Healing America’s Narratives: What’s Love Got to Do With It?

Posted on November 7, 2023 by Reggie Marra

[Part of our ongoing exploration of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow, this essay explores Chapter Twelve’s inquiry into the role of love — and its lack — in American culture. The book is available here.]

Regarding the subtitle’s question, the answer is, well, just about everything.

Over the course of some twenty years I paid attention to others’ views on love. I listened to friends and family, read fiction and nonfiction including scripture from various religions, and did my best to understand what I felt through my own direct experience. Three particular views among many spoke to me personally, and I “assembled” a working perspective on love that lives at the intersection of the three:

According to Br. David Steindl-Rast, Dr. M. Scott Peck, and Marianne Williamson’s reflections on A Course in Miracles respectively, love is “the joyful acceptance of belonging,” “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth,” and the absence of fear.¹

Throughout, amid, beneath, within, and above America’s collective national Shadow lurks a lack of love. Not that love doesn’t exist in the United States — it does — but where it is not lacking it most often manifests as an exclusive, conditional, qualified, and group-centric love.

We are willing to joyfully accept belonging with or to extend ourselves for the benefit of selected, but not all, others. Those other others we fear — sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, but fear them we do.

Where this leads, has led, and will lead us is toward a deeper, truer, more inclusive, and less conditional — if not unconditional — love. Within the developmental shorthand that points to our increasingly inclusive, balanced, comprehensive, and complex movement through it’s about me, it’s about us, it’s about all of us, and it’s about all that is perspectives, an it’s about me orientation is the earliest and least inclusive view available to us.

But without a healthy iteration of this view, which allows each of us to love our self and makes it possible to look in the mirror and authentically say, “I love you,” to the essence of our reflection (give it a try), self-love remains repressed as part of our Shadow — and this repression inevitably limits the fullness of our love for any other(s). In Teachings on Love, Thich Nhat Hanh made it clear that, “Until we are able to love and take care of ourselves, we cannot be of much help to others.”²

Choosing to extend one’s self in order to joyfully accept belonging as, to, and with the perfectly beautiful, blemished being each of us is strengthens our will to extend our selves on behalf of the perfectly beautiful, blemished beings you, they, all of us, and all that is are. Both the foundation of healthy self-love and the expansion beyond it are essential.

In, Outlaw Culture, bell hooks expressed being puzzled by folks who authentically confront one “domination” while often passively supporting or ignoring another. She pointed specifically to black men who fought against racial discrimination but ignored the plight of women, and to white women who were on the front lines of gender discrimination but ignored the racial discrimination against their black sisters. She observed that many activists act on behalf of self-interest, attempting to end “what we feel is hurting us,” rather than on behalf of “a collective transformation of society, an end to politics of dominations.” She concludes:

“This is why we desperately need an ethic of love to intervene in our self-centered longing for change. Fundamentally, if we are only committed to an improvement in that politic of domination that we feel leads directly to our individual exploitation or oppression, we not only remain attached to the status quo but act in complicity with it, nurturing and maintaining those very systems of domination.”³

She clearly states the necessity for a love that moves from embracing what concerns me or my particular us to the wider embrace of all of us and all that is. Sound familiar?

Consider the words of Siddhartha Gautama, passed down by many, including Gandhi and King: “For hatred can never put an end to hatred; love alone can. This is an unalterable law.”⁴ Remember the words attributed to Jesus Christ: “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”⁵

In Across That Bridge, John Lewis acknowledged the roles of faith, patience, study, truth, action, peace, and reconciliation in his vision for change in the United States. He also made it clear that for those who studied, trained in, and practiced nonviolence, “not simply as a tactic, but as a way of authentically living our lives — our sole purpose was, in fact, love.”⁶

In response to a question from Krista Tippett in 2020, author Jason Reynolds defined antiracism in this way:

“…[it’s] simply the muscle that says that humans are human. That’s it. It’s the one that says, ‘I love you because you are you.’ Period. That’s all…. That element of ‘I love you because you are you’ should be the most human thing we know. It should be a natural thing to say, ‘Look, I love you, because you remind me more of myself than not.’”⁷

While simple on the surface, those last eight words are subtly sophisticated and quite challenging when engaged beyond the conceptual — in the everyday world with other human beings. The prospect that you remind me more of myself than not recalls Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s recognition that our work is not so simple as separating all the good folks from the evil. It is more complex in that each human heart — each of us — carries the potential for good and evil.⁸

With whom and what do you joyfully accept belonging? For whom are you willing to extend yourself? How does it feel — or might it feel — to live a moment, a day, a year, or lifetime in the absence of fear?

_____

The “joyful acceptance of belonging,” is from Br. David Steindl-Rast, Gratefulness: the Heart of Prayer, (Paulist, 1984), 167; “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth,” is from M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled, (Simon & Schuster, 1978), 81; and ‘the absence of fear’ (not a direct quote) is based on Marianne Williamson’s reflections on A Course in Miracles, (Foundation for Inner Peace, 1976, 1992) in A Return to Love, (HarperPaperbacks, 1993).
Thich Nhat Hanh, Teachings on Love. (Parallax, 1998), 21.
bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, (Routledge Classics, 2006/Routledge 1994), 243–44. In making her case for love, hooks also cites Peck’s “the will to extend one’s self…” view and King’s “I have decided to love,” 247.
Eknath Easwaran, trans., The Dhammapada, (Nilgiri Press, 1985), 78.
John 13:34, NIV Study Bible, (Zondervan, 1973, 1995).
John Lewis, with Brenda Jones, Across That Bridge: A Vision for Change and the Future of America, (Hachette, 2012), 183.
Jason Reynolds, “Imagination and Fortitude,” On Being with Krista Tippett, June 25, 2020, https://onbeing.org/programs/jason-reynolds-imagination-and-fortitude/
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. Accessed via https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/13750-if-only-it-were-all-so-simple-if-only-there

Healing America’s Narratives: The Race for Violence — 2023

Posted on October 24, 2023 by Reggie Marra

Photo © by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

[Part of a series, this essay looks at some current events in the context of Healing America’s Narratives: the Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow — Now available]

The context of each of these “Healing America’s Narratives” posts is the collective national Shadow of the United States, as explored in detail in the book by that name. Briefly, America’s collective Shadow carries at least nine traits: ignorance, arrogance, fear, bigotry, violence, greed, excess, bullying, and untrustworthiness.

These nine traits can be observed throughout history, beginning with America’s three foundational subjugations — of women, Native Americans, and African Americans — and continuing up to the present day with the Vietnam War, post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, expanding inequality, the power of the insurance-pharmaceutical-medical-government-financial-lobbying industry (IPMGFL), patho-adolescent political polarizations, equal opportunity “otherings” of those “we” feel are not enough like “us,” and ambivalence about the planet — which may ultimately render all the other issues moot.

Today’s post focuses on the intersection of three stories that have emerged in March and April 2023:

The shooting in Kansas City, Missouri of 16-year-old Ralph Yarl, by 84-year-old Andrew D. Lester: According to the Washington Post, Yarl mistakenly rang the doorbell on the wrong house in an attempt to pick up his siblings, who were visiting a friend. Lester, who is white, who is described as being “visibly upset” and “concerned for” Yarl, and who is being charged, claims to have been “scared to death” when he saw Yarl at his door. Yarl, who is black, was shot twice and is now recovering.
The shooting death in Hebron, New York of 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis by 65-year-old Kevin Monahan. According to the Washington Post, Gillis and her friends accidentally pulled into the wrong driveway while they were looking for a friend’s house. Gillis and her friends never got out of their vehicle and were shot by Monahan from his porch while they were backing out of the driveway. As I post this, Monahan, unlike Lester, has expressed no remorse for his action.
According to the Washington Post, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt called for the resignation of four McCurtain County officials, “county commissioner Mark Jennings, Sheriff Kevin Clardy, sheriff’s investigator Alicia Manning and county jail administrator Larry Hendrix,” who, while speaking after a public meeting without realizing a reporter’s recorder was still on, “lamented about how they could no longer yank Black people out of the jail, ‘take them down to Mud Creek and hang them up with a … rope,’ according to McCurtain Gazette-News, which later published a recording online.”

To keep this simple(ish), we’ll focus on violence, guns, and race — each of which plays a direct role in two of these three stories.

Much of the media- and lobbyist-generated rhetoric concerning the two shootings has been on “stand your ground” and “castle doctrine” laws, which does need attention and is fine as far as it goes, albeit in a superficial, ignore-both-the-details-and-the-larger-context kind of way.

Here are some details: Kaylin Gillis was shot and killed because the car she was in mistakenly turned into the wrong driveway. Remember the days of sorry to bother you — we’re lost — can you direct us towards… Ralph Yarl was shot because he mistakenly rang the wrong doorbell — thinking it belonged to his siblings’ friends. Remember the days of hi, I’m here to pick up my brother — oh, sorry, wrong address…can you tell me where… Kaylin Gillis is dead and her family and friends will live with the trauma of her death forever. Ralph Yarl and his family and friends will live with the trauma of his shooting forever — as will, it seems, his shooter.

Here’s a larger context: Everyday violence, including, but not limited to, gun violence is America’s normal.¹ Ring the wrong doorbell, pull into the wrong driveway, walk home, go shopping, go to your place of worship, go to school, go dancing, go to a concert, go to work. Risk getting shot.

That’s the guns and violence piece.

I’m a five-foot, six-inch, white-bearded, bald-headed, Italian American. Some would reduce me to being an old white guy, but Ta-Nehisi Coates and I know better. Had I mistakenly rang Andrew Lester’s doorbell, do you think he would have shot me? While I can’t know for sure, I’m pretty sure he would not have. Next question: was it Ralph Yarl’s youth, his height, or his skin pigmentation that most scared Andrew Lester? Some well intentioned folks might actually debate that — with obviously he shot because Yarl was black on one side and because of his age, he might have shot any tall, young stranger who appeared at his door on the other. Enjoy that debate.

Here’s the question we need to explore: what is it about the United States of America, and about the specific lives of Andrew Lester, Mark Jennings, Kevin Clardy, Alicia Manning, Larry Hendrix (and “others like them”)such that Lester would shoot a young, black stranger at his door, and that Jennings, Clardy, Manning, and Hendrix would find it appropriate to share or find meaning in their racist, violent imaginings — especially in the context of their roles in local government?

We need to own our individual and collective Shadows. Land of the free? Home of the brave? A beacon of democracy? Peace loving? Toward a more perfect union? Each of these can be true, especially if followed up with a sincere question and exploration: For whom?

_____

¹A small sample regarding America’s normal: 2014-2019: 14,515 gun deaths/year avg. (not suicide) = 40/day avg; 23,094 suicides by gun = 63/day; 37,609 total annual gun deaths = 103/day: https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/ 2014–2019: 45,835 suicides/year avg. = 126*/day: https://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/leadcause.html Accessed September 28, 2021. Search criteria was: 2014–2019 / all causes, races, genders and ages. *Due to rounding, the suicides per day on the two sites differ by 1. I used the lower, 125, in the text.

Neil MacFarquhar, “Murders Spiked in 2020 in Cities Across the United States,” New York Times, September 27, 2021,https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/27/us/fbi-murders-2020-cities.html

Reis Thebault and Danielle Rindler, “Shootings never stopped during the pandemic: 2020 was the deadliest gun violence year in decades,” Washington Post, March 23, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/03/23/2020-shootings/ Accessed September 28, 2021. Gun violence ties directly to the unhealthy masculine: Mike McIntire, Glenn Thrush and Eric Lipton, “Gun Sellers’ Message to Americans: Man Up,” New York Times, June 18, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/us/firearm-gun-sales.html

Healing America’s Narratives: Thank You, Tennessee

Posted on October 10, 2023 by Reggie Marra

Photo © by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

[Part of our ongoing exploration of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow, this essay focuses on a school shooting in Nashville and related events in the Tennessee State Legislature that highlight our need for healing. The book is available here.]

On March 27, 2023 a man with a gun killed three adults and three children at the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee. School shootings — and shootings in general — are, as you know, a regular part of the American landscape.

On April 7, the Tennessee State Legislature voted to remove two of the three legislators who had participated in a March 30 protest at the Tennessee Capitol calling for stricter gun legislation. The two ousted legislators were Justin Jones, 27, and Justin Pearson, 29 — both of whom are black. The third lawmaker, Gloria Johnson, 60, is white.

When asked why she thought she was not removed as were Jones and Pearson, Johnson replied, “I’ll answer your question — it might have to do with the color of our skin.”

As I write this piece on the morning of April 12, Representative Jones was reinstated after the Metropolitan Nashville Council unanimously voted to temporarily appoint him until a special election is held later this year. The Shelby County Board of Commissioners in Memphis was set to consider reappointing Representative Pearson in a meeting at 1:30pm CT on April 12 (today).

The Covenant School shooting and the removal of two young black men from the Tennessee House for protesting in favor of taking action that might limit gun violence lies at the intersection of two of the issues explored in Healing America’s Narratives — our culture of violence and the enslavement and subsequent subjugation of and discrimination against blacks.

No one, anywhere — at least no one I’ve encountered — wants the next inevitable shooting — whether at a school, a dance club, a movie theater, a bank, a concert, a store, a post office, or a place of worship. Yet, enough local, state, and national elected public servants, many of whom count on NRA and gun manufacturers’ and their PACs’ campaign donations, continue to thwart attempts to ban assault weapons, among other gun-safety measures.

America’s collective national Shadow remains grounded in ignorance, arrogance, fear, bigotry, violence, greed, excess, bullying, and untrustworthiness. Ignorance, arrogance, and greed allow lawmakers to prioritize campaign funding over the health and safety of their constituents. Ignorance, arrogance, fear, bigotry, and bullying convinced two-thirds of the predominantly white, Republican Tennessee House of Representatives to remove two black Democratic lawmakers — albeit temporarily.

This is not an indictment of the people of Tennessee. Obviously, many in the state disagree with their elected officials’ ousting Representatives Jones and Pearson.

Still, thank you, Tennessee, for this particular reminder — along with many other daily reminders from states both Red and Blue — of the work we have to do as a nation.

_____

Who are the Tennessee Three? Here’s what to know.

The Republican-led Tennessee House of Representatives voted Thursday to expel two Democratic lawmakers, Reps. Justin…

www.washingtonpost.com

Healing America’s Narratives: Moving Toward Community

Posted on July 31, 2023 by Reggie Marra

[Part of a series, this essay turns toward the collective as we continue our exploration of Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available.]

As we continue to explore America’s narratives and collective Shadow, it’s essential to remember and pay attention to the interrelationships among individuals, groups, and systems — with systems, as used here, including all of our natural and human-made environments — from the planet itself to big cities, to belief systems, to the technology you’re using right now to read or listen to this essay.

From among those abundant possibilities, we’ll focus here on individual human beings as they come together in search of, or because of, community. One deceptively simple and wonderfully useful approach to community emerged through M. Scott Peck’s work after the publication of his groundbreaking book, The Road Less Traveled, in 1978. He and some colleagues set out to explore what they called community-making, and after some years of experience-based practice — convening groups of individuals to make community — he published The Different Drum: Community-Making and Peace in 1987.

The result, as shared in the book, was the observation, facilitation, and refinement of four stages of community-making—pseudocommunity, chaos, emptiness, and community — during six years of intentional experiments.¹

Briefly, in pseudocommunity, individuals are nice, friendly, and polite — as they try to fake community.

When the facade falls apart, chaos emerges, characterized by attempts to control and fix each other; chaos feels frustrating, exhausting, and further from community.

Eventually, a facilitator suggests the possibility of emptiness, which Peck describes as the hardest, “most crucial stage” — “the bridge between chaos and com-munity” — that requires participants to “empty themselves of barriers to communication,” many of which they have just experienced in chaos. The barriers include expectations, preconceptions, ideology, and attempts to fix, solve, or control.² It is common for individuals to ignore the initial invitation to emptiness, unwilling to let go of what they know and to surrender to the process.

Emptiness requires both the “little deaths” and rebirths of each individual and the larger death of the initial group. “When its death has been completed, open and empty, the group enters community. In this final stage a soft quietness descends. It is a kind of peace. The room is bathed in peace.”³ Peck is clear that true community is not magically permanent; it must be maintained.

Consider your own current relationships and “communities” — in the more common meaning of the word. What stage — pseudocommunity, chaos, emptiness, or true community — characterizes your experience of each? To what extent do the stages emerge and disappear and reemerge during the days, weeks, months, and years of your life?

In light of your, my, and our discrete experiences, how, then, in the name of all that is good (and possible), might we scale such an approach to affect a nation — or even effect a new version of a nation? No easy task, that amid our current chaos.

As we’ll explore in coming essays, large groups of people around the world are already convening and building community, albeit using different language and with very specific focuses. Readers familiar with the work of Otto Scharmer and Thomas Hübl might already see the parallels with Peck’s four stages.

We’ll explore all of this further in coming essays. For now, your homework is to notice the comings and goings of pseudocommunity, chaos, emptiness, and true community in your own life.

Be kind to yourself and others.

M. Scott Peck, The Different Drum: Community-Making and Peace, (Touchstone-Simon & Schuster, 1987), 86–135.
Ibid., 95–98. For more on barriers to communication, see also, Marra, Enough with the Talking Points, (2020).
Ibid., 102–03.

Healing America’s Narratives: What Am I Not Seeing?

Posted on March 16, 2023 by Reggie Marra

Part of a series, this essay explores a subheading from Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available.

In our previous three inquiries into subheaders from Chapter Eleven, “So, Now What?” we explored identity, story, and impact. Here we’ll consider what any one of us — or millions of us — might be missing with regard to our own lives and/or our country. “Shadow,” as it’s referred to throughout the book, is one reason, among others, an individual or a collective might not be seeing something.

There are various ways to work with Shadow.¹ One hint that an element of Shadow may be clamoring for our attention is if we notice a disproportionate emotional response to someone or something — especially if that response recurs. So, a recurrent, disproportionate, emotional response to someone or something we experience as being angry or lacking in compassion may be inviting us to explore our own anger or lack of compassion. Likewise, if we have such a response to someone or something we experience as exceptionally creative, generous, or successful, we may want to explore our own as-yet disowned creativity, generosity, or success.

Whether what we’re not seeing is considered positive or negative, recognizing, owning, and integrating it into our sense of self leads to a more integrated, “wholer,” fully human being.

Questions such as these may begin to uncover what might be repressed, denied, and projected:

1. What is it about this situation, person, event, issue, idea, emotion, or dream, such that I respond as I do?

2. What is it about me, such that I respond to this situation, person, event, issue, idea, emotion, or dream as I do?

3. To what extent do my reactions or responses feel disproportionate?

4. What might I be projecting onto this situation, person, event, issue, idea, emotion, or dream that I need to explore in myself?

The first question engages through an external locus of control. It helps begin to identify the source of the disproportionate response by looking toward something out there. Getting clearer about what that something is moves us closer to identifying Shadow — what we don’t yet see or know about ourselves.

The second question engages through an internal locus of control and is more challenging. It implicates us. What is it about me such that I respond as I do? Ooh, is my discomfort with his ease in expressing anger related to my unowned anger? Is my admiration for her success in the art world the result of my own as-yet-unrealized creative potential? What is it, exactly, that brings up my disproportionate response? Now, I’m curious. Repressing and projecting parts of ourselves requires energy. Owning and integrating what we repress and project frees up our energy for other aspects of life.

The third question invites us to authentically consider the extent to which our response is disproportionate to the reality of the situation, person, or thing. Honest, challenging, trusted friends may be helpful here.

The fourth question explores the quality, emotion, trait, or characteristic that may be repressed, denied, and projected. Sometimes we recognize it immediately, and perhaps experience a mix of relief, guilt, or simply, oh, THAT! Sometimes it may be slower to emerge — harder to see and even harder to own and integrate. Oh. That. Me? Lacking compassion? Nah. No way. For that one particular colleague/friend/sibling…? Um, perhaps, yes.

Working with Shadow can be discomfiting. Be kind to yourself.

Among many, see Bill Plotkin’s Wild Mind (207–34) and Soulcraft (267–80); and Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams, eds. Meeting the Shadow (65 essays from a variety of authors).

Healing America’s Narratives: Our Collective National Shadow

Posted on October 10, 2022 by Reggie Marra

[Adapted from Chapter Two of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow]

Read or listen to this post on Medium (4 minutes).

In mid-March, 2003 I sat with Animas Valley Institute’s Bill Plotkin and others in Payson, Arizona, for five days of an experience entitled “Sweet Darkness: The Initiatory Gifts of the Shadow, Projections, Subpersonalities, and the Sacred Wound.” On the evening of our first day there, the United States began bombing Iraq. So while we were exploring our respective individual Shadows and projections, our country’s collective Shadow and projections — “the evil out there” that we tend to see in other nations, groups, cultures, genders, colors, orientations, and people — was on full display, providing us an opportunity for recognition, ownership, and integration at the national level as well.

Jungian analyst Robert Johnson refers to “persona” as “what we would like to be and how we wish to be seen by the world.…our psychological clothing” — the mask we wear. He refers to “ego” as “what we are and know about consciously” and to “Shadow” as “that part of us we fail to see or know…. that which has not entered adequately into consciousness.”¹

In A Little Book on the Human Shadow, Robert Bly posits that behind each of us in childhood, “we have an invisible bag, and the part of us our parents don’t like, we, to keep our parents’ love, put in the bag.” In order to keep our elementary-school teachers happy, we continue to fill the bag, and in high school we further fill the bag in order to please our peers. “We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put in the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again. Sometimes retrieving them feels impossible, as if the bag were sealed.”² Bly points out that “There is also a national bag, and ours is quite long…. we are noble; other nations have empires. Other nations endure stagnant leadership, treat minorities brutally, brainwash their youth, and break treaties.”³

So, Shadow refers to disowned or repressed traits of an individual or group that the individual or group doesn’t recognize in itself and unknowingly projects onto others, whether or not the trait is considered positive or negative and whether or not the others actually embody the projected trait. Sometimes they do; sometimes they don’t. If I tend to have a disproportionately highly charged emotional response to someone I experience as angry, there’s a good chance that I’ve repressed or disowned my own anger — it’s in my invisible bag.⁴ Until I recognize this dynamic and work to integrate my anger, anger will follow me around and allow me to see all these angry people “out there” everywhere I go, while I remain oblivious to being the one constant at every scene of all this anger. Everyone else is angry. I’m not. Oops.

Finally, the word shadow is sometimes used to refer to negative or undesired traits that we don’t like about ourselves. We might refer to these traits as our “dark side.” These undesired traits that were never in or that we’ve already retrieved from our invisible bag are not what we mean by Shadow in this essay.(6) We don’t know our Shadow is there. Our repression and denial are not conscious choices. Collective Shadow, as used here, refers to elements that are common to individuals in the United States. A nation does not have a discrete psyche or Shadow. A nation’s Shadow exists in the collective impact of individual Shadow elements that are common to many — not necessarily all — of its citizens.

As developed in Healing America’s Narratives, the collective Shadow of the United States historically and currently includes at least nine traits: ignorance, arrogance, fear, bigotry, violence, greed, excess, bullying, and untrustworthiness. Chapter Ten of the book argues that one man — a former president — embodies all of these traits and that his life unintentionally presents us with a gift: an invitation to recognize, own, and integrate our national Shadow amid our ongoing American experiment.

_____

1. Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow, 3–4.

2. Robert Bly, A Little Book on the Human Shadow, 17–18.

3. Ibid., 26.

4. Anger is not necessarily a “bad” thing; it is clarifying. What can go wrong is how we understand and what we do with our anger.

American Status Quo

Posted on May 26, 2022 by Reggie Marra

The following is excerpted and adapted from Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow by Reggie Marra—forthcoming in October 2022.

On September 23, 2001 Rabbi Marc Gellman was one of the religious leaders who gathered at Yankee Stadium for a memorial service for the victims of the September 11 attacks. At the time the estimated number of deaths still hovered around 6,000, and Rabbi Gellman spoke of how stating the number of deaths—like 6,000 or six million—explains very little other than “how much death came in how short a time.” He went on to say that “the real horror of that day lies not in its bigness, but in its smallness. In the small searing death of one person 6,000 times, and that person was not a number. That person was our father or our mother or our son or our daughter…”¹

America’s ongoing domestic body count requires that we honor this observation. As a nation we have become numb to the 103 gunshot deaths a day because this everyday violence only earns headline status if it qualifies as a mass shooting—with four or more victims at the same time and in the same place.² Three doesn’t cut it. Recently, ten shooting victims in a grocery store and twenty-one in an elementary school were required to remind us of our American status quo. And even with the headlines and talking heads that such tragedies elicit, even with the photos and brief bios of the deceased, the “small searing death” of each individual carries with it agonizingly intimate memories and moments in the hearts and minds of surviving family and friends that the rest of us simply cannot imagine, try though we might.

The United States struggles and has struggled since its inception with the denial of the worse demons of its nature. Ignorance, arrogance, fear, bigotry, violence, greed, excess, bullying, and untrustworthiness cross breed and manifest in what Robert Bly called the long invisible bag we drag behind us—filled with all we deny and repress about ourselves—our collective national Shadow.

As a nation, America remains an experiment. We were conceived through an often remarkable fertilization of ideas that gave voice to some and subjugated others. We were born through a bloodbath that separated us from the British. We were raised on the enslavement of Africans and African Americans, on land theft from and the massacre and betrayal of Native Peoples, on the subjugation of women, and on peasant labor. We were reborn in an attempt to maintain the experiment through an anything-but-civil bloodbath with ourselves, from which we have yet to fully recover. And we were reborn yet again as a financial and military superpower as the result of a global bloodbath.

We regularly perpetrate and perpetuate violence against others while refusing to acknowledge and address in any effective way the everyday violence we commit against each other. Not yet 250 years old, we embody unhealthy iterations of adolescent beliefs in invincibility and immortality, despite clear evidence that we are neither. Not only have we not recovered from our bloodbaths of birth and rebirth in any whole, integrated sense, we continue to choose to bathe ourselves and others in blood, literally and metaphorically, because that is the normal we know.

Ignorance, arrogance, fear, bigotry, violence, greed, excess, bullying, and untrustworthiness: we can recognize them, own them, and integrate them, or they will continue to own us. Which do you choose?

_____

¹ Rabbi Marc Gellman, remarks at the September 23, 2001 Prayer Service at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, New York. The video is available online: https://www.c-span.org/video/?166250-1/york-city-prayer-service.

²2014-2019: 14,515 gun deaths/year avg. (not suicide) = 40/day avg; 23,094 suicides by gun = 63/day; 37,609 total annual gun deaths = 103/day: https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/