There are a lot of things in this world that are not as we wish for them to be. In thinking about how to answer the bi-weekly question from the @TribeSteemUp community, organized by @Trucklife-Family, with this week's question submitted by @WhatAmIDoing, I aimed for channelling resources toward what I believe to be the root causes of our suffering; the spots that, if adequately addressed, I believe would have the greatest impact on society.
Since I'm of the opinion that shifts in individuals' attitudes, beliefs, and values have the potential to trickle up through our communities, institutions, and social systems, and that meaningful change comes from within, rather than from an external authoritarian power, I take a bottom-up, individualized approach to healing. In order to increase the amount of compassion, care, and generosity in the world, and decrease the greed, hatred, delusion, violence, and suffering, I would start by addressing trauma on a broad scale, redefining the Anglo-European idea of justice, and meeting the basic needs of all people, regardless of ability to contribute.
Trauma
Developmental trauma, which occurs between conception and the age of two, early childhood trauma, and complex childhood trauma, is a widespread epidemic that has been linked to decreased cognitive function (including problems with memory, attention, perpetual awareness, thinking, IQ, and language), chronically activated cortisol levels, dissociative symptoms, self-worth issues, depression, anxiety, antisocial behaviors and attitudes, difficulty trusting, difficulty establishing healthy relationships, weight problems, and myriad other mental and physical health problems throughout life. [1][2]
Children who have experienced complex trauma often feel unsafe and have difficulty regulating emotions, leading to disruptive behaviors at home and in school. When these effects are compounded by further trauma from systemic oppression and violence (including racism, classism, and poverty), and fear-based social responses such as zero-tolerance policies in schools and the school-to-prison pipeline, we end up with a system that takes hurt babies, hurts them more as they grow into adulthood, and funnels them into prisons when they start to show the consequences.
Trauma lives in our bodies and in our DNA, and can be passed down through generations, further compounding its destructive effects.
Since learning about the pervasive and destructive nature of developmental and childhood trauma, just about every social ailment admittedly looks to me like a nail that I want to hit with the hammer of healing trauma on a massive scale. Ultimately, I think that the origin of much of the world's current trauma lies in systemic violence, injustice, and oppression, which is why I believe that our efforts are best spent building positive peace and ending poverty, unequal resource distribution, racism, classism, patriarchy, statism, and other forms of violence. I suspect that there is a chicken-and-egg quality to this problem: end oppression and violence in order to reduce trauma; heal trauma, and people will be less likely to engage in and perpetuate oppression and violence. Thus I think we need a multi-faceted approach.
My starting point would be to resource a massive army of therapists, counsellors, social workers, energy workers, body workers, shamans, and other healers to address the trauma in the world's population, to both cultivate resiliency and empower people to heal themselves. There are so many people in the world who feel called to healing work, but many of them find it difficult to stay the course or offer their maximum impact because their work can often be emotionally, physically and spiritually taxing, and usually underpaid and undervalued by a profit-driven society. Healers frequently experience burnout due to high case loads and a deficit of self care; in some cases they may need to work multiple jobs in order stay afloat. There is simply too much suffering in the world relative to the number of healers who are sufficiently supported in their practice.
I would use the unlimited resources at my disposal to ensure that healers of every kind would be well supported, and that their services would be available to all, regardless of ability to pay. (In fact, I would ultimately like to see healing offered not as a service in exchange for payment, but as a human right gifted freely.) I would also channel resources toward removing barriers that make it difficult for people to access healing of their choice. I believe this would increase the number of active healers in our society, along with their perceived value, and their overall effectiveness.
Justice
In my view, one of the most important pieces to bringing peace, equity, and healing to the world lies in creating a cultural shift around retributive and exclusionary perceptions of justice. The Little Book of Restorative Justice in Education talks about how ideas of justice in other cultures influence practices around addressing harm and holding people accountable. The Navajo concept of horizontal justice, for example, which emphasizes equality, interconnectedness, helping one another, and shared responsibility to repair harm and work toward healing, seems like a necessary component to dealing with harm and conflict in a healthy way:
The Honorable Chief Justice Dr. Robert Yazzie of the Navajo Nation differentiates between horizontal justice and vertical justice. Within vertical justice, the offender and the victim are seen as separate and detached; the outcomes are defined by winning and losing. Within horizontal justice, equality is like a circle in which no one is more important than another. We are all one. The outcome of justice is related to wholeness and healing rather than the right and wrong. Further, helping another person is more important than determining fault. Responsibility lies with each of us to repair harm and restore justice. [3]
The Anglo-European approach to justice, in contrast, is based on exclusionary practices, blame, culpability (as apposed to accountability), and the act of criminalizing members of society and making them someone else's (i.e. the criminal justice system's) problem -- and is disconnecting and dehumanizing as a result. These views are so embedded in our attitudes and psyches that they are often reflected in our interpersonal relationships and our parenting, giving rise to disconnection, feelings of unworthiness and shame, and moral superiority.
By separating victims from offenders, levying punishment, and focusing on culpability, our current criminal justice system does not serve the needs of those harmed, but rather the needs of the state. It addresses harm from a punitive standpoint and assigns blame rather than providing a safe space for people to express their guilt, grief, anger, or outrage, and to lay the foundations for meaningful repair. This is why the win-lose model of the legal system often results in unsatisfying outcomes for all involved in legal disputes, especially for victims, and why the restorative justice model for addressing harm in community is gaining popularity as an alternative.
Recently, when two particular girls in the after school program at which I volunteer caused conflict, the other mentors' first response was to ask them not to come the following week, as a punishment. These mentors are kind, compassionate people, and I have no doubt that their response was well intended. However, by excluding the girls from the group, even temporarily, it sent a punitive message that is more likely to cause further harm than to heal, and modeled for the other kids the idea that the way we deal with conflict or harm is to send it (and the person) away, out of sight and out of mind, rather than to engage the person(s) causing harm and hold them meaningfully accountable, by giving them the opportunity to make amends, repair relationships, and contribute to the health of the group. This exclusionary reflex in response to conflict is reflected in homes, schools, social groups, workplaces, and many other communities in Anglo-American culture, and operates at personal, institutional, and systemic levels.
The removal of problematic or disruptive kids from communities to the justice system has an air of “not my problem” that smacks to me of an abdication of responsibility -- which is ironic, since I think one of the motivations for criminalizing kids is ostensibly to hold them accountable for their actions. Kids’ poor decisions and dangerous behaviors are, of course, everyone’s problem, as long as we’re contributing to conditions that make it make sense for them to behave in these ways. The legal system as I understand it only further serves to remove a sense of shared responsibility in the way that it removes offenders from society.
I've spoken a lot about kids here, but really, I would like to see these principles of compassion, inclusion, and accountability extended to all people, regardless of age. I often wonder why it is that people seem to give kids the benefit of the doubt, but revoke such compassion or understanding as soon as a person reaches adulthood. It’s discouraging to me that that “the century old idea in the United States that children and adolescents are less culpable and more able to be rehabilitated than adults who commit crimes” is declining in favor of harsher views, rather than the other way around (i.e. considering all humans rehabilitatable). In my view, people of all ages ought to be held accountable, not culpable.
It seems clear to me that until we address this punitive and exclusionary approach to justice at a cultural level, in the hearts and minds of the people, these attitudes and practices will continue to filter into individuals' relationships, into the cultural zeitgeist, and into the communities and organizations within which we live and work. We can't change one component of this interconnected web of oppression and disconnection without changing the beliefs that give rise to it.
To commence this cultural shift, I would likewise support restorative justice practitioners and educators, as well as other peacemakers of any culture or paradigm who espouse values of interconnectedness, accountability, inclusion, and horizontal justice. As with the healers I mentioned above, I believe there are many people in the world who feel called to do this work, and by ensuring that they are well resourced and in good company, we can enable them to do so, empowering them to create a cultural shift in the way we address harm and enact justice.
Resource Equity
I'd be remiss if I didn't include in this list the meeting of all people's basic needs for safety, food, clothing, clean water, mental and physical health care, and access to information and knowledge. In the real world, this might fall under the heading of "redistribution of wealth", but since in this exercise I have unlimited resources at hand, it seems like freely giving to all to address unmet needs would have the same effect. If everyone were well nourished, housed, clothed, and free to pursue their own contributions to community in whatever ways felt meaningful to them, how would this affect the power structures currently in play in our governments, law enforcement agencies, and other coercive systems of social control? If large portions of the population did not have to struggle to survive, would it change the way they contributed to the upholding of these power structures? If people were less vulnerable, would they be more empowered, more difficult to control? Would oppression, racism, classism, sexism, ablism, and other -isms be subverted? Would the richer and more powerful among us then change the way they behaved in the world? I have questions.
As a believer in non-violence, I would rather explore ways to cultivate the conditions in which people will willingly, even eagerly, lay down their weapons, share their power, redistribute their wealth, and be inspired to honor the sovereignty and dignity of others, rather than to attempt to coerce of force them to change. Is meeting the needs of every person regardless of ability to "give back" a way to do this? Would it decrease fear, competition, power discrepancies, violence, greed, and oppression, and facilitate compassion, reconnection, shared power, self empowerment, and a shared sense of abundance?
I don't know for sure, but that's where I would start.
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Image credits:
Horn of Babel by Vladimir Kush
Abundance by Jill Kramer
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Van der Kolk, B. (2015). The body keeps the score : Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. New York, New York: Penguin Books.
De Bellis, M. D., & A.B., A. Z. (2014). “The Biological Effects of Childhood Trauma.” Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 23(2), 185–222. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.chc.2014.01.002https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3968319/
Zehr, H. (2002). The little book of restorative justice. Intercourse, PA: Good Books.