By Carolyn Baker
Asking the proper question is the central act of transformation.
~Clarissa Pinkola Estes~
This has not been a good year for Colorado. My home state, like so many
others in America, has been besieged by drought and scorching heat,
culminating last month in the High Park fire west of Ft. Collins which
burned well over 200 square miles and this month, the Waldo Canyon fire
in Colorado Springs which destroyed well over 350 homes in an area of 5
square miles. From the perspective of other states, Colorado had burned
up, and needless to say, its tourism industry took a huge, perhaps
fatal, body blow. Throughout the state one can still sense an aura of
terror that one’s town or neighborhood might be next, and many people
have preventively packed their cars with valuables just in case a fire
might break out and they would be forced to evacuate. And as Coloradans
were choking on residual smoke from the fires, Governor John
Hickenlooper came forth to reassure the nation and the state that only a
small portion of the state had been affected by the fires and that
Colorado was still a beautiful vacation venue.
Fortunately, earlier this month,Colorado experienced nearly three days
of substantial rains, which despite the mudslides and erosion they
produced, were a welcome respite from the crackling vegetation and
brutal heat.
Then in the wee hours of Friday, July 20, James Holmes of Denver
allegedly walked into a movie theater in Aurora and opened fire on the
audience—a mass execution that to date has left 12 dead and 71 people
wounded. Many of the wounded are in critical condition, thus increasing
the possibility that the death toll may rise. Once again, Governor
Hickenlooper came forth to do damage control and declare that Aurora is a
safe city and that it will “come back stronger than ever.”
Meanwhile, CNN and what suddenly became 24-hour local news reports
repeatedly mentioned the Virginia Tech massacre of 2007 and the Tucson
massacre of 2011 in which Gerald Loughner opened fire at a shopping mall
where Congresswoman Gabriel Giffords was speaking, killing 6 people and
injuring 14. Immediately, such conversations deteriorated into debates
about gun control—as if gun control were the core issue of this madness.
As a nation with massive unemployment and underemployment, its citizens
battered by drought, foreclosures, bankruptcies, lack of health
insurance, rotting infrastructure, and ghastly student loan debt looks
on, we sense that the conversation will not venture into deeper waters
anytime soon.
Coloradois in profound trauma, and so is a nation unraveling. In such a
milieu, people rarely ask the proper questions, but as my
fellow-Coloradan, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes reminds us, “Asking the
proper question is the central act of transformation.”
The Proper Question(s)
Perhaps the most obvious one is: What is causing people, particularly
young males of college age, who are or have been students, to pick up
guns and perform mass executions of people they don’t even know? I do
not pretend to hold all of the answers to this question, but a few
issues cry out for our attention.
The most fundamental reality pertaining to youth in their twenties in
this nation is that they have virtually no future. Some are already asking if
the Aurora massacre is related to the youth unemployment crisis. My
generation and those before mine have handed the millennials an enormous
load of garbage. Even if they are fortunate enough to have no student
loan debt, the perennial maxim of their parents’ generation, “If you
don’t get a college degree, you’ll end up flipping burgers” rings in
their ears—as they stand there, with or without college degrees, yes,
flipping burgers. Or in the case of the many homeless college students in this country, flipping burgers could seem like a dramatic advance in the direction of upward mobility.
But certainly, young people in their twenties are not the only ones
enraged. The entire culture is enraged, but impetuous, troubled young
men are often driven to act out their rage in ways that the masses
quietly bury or medicate.
Yet a more accurate and penetrating question must be asked: What in
the paradigm of industrial civilization causes not only such grizzly
violence of epic and epidemic proportions, but what in that paradigm
causes us to so blatantly and blithely ignore the global
warming-generated drought that is shriveling at least one third of this
country? Are the two issues related?
To begin to address these questions, we must notice a few very basic assumptions inherent in the paradigm. Some of these are:
- We are separated from the earth and each other.
- Humans are superior to the earth community.
- The earth is here for our use and exploitation.
- There’s not enough of earth’s resources, so we must wage war for them.
- Because we are superior to all other beings on earth, we can always perfect a new technology that will assure the infinite growth model and the perpetuation of our profligate lifestyle.
I invite the reader to contemplate each of these, along with their
ramifications. What happens when humans live by these maxims? What is
the ultimate outcome? Who do they become, physically, emotionally, and
spiritually?
An Indigenous Perspective
In the cosmology of the Dagara Tribe
of West Africa, the element of fire is one of five essential elements
which allow the continuation of life on earth. Both people and cultures
can be characterized by fire which is an element that connects with the
ancestors. Experienced in proper proportion with the other elements,
water, nature, earth, and mineral, fire can be a gentle flame that keeps
the community warmly aware of its relationship with the ancestors.
However, when fire dominates a person or a culture, both can become
warlike. Fire propels people and cultures into action, but too much fire
makes for frantic, impatient, behavior and people obsessed with
progress and moving forward. In fact, too much fire can catapult people
and cultures headlong into destruction.
And what is the antidote to fire? Naturally, water. Fire people and
cultures must be tempered by the waters of grief. Water calms and slows
things down. A culture obsessed with infinite growth is propelled by
fire and needs to decrease its velocity, bathe in its own tears, and
gain perspective about what really matters. Water opens the heart and
allows emotion to come forth and be honored.
Thus, in these tragic collective scenarios of terrorism and mass
execution, the most helpful intervention is not endless rhetoric about
how the community will “come back stronger than ever” or how it will
“put this behind us” and “get back to normal.” Rather, there must be a
profound recognition of the horror and a willingness to stop “dead in
one’s tracks” as the saying goes, and forsake the pretence that such
carnage can ever be put behind anyone or that there is a normal to
return to. In addition to the myriad prayer meetings being conducted at
the crime scene in Aurora, endless memorials should be created and
people encouraged to weep, wail, and mourn for hours and days upon end.
Bring in the drums, the flutes, the musicians and mystics who will
support people in grieving until the last tear in their bodies has been
shed. Myriad rituals could be conducted not only in the place where 71
people were brutally shot, but throughout the charred forests where
fires have ravaged the landscape.
The Dagara people might tell us that we have too much fire in our
culture and that staggering droughts, blazing infernos, and eruptions of
terrifying massacres are cries for help from ecosystems aching for the
water of our tears.
Of “Dark Knights” And Shadows
Has anyone really noticed the title of the movie in which the carnage occurred—“The Dark Knight Rises”? Fellow Coloradan, David Sirota, noted in his July 18 Salon article, “Batman Hates The 99 Percent,”
that “The Dark Night” demonizes the Occupy movement. Director
Christopher Nolan adamantly denies this theory, but for me, the
significance of the “Dark Knight (or night)” motif feels even more
primal. As a culture, we seem to be drawn to darkness, yet cannot
discern it all around us. Medicating our way through the darkness of a
culture unraveling—soothing ourselves with shopping and mind-altering
substances and behaviors, we name the darkness “light” and allow
ourselves to be victimized by the arch-villain, The Joker, with whom the
alleged Aurora shooter identified.
In a culture of “white, bright, and light,” we are commanded to avoid
the darkness like the plague, and when it engulfs us as it did the
victims of Aurora’s “darkest night,” we can’t wait to “put it behind us”
and “get back to normal.” Yet something in us gravitates to darkness
because darkness is one-half of who we are. We gestated in darkness for
nine months, and at the end of our days, to darkness we will return, no
matter how many white lights we encounter in our journey off this
planet. Darkness is a place of rest, but also a place of very
challenging psycho-spiritual work. In the darkness is where we encounter
the deeper Self, the sacred, the mystery. In the darkness live the
ghosts of our wounding as human beings living in a culture that is
killing the planet and each of us. And residing next to each wound is a
gift—a possibility, a talent, a skill, a potential that awaits our
discovery. Yet in order to access it, we must, as individuals and as a
culture, be willing to confront the Shadow—all those villainous
qualities we insist are not us because “we are good and decent human beings,” and “this is the greatest country in the world.”
Denial And The Next Chapter
In the latest from John Michael Greer in his piece “The Far Side Of Denial,”
at the Archdruid Report, he notes Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s Five Stages
of Grief which are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and
acceptance. Greer applies this model to one’s awakening to peak oil and
the collapse of industrial civilization, and of course, it can certainly
be applied in traumatic events such as the Aurora, Colorado massacre.
The only issue I would take with Greer’s piece is that he believes
civilization is just now collectively entering the stage of denial. I
believe civilization has been in this stage since its inception, its
denial exacerbating with every passing day in current time.
Greer concludes his blogpost with:
The pundits and corporate flacks who have, for all practical
purposes, gone barking mad about the world’s energy supply—I really
don’t think any less forceful phrasing reflects the nature of these
strident claims that scraping the bottom of the barrel, via fracking or
otherwise, ought to be treated as proof that the barrel’s still full—are
by and large associated with the two economic sectors, finance and
petroleum, that are going to be clobbered first and hardest as the
reality of peak oil sets in. The elephant’s in their living rooms;
that’s why their shrill denials that elephants exist can be heard so
clearly all through the neighborhood. As the elephant roams a little
more widely, I suspect that the same frantic tone will travel with it,
until finally we find ourselves on the far side of denial and the next
phase starts.
Greer then finishes with this gut-punching statement:
That phase, for those who haven’t kept track, is anger. It’s once that stage arrives in force that the explosion will follow.
Again, I must argue that we have been in the anger phase for quite some
time, and nothing confirms this more than the carnage of Virginia
Tech,Tucson, and Aurora.
Debates about gun control are, pardon the pun, band aids for bullet
wounds. In the first place, just as the powers that be will never
legalize drugs and forsake the dizzying profits involved in drug
trafficking, they will certainly not curtail a very lucrative firearms
industry which is a necessary underpinning of international drug
trafficking. Moreover, even if all firearms vanished overnight, enraged
and deranged humans would still find ways to destroy one another.
Training In Trauma Management
In the anger phase of societal unraveling, we must not only be aware of
its perils but prepare ourselves with great intention to navigate it.
One of the first issues we must grapple with is the reality of trauma.
Increasing dissolution of the fabric of the culture is by definition
traumatic for those who rely on it for basic necessities, identity,
lifestyle, distraction, and sense of well being. As those of us who have
been writing about the collapse of industrial civilization for some
time have repeatedly asserted, the less aware of impending collapse
individuals are, the more traumatic it will be for them. Denial is
wearing very thin in many parts of this nation, and when the veneer
cracks, we must be prepared for outbreaks of violence.
The issue then is: How will we manage our own trauma and the trauma of those with whom we may experience unwanted encounters?
I recommend three of many options for training in trauma management:
- Somatic Experiencing, a modality designed by psychologist, Peter Levine
- Trauma First Aide, which educates and trains individuals, groups and communities in order to reduce and prevent the long term effects of acute traumatic stress reactions.
- Trauma Resource Institute, which seeks to create resiliency-informed and trauma-informed individuals and communities.
In addition, I suggest checking out the work of Michael Meade of Mosaic Voices.
Meade works closely with at-risk youth and returning combat veterans,
using drumming, storytelling, poetry, and ritual to facilitate healing
from trauma and access to the inner gifts that bring a stable,
meaningful life.
The “heat” is on in this long, hot summer of fire. We can expect
skyrocketing food prices as a result of droughts, and we can expect more
eruptions of rage in a culture unraveling from the inside out. While
many wise and aware individuals and communities are planting gardens,
taking Permaculture classes, moving off the grid, working to redesign
their cities and local venues, creating alternative currencies,
investing in local food and local economies, home schooling their kids,
raising chickens and reskilling themselves superbly, it would be
tragically naïve to believe that we will somehow “tiptoe through the
tulips” of seamless and painless transition to a new paradigm and a new
milieu.
Now is the time to ask the proper questions. Now is the time to mourn,
to allow the waters of grief to flow from our eyes and hearts and water
the scorched earth. Now is the time to be taught by the trauma that will
not go away. May we become more resilient because of it and be re-made
by it. May we know, as Peter Levine states that: “Trauma can be hell on earth; transformed, it is a divine gift.”
Or in the words of the contemporary female mystic, Rashani:
There is a brokenness out of which comes the unbroken,
A shatteredness out of which blooms the unshatterable.
There is sorrow beyond all grief which leads to joy.
And a fragility out of whose depths emerges strength.
There is a hollow space, too vast for words through which
We pass with each loss, out of whose darkness we are
Sanctioned into being.
There is a cry deeper than all sound whose serrated edges
Cut the heart as we break open to the place inside that is
Unbreakable and whole,
While learning to sing.
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