I like
Commondreams. It is a site where I can go to sometimes escape the conventional wisdom frameworks of both the mainstream media and the blogosphere when disgesting the news and political questions. Yesterday I was pleasantly surprised to find a couple of new angles of vision on two of the week's biggest stories:
Rosa Brooks on the Mark Foley scandal, and
Sarah Kohn on the Amish school shooting.
*Update:* I've done something horribly wrong here, and didn't even see it until engaged in the threads and having looked back on other diaries about the Amish response. I haven't really highlighted what it is about the response that I find so noteworthy and so potentially radical to contemporary US culture. The assumption upon reading my diary is that I find the foregiveness dimension of the Amish community's action and response to be the key elements to focus on in reading Kohn's essay.
This isn't it at all. More of this update appended to the end of the extended body...
I cringe whenever the topic of children is raised in our culture. Whether it is the media, a PTA meeting, a conversation with my co-workers, a bloggers convention, or a national agenda on education, it just seems to me impossible to have a discussion about children that isn't somehow hyperbolic, pedantic or trite (and sometimes all three) in this society. I find there is always so much excess baggage attached to any conversation regarding children that I fear where nearly every one will lead. They are physically painful to me for that very reason. Both the Foley scandal AND the school shootings stories are no exception. Each contains enough of the cultural ingredients to produce a quick and dirty cocktail of smug self-righteousness, moral indignation and political/emotional scapegoating to intoxicate the entire culture. So for the last few days, I've tried to avoid the topics. That doesn't leave me much to read on dKos, or much to listen to/watch on broadcast media.
Both Brooks and Kohn, however, put things into perspectives that I could not only handle, but also put to good use.
Brooks says just about everything that I think needs to be said about the Foley scandal in her LA Times column:
The Foley scandal makes for salacious reading, and it's always satisfying to see hypocrisy exposed for what it is. But neither the Foley page scandal nor the Republican leadership's energetic efforts to shove it under the carpet should come as a surprise. Though only the Foley scandal has generated substantial media coverage, the Republican-led Congress has a long record of child endangerment.
That's it folks: you think one predatory republican Congressman is bad for kids??? Then I suggest you never stop to consider the last 6 years of Republican policy-making. As Brooks points out, in the last five years the number of American children living in poverty has gone up 1.3 million and the number of American children without health insurance has also increased from 7.9 million to 8.3 million. (She doesn't even mention the Sudanese, Iraqi, Afghani, and Lebanese children harmed by Republican- written and -endorsed foreign policies.)
This, ladies and gentlemen, is a frame change I can get behind 100%. Drop the sex, drop the lying, drop the hypocrisy. Let's talk about the connections between real children's lives (and deaths) and Republican party policies. If we must discuss harm, danger and children, I want a bigger picture discussion than one the Republicans and my hopelessly shallow public culture seems to be able to provide.
At least, that's what I thought before I read Sarah Kohn's essay. "Our culture"--in my cynical worldview--"is too shallow to take moments of tragedy in order to reflect", so says my brain. This is, I'd argue, one of the cultural factors that's gotten us into the mess we are in with Iraq, one of the factors that has enabled the disasterous Bush Administration policies.
"Not so fast with your cynicism, agg", says Kohn, "let us, instead, learn from the Amish":
The gruesome depths of this crime are hard for any community to grasp, but certainly for the Amish -- who live such a secluded and peaceful life, removed even from the everyday depictions of violence on TV. When the Amish were suddenly pierced by violence, how did they respond?
The evening of the shooting, Amish neighbors from the Nickel Mines community gathered to process their grief with each other and mental health counselors. As of that evening, three little girls were dead. Eight were hospitalized in critical condition. (One more girl has died since.) According to reports by counselors who attended the grief session, the Amish family members grappled with a number of questions: Do we send our kids to school tomorrow? What if they want to sleep in our beds tonight, is that okay? But one question they asked might surprise us outsiders. What, they wondered, can we do to help the family of the shooter? Plans were already underway for a horse-and-buggy caravan to visit Charles Carl Roberts' family with offers of food and condolences. The Amish, it seems, don't automatically translate their grieving into revenge. Rather, they believe in redemption.
Kohn's observations actually gave me hope that there are people in the world who can be confronted with danger, with harm, with fear, and not exploit it. Even more than the story of the shooting itself, it is this response, this recognition, that brings me to tears.
There are other responses to crime besides punishment. There are other responses to harm than revenge. There are alternative forms of protection than the "mean world syndrome", tough as nails approach to crime, to national defense, even to terrorism which now dominates our cultural understanding. "Truth and reconcillation" is another form of both response to and protection from tragic events.
Kohn's analysis makes me wish we could have learned something from the Amish after 911, too.
*Extended Update:* Its not the forgiveness part. The forgiveness dimension is something I'm actually ambivalent about. For me, that's a concept that comes from religion, and I'm not a religious person; it is not an approach to the world that makes sense for me. In addition the forgiveness dimension echoes too much of the individual-centric, psychological approach that contemporary consumer, popular and even New Age culture tend to embrace. In fact, in reading the responses on the thread and engaging with a couple of the other diaries mentioned in the comments, I'm becoming wary of the fact that this is how we (as a culture) are processing that community's response. I'm starting to fear that even this response, that is quite genuinely steeped in admiration and respect is a conventionally cliched and potentially dangerous and so many of the other emotions and values that have been circulated around this story often prove to be in the long run. I'm now a bit hesitant that I've even expressed admiration because of the way that admiration is so easily swept up into the conventional modes of processing these things.
What I found and still find so remarkable about this essay and these responses on the part of the Amish community is so much more banal and secular than the almost far-too easy embrace of the Amish's "specialness" here. It is their very simple recognition of the perpetrator as a human being, someone who was a killer, but, like any human being, was also more than that. This, I believe is the even more valuable lesson we, as a culture, can learn from the Amish. Not forgiveness, so much as a refusal to make special the horridness. To separate out the bad of human life from the good and define it as "not human", for killing, crime, mental illness, even terrorism are all human activities. They are not unidimensional. Therefore, our responses to them should not be unidimensional either. The Amish, the plain people who purposely stand themselves outside our modern, supposedly more complex society understand, accept and act upon this. We don't. We need to be plain enough to see that complexity and accept it, only then can we really deal justly, effectively and humanly with those aspects of human life.
I'm grateful to the Amish for teaching me that. I'm grateful to those who have pointed out the lesson of the Amish to me. But I do NOT want to over-valorize or celebrate the Amish as exceptional, for in doing that, I would, in effect, negate the very lesson they've just taught me. By making what they do, see, and understand into something remarkable that actually helps to solidify as "natural" our own rather flawed, unidimensional understanding and responses. We take away the very beauty of the simple humanity the Amish have taught us, in making it remarkable to us. So just as Roberts was more than a killer, the Amish are more than saints. All of them, all of us are human beings, and there's nothing unidimensional about that, no matter how "plain" or "simple" we try to make it._