Cultural-level responsibility

I said in my post yesterday about the Orlando shooting that the way for this not to have happened is for him to have had better emotional skills.  And that's true.  He failed miserably in his responsibility on a personal level.  But responsibility has many levels to it. On a cultural level, I think we are all failing miserably in our attempts to stop this kind of violence.

There are three main ways that I see us failing to stop violence at a cultural level.  The first seems obvious to me.  Our gun laws are a joke.  No regular person needs to own an assault rifle.  There is a ton of evidence that in places where there are more guns, there are more violent assaults.  The NRA owns this country and prevents sensible gun laws from being enacted.  If you vote for candidates that support the NRA, you're part of the problem.  Simple.  Obvious.

Two:  If you follow the roots of any violent act back far enough, you are going to find suffering.  This man who killed people in Orlando, like all the violent criminals before him, has suffered.  Let me say this very clearly:  THIS DOES NOT JUSTIFY HIS ACTIONS.  He failed in his basic responsibility as a human being.  But it does give us at least a partial explanation for his behavior.  And if we truly want to see the violence stop, then we need to recognize that if we eliminated the conditions that cause this kind of terrible suffering, we would have eliminated the original starting point of a lot of violence.  That doesn't mean that there wouldn't be other starting points for violence.  There will always be violence.  But our responsibility is to look at our role in causing suffering.  His parents are from Afghanistan.  Do we have any responsibility for causing suffering in that country?  I would say we do.  Whether we should have done things differently in Afghanistan doesn't seem worth discussing to me.  It happened.  What is worth discussing is the recognition that we played a role in the creation of conditions favorable for suffering.  I hardly think we're to blame for this terrible act of violence, but I do think it's a possibility we could have prevented it by creating thriving environments around the world.  Says Def Poet, Suheir Hammad, in her poem First Writing Since,

"affirm life.
affirm life.
we got to carry each other now.
you are either with life, or against it.
affirm life."

Remember, it's not about assigning blame.  We know who's to blame.  It's about preventing violence.

Finally, we are failing on a cultural level to prevent violence because we are not teaching healthy emotional skills.  I explained yesterday how healthy emotional skills are what would have prevented this and most every other violent episode ever.  So how do we do it?  We need a broad approach.  Relying on the most broken people in our culture to seek out a therapist who may or may not help them is ridiculous.  People like this guy don't even know they're broken.  Healthy emotional skills should be taught in schools from kindergarten all the way until graduation from high school.  Back in the day, when we were just a bunch of farmers, nobody needed any damn emotional skills.  Just milk the cow, plow the fields, eat and sleep.  Was it hard?  Hell yes.  But it wasn't complex.  Now, life is just too complicated for anyone to handle without the necessary know-how.  And almost no one has the know-how.

In summary:
1)  Fix gun laws.
2)  Affirm life.
3)  Teach emotional skills in schools.