i can’t save you

Like many people, upon hearing about the most recent shooting in Newton, CT I was saddened. I teared up while listening to news reports. My heart went out to the parents of those children. Remarkably I heard several people say the most thoughtless things like “How could this happen?” and “blah blah blah gun control (for or against) blah blah blah.”

Mass killings happen in the United States with a predictable frequency. People who are pro-gun often say things like “Guns don’t kill people, people do” and “blah blah blah liberty blah blah blah.” And they are right guns sitting on a shelf, in a box, or stored somewhere do not kill people. Further it is beyond the ABILITY of the government to take those guns away, even if they wanted to (they don’t).

Other people said things like “If that crazy person hadn’t been allowed to legally purchase that weapon this wouldn’t of happened.” And they are right.

But this isn’t about trying to find some sort of equivalence. This about trying to understand how did this happen. What no one seems to be saying with any earnestness (as in funding research type of earnestness), “Why on earth is this happening?” I’ve not found any research that is compelling as to causal factors. I have my suspicions though. In this country we’ve made it clear through our policy decisions that as a country we don’t care about our fellow citizens. We have children living with their drug addicted parents and then blame teachers for those students failing in school.  We don’t fund pre-natal healthcare and then wonder why we have the highest infant mortality rate in the developed world. We throw away more food than many countries produce in a year but still have children going hungry. This list could go on forever. Every single one of these problems is created by policy. By an unwillingness to fund programs that would help children.

Aside from the obvious point that funding programs for children is morally right, it pays off in HUGE dividends by helping to raise a child who will become a contributing member of society rather than another body in our for-profit prison system.

Lots of evidence clearly shows that fundamental causes and NOT individual initiative are more likely to determine a persons life outcome. That is to say, your neighborhood and income level mean more about where you end up than most of your individual choices. We should be making every neighborhood a place worth living in.

But what does it all really mean? It means that, like most political debates in this country, to focus on a policy point rather than the context it’s happening is to miss the point entirely. When examples of more heavily armed countries with lower rates of violence are brought up all that is being highlighted is that our country is different from the example country. Due to our history, culture, and strange obsession with individualism, what works in many countries (every single person being armed) would not be a good idea here given our many divergent cultures and lack of concern for the common person.

The real tragedy in all of this is that politics will prevent even the most mundane and ineffectual of solutions being tried. If you want to make a difference, if you really want to prevent this sort of thing from happening, YOU, yes YOU, my dear reader should volunteer in schools, become a Big Brother or Sister, or volunteer at the community center in the poor part of your city. Politicians are too bull-headed and heartless to make the sorts of changes needed to make an impact, change starts with everyday citizens like you and me.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” – William Blake

In a not so recent post I mentioned confirmation bias and Stanley Milgram’s obedience studies. These two studies deeply inform how I think about the world. I thought I’d spend a little time writing about why. Perhaps more to the point, why should you care?

1) You can’t be objective and no one can.
I used to think that I could be objective, more to the point I thought anybody could be objective. It’s only after a variety of, how shall I say, learning experiences that I realized, I and everyone else views the world through a series of lenses. The lenses of culture, gender, religion/philosophy, heck even our physiology. The result is that even scientist(!) are influenced. Here is an example of how confirmation bias relates to objectivity.

John is reading the news and sees a study that shows Guns in the Home Provide Greater Health Risk Than Benefit. As a hunter, and the son of the hunter he quickly peruses the article and discounts the findings because the author teaches at a “liberal ivory tower.” He then goes on to think of all of the times he’s safely used a gun and the enjoyment he gets from spending time with his father in the woods.

The above example just as easily could have been about someone reading about abortion (for or against) and similarly dismissing the findings. Now add in an element of obedience. In my own brief tour of the U.S. Navy’s boot camp it was readily apparent that the “education” of the recruits adds a lens that the many of them would be looking through the rest of their lives. Add to that the predilection of people to follow orders and it’s no wonder that so many people “just follow orders.” That isn’t to equate what the vast majority brave men and women in uniform are doing to protect the this country with the atrocities to committed in WWII. But it is to say that the horrors of Abu Ghraib didn’t happen in a vacuum, rather those soldiers received orders and they acted on them. Then they were able to rationalize that behavior because it was being normalized by their peers.