Cultivating a Culture of Peace and Nonviolence in the Face of Tragedy (Page 1 of 2)

As the news slammed into us on a Sunday morning that someone had opened fire at Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, immediate expressions were disbelief, sorrow, anxiety, horror, shock.

Then the questions began with concerns about our friends who were there — who is hurt and who is OK? What can we do to help? And then, naturally, as the whole thing washed over us, questions about what had actually happened.

It’s only natural to try to understand why this happened, why these people, why on this day? “Trying to make sense of it,” is how the media put it, concluding that we will likely never know all of the answers.

Well, yes and no.

We’ll never know the answer to the mystery of the randomness of suffering because there isn’t one. Why this person? “Because he was closest to the door” doesn’t seem enough of an answer.

Other questions are being answered because the shooter wrote a note. Why this congregation? There was a link, at least in the shooter’s mind, to the things that troubled him so deeply. Why this day? It may well have been just the time he settled on, as anger and despair congealed in his mind, driving him to pack his shotgun in a guitar case…

“Senseless” is the word most use to describe it all. I would gently beg to differ. As the terrible shock begins to wear off and the roller coaster of recovery that accompanies every trauma takes over, each of us touched by this tragedy should realize we are not helpless to understand at least some of the factors that created this moment of evil.

Making sense of it starts here: We live in a culture of violence.

Violence seems like it erupts terribly and randomly, like a faulty pressure relief valve, but it’s more complicated than that. What would possess any person to think a gun is an acceptable or appropriate way to express anger or to seek redress for a complaint? How does a person get such a dangerous weapon, anyway, and all those shells, each packed with dozens of pieces of metal?

If this shooter imagined himself doing this, which his writings indicate he did, where did those images come from? If he conceived himself the Rambo-rescuer of society from the forces of liberalism, a vigilante for the forces of right against the tide of tolerance practiced by the Unitarians, how was that idea planted and how was it nurtured? As the hurts of his personal life grew, who or what applied the relentless pressure that demanded of him, finally, that he act to relieve it?

At least one news source named names, citing his reading list and quotes from his manifesto. I’m all for accountability, but the forces are greater than that. Radio jocks and others who make tons of money with inflammatory rhetoric are not guiltless — their rants have power and they know it, and their advertisers know it and their listeners know it and their station managers and programmers know it, and they all bear some responsibility for the ways this language shapes the culture of incivility we live in. But they are at the same time a product of this culture of violence; they nurture it, enable it, further it but they did not create it.

Last January I sat in a room at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church and listened to Steve Leeper, chairman of the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation, as he introduced Takashi Teramoto, a survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima. Teramoto-san knew first hand the horror that would come to TVUUC seven months later, multiplied by tens of thousands. In the introduction, Steve explained that Hiroshima survivors were on a mission to spread the idea of a Culture of Peace and Nonviolence.

What would that look like?

It may be hard to picture at first, but if you start to think about it, you realize in lots of ways it would be the opposite of the culture in which we live and move and have our being. Our entertainment is often violent — Grand Theft Auto, World of Warcraft; our recreation is often violent — big-time football, hockey, wrestling; movie-makers seem to be in competition to see who can simulate the most graphic violence, usually with little purpose other than to sell tickets, and sell they do.