We need to ask ourselves some seriously hard questions about where society as a whole is heading. We've seen that banning doesn't stop the killing. Banning is the least effective method we have to deal with this - and yet, it is the one method our society and governments choose to use over all the others available to us.
We need to eliminate banning objects as a first response (or even a last response, really - it just plain does not work) for any assumed threat.
What other methods do we have available?
There are lots to choose from. When you are in doubt about how to behave, behave caringly, with kindness.
I bet it will work far better for our individual and national survival than banishment, denial, and demands of worthiness.
The easiest change to make would be the commercials and ads aired on TV or placed in print media. Too many of them use themes of selfishness, revenge, violence, and sex to sell their product. I've been boycotting the products whose ads convey a negative social image for their product - particularly the ones that attack their competitors and resort to namecalling. Too many people emulate that behavior. I write to those companies and tell them why I'm not buying their products. It's a lot like the Rush Limbaugh boycott, only applied not just to Rush, but to every company that is hateful in their advertising.
But not all commercials and ads are that way. I encourage the ones that model sharing and helping, that demonstrate community bonds and kindness by buying their products. I'm really happy to see that some companies are already trending towards this method of social responsibility. I wish more would.
And guess what? We didn't have to create laws to force them to do this. That's the best kind of change, the ones that come because people see that it's needed.
Making advertising more socially acceptable isn't enough, though, because these images are coming from multiple sources. It's only a small step in the right direction.
News reporting of violence needs to be less sensationalistic and more factual. When did the news start being something that was mostly opinion with hardly any fact-checking? The claim that former President Lincoln created Facebook? Yeah, that's our typical reporting nowadays. Journalists need to take back their career field and make it respectable once again..
That brings us to punishment. Incarceration is failing dismally. The only people who should be in prisons are the ones we dare not allow to run free - those convicted of violent crimes who cannot or will not be rehabilitated: murderers, rapists, pedophiles. We have the technology to enforce other types of punishments on lesser criminals. Restitution should be the focus of punishment for those types of criminals, not just through community service, but through repaying the victims of their criminal act. Many crimes are crimes of passion or opportunity or desperation. We need to understand the passion, help the desperation, and redirect or teach the opportunist - and lock up only those who are a danger to society through their acts of willful violence.
There needs to be a more visible presence for small charities. I'm not talking the mega charities but the little ones like Modest Needs and Sandwich Saturdays and Handy Bags and DKos's own Community Fundraisers. These are family and small community driven charities - 100% of the effort goes directly to the people being helped; none of it is sidetracked into the advertising costs, employee wages and benefits, overhead expenses, or layers of governmental reporting that suck at the mega charities. I have nothing against the purposes for the mega-charities - they had good intentions until the government came along and added so many layers of expense to their operations that they can't help as many as they once did. I have only sympathy for their plight. I am also not supporting the big charities. I've donated more to the 4 small charities I named even though I get no tax deduction for it than to any big name charity ever. I don't earn enough to be able to declare those donations, so I'd rather spend my charity dollars where they reach more people and do more good.
TV series shows also need to be re-evaluated. A lot of the reality shows are being scripted to highlight people's worst behaviors: selfishness, revenge, bad-mouthing others, egotistical actions, and even bordering onto assaulting one another. And sitcoms? It's not funny, watching children smart-mouthing their parents and the other adults about them. It's not funny watching adults bumbling about like idiots, and having some child save the day with "child wisdom". It's not funny watching couples presumably married for decades acting like spoiled children and being shown by the newlyweds or their children or - worse, some neighbor child - how to resolve a simple marital issue.
There were a few TV shows that do demonstrate a social awareness without being preachy: Firefly, Dead Like Me, The Addams Family (the original TV series, not the remakes). I can't recall any recent ones, probably because I stopped watching TV.
We need more shows like those.
Early intervention for problems also needs to happen. When a child reports they are being bullied, the adults need to pay attention and see what can be done to reduce or eliminate the bullying, from finding out who is doing the bullying and why to protecting the bullied with adult supervision. Even when I was a child, bullies were always a part of our childhood landscape, but they were often under at least some control. There were limits to their power. We could count on escaping the bullies if we could reach an adult. How many children can make that claim today? And TV shows only highlight that children are smarter than adults, so what child will trust an adult?
Too many of our children are growing up today knowing they can't depend on anyone else to protect or help them when they most need it - and that makes them bitter timebombs just waiting for the opportunity to exact the revenge for which they shouldn't have to feel a need. Our children need to know that they can depend upon an adult - any adult, every adult - to help them when they are faced with a problem beyond their ability to cope. Bullies need to know they have limits, limits that will be enforced. Bullies also need to know there is help available for them. They don't have to do the bigger monkey act.
Perhaps the biggest and most effective change we need to make is to listen. Listen to our neighbors, friends, family. We need to pay attention to how they feel, what's happening to them, and work to take care of one another long before anyone has a chance to dwell so long on a hurt that they build the pain or humiliation or terror so far out of proportion the only remedy they can imagine involves violence and death. We need to hear about the good things, the sad things, the happy, and the hurtful. We need to listen with sympathy, understanding, and love. We all need to know that even if we are in the minority, we aren't alone. Others care about us. And we care about them. Maybe all we do is gather in the front yard before or after mowing to chat with our neighbors about small things. Maybe we have a barbecue or a kaffee klatch with family, friends, neighbors.
We communicate with one another - and that means listening to one another. We check up on our family and friends and neighbors. When something changes, we know it and can ask about it, can pay attention and listen and if necessary, offer help before whatever problem is facing them escalates into violence.
When someone can die in their home, and no one knows for a week or more - that's a sad reflection on society. When someone speaks up about a hurt and is ignored for years and the hurt and pain build up until no other alternative is seen except violence - that's a dangerous reflection of a society. It is by paying attention to one another, by caring, and by acting on those caring impulses that we can shift society from the dangerous edge.
What do we do when a crime or a disaster happens now? We blame the victim, shun the family as if crime and bad luck were contagious, and we isolate ourselves one from the other. I've been watching how many preachers and public figures say faith must be an absolute. There is no room for doubt, for questioning. When disaster strikes someone, it must be because they doubted. They deserved the damage they suffer for that doubt. Those who suffer are guilty and must be made to suffer more. Cast stones at the suffering so their bad luck doesn't contaminate others. And those who are different are evil. Don't just shun them, drive them out, imprison them, bind them with laws, deny them healthcare, food, shelter. Make them suffer - that's the word from the pulpits. When did that happen?
That's not how it should be. We should question. We should doubt. It is in the questions and the doubts and the exploration for answers that we grow connected to others in the world. The isolation that comes from absolute certainty allows no room for love, no room for care, no room for anyone else but oneself.
Life is not a contagious disease. Quarantine doesn't keep out the vagaries of life.
Absolute certainty is a trap.
Those of us who doubt and question and seek, when we encounter a person of absolute certainty, it isn't envy we feel. It's pity.
The life of a person of absolute certainty is filled with things, not people. They measure love by financial success, expensive objects, luxury - and those without those visible markers of wealth must not be worthy of love. People who are different can't offer input to the person of utter certainty, because that information must be tainted, suspect.
And the reverse is also true - a person of utter certainty can't share with others because that would dilute their purity, their success and happiness. That is why when the American people, most of whom are doubters who care and share with one another, were told by the president of the US - a person of utter certainty - that the best thing we could do in the shattered days after 9/11 was to buy more things and present a face of certainty and prosperity, however hollow it was, we were bewildered. That wasn't a proper, socially positive response to disaster. It was certainly not the response to the previous major bombings that happened in America, from the reaction of the bombing of Pearl Harbor to the bombing of the Murrah Building. The only thing to change between Murrah and 9/11 was that we now had a person of utter certainty as president of the United States. His administration told us that the appearance of prosperity would bring the real prosperity behind it. Not one of us with doubts could figure out how buying things could help our soldiers or our country. We still can't. That's not a community building and bonding activity. It is what you tell someone when you want them to go away or when you don't believe they can do anything of importance, because they are not worthy.
People want to be worthy and many admire the absolute certainty the Republicans are pushing - the wealth, the things they have. The media, for some reason, has been captivated by the glitz and bling and so favor those who project the absolute certainty viewpoint, the "prosperity ministry" that declares if God loves you, you will be rich. That's why the surface of America is one of indifference and even hostility to those who are less fortunate - because that misfortune could contaminate absolute certainty, crack the facade and allow doubt to enter. When the person of utter certainty begins to doubt, their whole life falls apart, for there is no substance to it. They have to destroy what is different so they can regain their absolute certainty once more.
When society as a whole doesn't model caring for one another; when the hurt and the damaged seek and are refused validation and help because they aren't "worthy", they will extract what they think they need in any way they can.
Look at the Gulf Coast hurricanes Rita and Katrina - many of the absolute certainty people refused to send aid or offer any sort of help because those who were caught in the hurricanes deserved their fate - they weren't "worthy".
Nothing pisses me off more than some privileged prick deciding someone in desperate need isn't worthy of help.
If the Gulf Coast hurricanes were a test of the American people's compassion, then we saw the division lines clearly, those who held doubts and compassion, they were the ones who reached out. They helped. And those who were absolutely certain they were the "good people" and their way was the One True Right and Only Way, they did - nothing.
I take that back. They heaped scorn and blame upon the victims, calling them criminals, loafers, looters, lazy scumbags not worthy of help or decent human caring. They publicly and vociferously withheld help.
How many other tests of compassion and caring have we, as a society, failed? The boys at Columbine. The drifter who killed the schoolgirl in Colorado. The man in Pennsylvania. Even the terrorists. Each of them shed clues about their needs, and we ignored them. These are a mixed bag of people: those who were absolutely certain, and the desperate who couldn't get the help they needed. Each of them decided to make a statement in blood - a plea we are still ignoring because the truth of the matter hurts.
We don't want to fix the problem; we want them to go away.
And if we can make the problem invisible by banning the objects used, like guns and liquids and shoes, and imposing ever greater restrictions upon the innocent and formerly free, so be it. Just so long as we don't have to face any ugly truths and take any difficult action, as a society, we are content. So long as we have our wealth, we are beloved of our Gods, and need offer no compassion, no understanding, no community feelings to anyone else. Each of us, insulated by our things and our entertainments, can block out the cries of our families and neighbors because we have what we need, and those others? They don't deserve it because they don't already have it. They aren't worthy.
Pah!
We can't go through life with blinders blocking out unsavory sights, a pomander strapped under our nose to block out bad smells, and earphones blocking any undesirable noises with our hands tightly bound to our sides and our feet shuffling through a deep rut. At some point, we will get jostled, or knocked down, or trip - and then we will see, hear, feel what is happening.
A lot of violence can be averted simply by listening, by paying attention and being aware of others and by having at least one friend you can talk to.
Banning objects, placing restrictions, imposing curfews, conducting strip searches, making people walk through metal detectors - these things don't work. We've seen they don't work. Yet we keep using these ineffective methods.
Isn't it time we looked to other methods, tried new ones?
I offer the methods of kindness, of understanding, of reaching out when the problem is small, so it never grows out of control and ugly. We need to set standards and let others know what our expectations are. We need to band together to enforce them through peer pressure, time-outs, shunning, banishment, punishment - not punitive punishment, but restitutionary punishment. When someone breaks something, they need to apologize for it, have the apology be accepted, and then repair, replace, or in some other way offer compensation for the damage done.
And when someone is in need, we as a society, need to stop blaming the needy for their circumstances and show some empathy. We need to reach out and give a helping hand - a hand up that will allow the needy to see their way out of their morass and into a place where they can help themselves and then reach back to help others who are where they once were. The current method of holding people under water until they drown of their need isn't helping anyone.
Pay attention to the world around you. Meet rudeness with civility. Help where you can - and it doesn't have to be expensive or major. Pick up something someone dropped for them, hold a door open without blocking the doorway, look people in the eye and smile. It's the small acts of kindness and caring that will lead to bigger ones.
Too long have we lived under selfishness and "Me first" attitudes and look where it's gotten us.
Let's try something completely different.