A Prayer for Mankind

I've had some additional thoughts about the recent violence at Virginia Tech.  Again, I am simply shattered by any senseless loss of life.  However, because my mind is an analytical mind and I am a person who is always seeking the larger answers, who takes the opportunity to examine our whole society and not just the soul who was responsible for the heinous crime, I can't help but think about how we, yes, you and I, are also in some way responsible for this. 

I hear some of you gasping and muttering to yourselves, already.  Nakedjen, you're going too far!  Nakedjen, how can we be responsible?  We fight for proper gun control!  We insist on better access to mental health care for all citizens!  We withhold our taxes to avoid paying for the war machine!

Perhaps you have done any one or all of those things.  If you have, I certainly commend you.  But I can't help but think about our society as a whole.  About the generation of children who are now students at our colleges.  How they have been raised in a country that for most of their lives has been involved in conflict on foreign soil.  Conflict that is so commonplace that we to speak out against it makes us anti-American.  Even more telling, for me, though is that the music of their generation and the video games of their generation somehow became very angry and violent.  And that anger and violence just became something that was completely acceptable.  First person shooter video games where the player kills people in order to gain points and master each level are the norm for our college students.  Not only that, but they have been spoon-fed by a media that is hell-bent on serving up the most heinous crimes of the day as regular dinner fare.  If they have a television, they have been watching with mind-numbing regularity on nearly every station thousands of bodies pile up in crime show after crime show.  How many CSI and Law and Order shows can we sustain?  There doesn't seem to be a stopping point.

Now, I'm not going to go all Tipper Gore on all of you and suggest that we censor ourselves.  I am not about censorship.  But I am about careful and wise choices.  And about good parenting.  Obviously, our media choices and video game choices in many ways reflect what our society demands.  If those shows and games were not selling, the producers would be finding what did!  But I can not help wonder how many of our children both here at home and stationed abroad, fighting in our armed forces, might at least feel some greater sense of remorse and dread if they hadn't been raised in a world that basically has both glorified violence and numbed them to the realities of death.

Last night, DearSweetDave attended one of his monthly men's group meetings.  The following prayer from Boysen Hodgson, the Center Director for the Mankind Project in New England, was shared.  While he speaks about men, in reality, I think it is something that all mankind should consider.  So I'm sharing it with all of you.  Namaste, my dear friends.  Namaste.

My friends, 

Pray for men. 
Pray for boys in men's bodies.
Pray for the boys that they were.

I am in pain this morning, grieving the tragedy in
Virginia, the tragedy in Dafur, the tragedy in Iraq
- the thousands of tragedies that are happening right now
that none of us know about. 

Men are picking up guns and getting ready to kill.
Men are mistaking their deep fear and bottomless grief for rage and righteousness. 
Men are believing that they are ALONE when they are only lonely and disconnected.
Men are covering themselves in impenetrable armor to protect their soft cores. 

This is the crisis of masculinity.
90 gun deaths every day in America.
90% committed by men and boys.
1 in 4 women assaulted or raped before the age of 18 - by a man 
- usually a man they know. 

These are our mothers, sisters and daughters.

This tragedy in Virginia started with male violence against a woman. 
(like so many others)
This is the crisis of masculinity.

So here is our challenge as NEW WARRIORS. 
To rewire our reactivity. 
To feel the fear and grief and help others feel it. 
To protect our communities from OURSELVES. 

These men out there are us. 
These are the living shadows that we have looked at in ourselves. 
The answer is not to get tougher. 

I must get softly PRESENT, 
I must get gently AWARE. 
I must share this AWARENESS, 
this SENSE OF BEING with other men and boys 
- to allow them to FEEL and to take conscious action in the world. 
To respond to their worlds rather than react.

We have to move through the ANGER and FEAR, 
we have to FEEL IT - unprotected, vulnerable, safe.
This is what we are inviting men to step into.

I bless the work you are doing today as a New Warrior.
I bless the fear and sadness.
I bless the quiet center of your being - that is ready to take conscious action. 

Write letters today. Call Congress (202-224-3121).
Pull your family close and share yourself with them.

I'm in, with sadness and hope.

Namaste, my dear friends.  Namaste.