the homegrown American
who decides to take a massive load of weapons into a hotel room for
the express purpose of killing as many people as possible from the
rest of us, no matter how hard we try.
This is an opportunity
for us to come clean; to stop seeing ourselves as some sort of beacon
to the world, always and only clean, pure and wholesome, and to truly
look at who we are, and how we, ourselves, have created these
problems. If we do nothing else in the wake of so many dead, not just
in Las Vegas, Orlando, and Newtown, but in all our cities and towns
on a daily basis, and reevaluate our views about the relationship
between personal freedoms and public safety, we will have taken a
step in the right direction. If we could study the rest of the
developed world as to how they have responded to mass shootings and
automatic weapons, and for once, admit that perhaps those older, more
mature cultures know more that we do, we will have made progress. I
hope and pray that we do not miss this opportunity—again—to make
definitive change that will allow our children to sleep without fear,
go about their lives without looking over their shoulders, and
breathe deeply the air of freedom we so crave. There is a secret love
hiding in this problem. We have to look at ourselves, not everyone
else. Now's the time.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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