A three year old was intentionally shot and killed in Boston. This is not hopeless, it is outrageous. I do not believe that anyone can be born "bad", although it is tempting to attribute an innate disposition to the horrors we hear of. Consequently, we do not have to try and comprehend how someone just like ourselves could murder a defenseless child. We choose not to grapple with the fact that we have been raised in the same society that can deform people to such an extent that they rip apart peoples' lives. The disturbing fact is that these murders are only surprising relative to the three year old. However, I find that I am not shocked when I hear of the murders that take place on a regular basis. I am not shocked and therefore unaffected. I am unaffected and therefore do nothing.
If we are not innately evil, then there must be potential for good. I think the question is what was missing in the lives of the murderers that made them who they have become. How can someone be deprived of a chance to exploit their goodness? My sense, based on my own upbringing, is that these people, as children, were not exposed to an alternative. These people, as adults, were given up as a lost cause. As alternatives, no matter how profoundly an alternate, we are obligated to provide that exposure. I think the more we take it upon ourselves to do this, the less likely our three year old neighbor is to be shot.
The founder of City Year, Michael Brown, envisions the national service movement expanding to such an extent that in addition to asking young people where they plan on attending college, we will be asking what they plan to do for their year of service. I graduated with a class of 300. Imagine 50% of my class chose to do a year of service, and each affected on average 2 people. Pretend 50% of all high schoolers in Columbus opted for a year of service and each profoundly impacted 2 people. Ripples start small, with individuals, but I think we must believe in their potential to spread and build upon each other. Finally, we will have a powerful movement of change, but we must take the first step as individuals.
I heard about this today and wanted to write in addition to what I wrote yesterday.
Nora
The way you are choosing to behave contradicts your statement that you do and feel nothing about these tragedies. I think your volunteer work is a very good expression of the "rational and just nature of sympathy."
ReplyDeleteBoswell: "I own, Sir, I have not so much feeling for the distress of others, as some people have, or pretend to have: but I know this, that I would do all in my power to relieve them." Johnson: "Sir, it is affectation to pretend to feel the distress of others, as much as they do themselves. It is equally so, as if one should pretend to feel as much pain while a friend's leg is cutting off, as he does. No, Sir; you have expressed the rational and just nature of sympathy. I would have gone to the extremity of the earth to have preserved this boy."
Just by the way, I am of the opinion that a lot of these apparently sub-human acts may be due to brain lesions we do not yet recognize or understand. It may be that no one failed the perpetrators any more than cancer victims were failed by the people around them. It may simply be that a pernicious force of nature can be expressed through something as marvelous and precious as a human being. An analogy would be a tsunami, horror delivered through the medium of the wondrous ocean.
Aunt Jane, what kind of research is being done with regard to brain lesions?
ReplyDeleteDo you think these lesions are formed due to experiences or that people are born with them? If the latter, how do we explain the mass participation in evil acts by the Nazis and the Soviets after the war, for example.
Take a look at this: http://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/12/1/71
ReplyDeleteGoogle "Phineas Gage" to see about the guy who kind of started the inquiry by surviving a terrible brain injury.
I think there is a lot of evidence that experience makes permanent physical changes in the brain, so your question is very insightful. I think that there is probably a lot to be learned about what happens when nature (a congenital weak point) collides with nurture (the experiences of the person with the inborn vulnerability.) Guess who has a world-class neuroscience program? Oberlin College! How about that, then?