The Extra Stone

A woman in Virginia placed an extra stone on the 32 stones gathered to symbolize those lost in the mass killing at Virginia Tech. She said 33 people were lost that day. She was right. The life of the shooter counts.

People are outraged that his “video manifesto” was made public via the airwaves. Even in death, we silence him. We do not want his reasons and will not allow his reasoning to be the reason. Even those who acknowledge the tortured nature of his existence are careful to preface it with: “I am not excusing his actions.” We are afraid to see the reasons afraid of the weight of another stone.

We live in the most violent of cultures. We kill each other at a rate not seen elsewhere in the so-called “civilized” world. We are not as good as we would like to think about caring for those less fortunate. Look on the sidewalks downtown anywhere at those living between the cracks. How can we be asked to shoulder the burden of not just the one extra stone but of all of them?

What does it take for us to see and appreciate the inter-relatedness of our well being in a way that makes our awareness translate into action? If we ignore those who suffer not so much in silence but in the wake of our blindness, we continue to run the risk of having them get our attention in fatal ways. Is the answer more paperwork, reporting, exclusion, confinement, drug treatment or is it more effective and humane to look at the cause of mental dis-ease?

Why do children bully other children? Why don’t we pay more attention? Every time we teach a child to fight fire with fire, we signal our acceptance of violence as an appropriate resolution to conflict. Yet, we shudder when we meet young Johnny with a gun. What is the source of the anger, pain, insecurity and conflict? Where is the currency for bullies? Excluding others often predicates one’s own acceptance. Picking on another child hides the bullies own insecurity and need for inclusion, he creates an out-group to be in the resultant in-group. Children learn to respect difference or to fear it and they learn it at home. However, the adult at home was once a child learning what they now teach. So if we are all practicing what we have learned who is the teacher?

All the cultures that inhabit the melting pot of America rest in the bosom of American Popular culture which is the harbinger of the current paradigm. We compete. There are losers and winners. Winners have more. Losing hurts. Lack hurts. Those who got want to keep. Elbows and turned backs. Gated communities. Consumption. Want. Consumption. Need. Consumption. Greed. Consumption. Lack. There are walls between the have and the have not. Those who don’t have are trying by any means to get. No vacations in America. Two jobs. We buy. We buy. We buy. We work to buy more. Because those who have are good competitors, they are winners. Those who do not have are losers, poor competitors. They did not do enough. They should have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps even if they have no feet. We have no time. Time is a commodity. We are commodities. Life as a commodity, do I blame it all on material capitalism? Pretty much.

We live in a culture of the individual. In this equation, it is me against you, my kids against your kids. All of us locked in competition for the things that we have come to value. No time to hug your son but he has the nicest clothes and the latest Js. No time to throw the ball with him but he has a widescreen TV to watch the game on alone while Daddy gets the money for more things to show you how winners live. We schedule children because we have no time. We must become the best by any means, because there are winners and losers. Education in this paradigm is to facilitate acquiring more as opposed to knowing more, it is a competition. We grade the children and the institutions and the degrees they award come in levels supposedly the higher you go the more you can buy. In America even leisure is a competition in terrorist confused airports, in two week bites, in crowded theme parks, in noisy dance clubs, we move frantically, herded to spend quickly and return to work so we can buy things. We exist in a materially oriented society with a perception of time scarcity. This both consumes and distracts us from the fabric of lived reality, the reality of us living here on a ball spinning in space breathing the same air. The reality of we live we die. The reality of right now being all we can touch, taste and move. The reality where quiet frantic crazy builds character in seemingly normal people almost forces us to move with limited compassion. None of us wants to be losers. There are things we must have in order to be winners. And the list gets longer every day. How can we afford the time to pay attention? We cannot easily conceive of suffering with the losers. We cannot easily approach the extra stone.

We pay for our choices. We pay for our blindness by being occasionally jarred to attention by the unfathomable. We pay for our short memories by the same type of things happening again. We must find the time to pay attention. We must be in life, the day to day-ness of it. We must find not the quick but the true resolution to our small conflicts to teach it matters, we all matter. We must hear people when they speak the story of their being. If it differs from your perception of it, does it make it less real for the liver of the reality? If we listen better, we may learn to care better, if we care better there will be fewer cracks to fall between. Caring implies awareness. We must pay attention, not just to the horrific but the fabric of it, the everyday.

The small scars that become huge wounds grow unattended. Who attends us in the small fears that become the dark spots where we avoid shining light? Who tells we are more important than the things we spend our time and attention struggling to acquire? The things that we eventually throw out on the sidewalk to populate the landfills have become more important than the us-ness of life. We are consumers who are consumed with the material, the temporary, and the trash of life to the exclusion of being in life.

It is not enough to plant a tree once a year, or donate to an orphanage in some far place, or to feed the poor on holidays. It is a start but it should not be a temporary focus. It should be a part of our being. Adlai Stevenson said, “In a democracy you get the government you deserve.” I am saying we build the culture we have. Stone by stone.