If I ruled the world

Nick had a rough night. He’s 20 and had his first experience with being helpless, despite his strength, courage, integrity and willingness to assist. Even with almost two years of security work behind him, he was not prepared (can we ever be?) for his first experience of standing in the midst of the physical, emotional and spiritual stench of poverty, ignorance, violence, alcohol/drugs and its resulting conclusion of despair. When he told me about it, we both shook inside and out…tears just at the surface, pressing hard to be released. And so they flowed.

As I listened to him, I knew only too well that sense of powerlessness in my own body. No matter how willing I have been, no matter how well-informed and armed with the ‘evidence’ of results that are possible, there have been times in my experiences with others over the last 20+ plus years when I have had to simply let go and acknowledge in that moment that I was indeed, powerless. It’s one thing to do it with adults who are choosing for themselves – it’s quite another when there are children involved who, I believe, are the real victims of the insanity we create in our own lives. If I choose to surrender my own life to habit and ignorance, I am at least choosing. Children always have someone else doing the choosing for them.

I listened. I felt. I breathed. I cried. And it all left me with the thought that if I were in charge of the world…..

* No child would ever be harmed – physically or emotionally. No yanking, pulling, shoving, grabbing. No ‘spanking’ – which is nothing more than an adult using his/her body mass to bully a much smaller being into a desired behaviour. No screaming. No name calling. We seem to forget – these children ARE our future. What we create now in our way of being with them, we will be at the mercy of in the not-so-distant future.

One thing that stuck me about what Nick noticed is that he was very clear: there were two small children in that room, but there was no one in their bodies. They were ‘there’ but not there at the same time. Astute. And it is an experience that can be palpable. In this instance, the neglect and abuse was such that the intensity of the disconnect was powerfully evident. Chaos all around – and yet riveted to the TV, seemingly oblivious to their surroundings. Our children learn early how to remove themselves from places and experiences from which there is no escape.

* No parent would ever be so deprived of a connection to themselves that they would be able to do harm. When we lose our innocence, we become lost. When it is taken from us through violence and brutality, we become both willing and able to do harm. Our lives without that sense of wonder at the magic of our own experience, is so painful we wreak vengeance on life itself, in punishment for such a cruel trick. Parents disconnected from their own innocence are dangerous to the innocence of children – theirs and everyone else’s.

Nick was very aware of the misery of the woman who seemed to be the mother. Drunk and/or stoned, surrounded by empty cupboards, decaying garbage and food on plates piled high from one end to another; a fridge stocked with stray ice cubes and nothing else; whimpering from having just been assaulted, her life was not to be envied. One child lay crying on a mattress on the floor, soaked in his own urine and feces while another sat motionless on the floor, surrounded by garbage – including open bottles of toxic chemicals. Her story about the open bottle of Javex in the toddler’s bedroom was that she needed it to wash down the walls. You have to ask yourself: what’s on the walls?

* No man would have the willingness or the ability to be violent; to use body mass to control and/or denigrate another living being. Not all men are violent – and far too many are. We can dance around that one and argue about statistics and how there are women who assault their children and other people – and to me, that conversation is a red herring that only serves to protect the status quo. Far more men than women are violent. That’s a fact. Around the globe, far more men than women use brute force… terror and brutality… to make their way through the world.

It’s the chicken and the egg situation. Which comes first - violent men or non-violent little boys taught how to find the violence inside themselves? I do not believe that violence and aggression are innate to being male. I believe that like anything else, we become what we live. And violence is an acquired skill. Does that mean that there are not times when I believe that a violent reaction would be instinctive? Not at all – and a violent reaction is not the same as engaging violence as a way of moving through the world to leverage a desired result.

And so, my conversation with Nick continues. I make a difference in my own life where and when I can. I choose to make a difference in the lives of others when it is invited and/or welcomed, where and when I can. And then there are the children. How long do we…do I…do nothing because they are not my children? How long do we seek to find ways to heal the wounds of the child rather than stop the wounding? To stop the wounding, we would have to find a way to stop the men. Are we ready for that? Are we willing to engage that one? I, for one, am not sure. To proceed, we – all of us.. men and women – would have to acknowledge that we have a much larger problem than we are willing to name.

For now, I continue to stay with my own internal struggle of how I see my world. I continue to stay in conversation with Nick and in conversation with myself, through writing these thoughts. I continue to be unwilling to NOT see the compassion, caring and kindness of the men I know (and the ones I don’t); and I continue to be unwilling to NOT see the violence that men are capable of. What I continue to wonder is: what makes it possible? Have we brutalized our sons for so long and to such an extent that they can no longer find themselves? I don’t know – and it frightens me.

This I do know for sure: ignoring it or making 'nice' with it is allowing a future to emerge that will not likely sustain us.

Breathing is good….