WHEN A PERSON MURDERS SOMEONE, WE ALL DIE A LITTLE, AND OTHER PONDERINGS THIS SUNDAY
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 30, 2011
* * *
MOM ADMITS KILLING KIDS
My expectations, when I came back from South Africa in 1969, were that I wouldn’t make it to the end of the century, and here I am eleven years into the new. It has given me the opportunity to ponder a world that is having a nervous breakdown that I never expected to see, a world that seemingly has everything and nothing at all.
* * *
A well educated mother with a very successful husband, living in an upscale neighborhood here in Tampa, picked up her thirteen year old son from soccer practice drove him home, then shot and killed him.
She then went upstairs where her honor student sixteen-year-old daughter was studying and shot her in the back of the head. She lost the courage to make it a murder/suicide.
The mother is 50, the father is 48, a US Army colonel currently out of the country on assignment in the Middle East.
The crime of these two young promising teenagers was that of back talking and bad mouthing their mother. She had had it and lost it. They lost their lives for this crime. We have lost the contribution of two young people who were on their way to making meaningful contributions to American society.
It is the DNA of our times to think this mother is disturbed with some psychobabble description of her sickness, failing to realize the seeds of her sickness are in us all.
It was not an impulsive act. The mother planned the killings purchasing a 38-caliber pistol for this precise act. It was not a happy home as police cars were periodically at the home. Why she did it only she and God know, or maybe that is not the case.
I don’t know her, or her children, or her husband or actually anything about the family other than what is in the newspaper or on television but I mourn them all.
Intelligence is not enough to get any of us through this life, especially if it is only cognitive intelligence. It never was. It is not easy being a human being. This life gets more demanding, more ruthless, more punishing every day, mainly, I believe, because we look for guidance outside ourselves, for coping through some outside agency.
We are still programmed, but not to be self-sufficient, or not to trust our own instincts. We have lost our spiritual connection with the land, with each other, with our heritage, with our culture, and therefore with ourselves.
* * *
COPS AND COP KILLINGS
For a decade (1970 – 1980), I was a police consultant as an organizational development psychologist, consulting police departments from Connecticut to Miami along the eastern seaboard.
My studies have been used in course work at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, and the University of North Carolina. I wrote my master’s thesis and doctor’s dissertation on my empirical work in the field.
I conducted long-term studies in a number of police departments including Fairfax, Virginia, Raleigh, North, Carolina, Richmond, Virginia, St. Petersburg, Florida, and Miami, Florida. I have given executive development seminars for senior police officers in Seattle, San Francisco, Denver, Kansas City, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City, and Orlando and Tampa, Florida for the American Management Association.
And I have ridden more than a thousand hours with police officers on the job over the course of this work. I mention this involvement as prelude to saying I have developed great affection and respect for police, and the job.
There is no profession, in my experience, that sees society as naked as do the police. Yet, police are made up of ordinary men and women who have a sense of duty and honor to protect and serve the community.
Police deal in human combustibles every day and of a variety that no priest, rabbi, minister or Moslem cleric, psychologist or psychiatrist is likely to ever encounter.
My work was with them when many were called “pigs,” abuse which they took and still did their duty. I have been present when they have been spit upon and thrown up on, pushed and shoved, showers with the most vile language I have ever heard, from both men and women, young people, too, and they showed restrain. It was often hard to watch.
My wonder is where society would be today without police, without their sense of duty and their capacity to absorb hate, vilification and societal pathology?
Eleven police officers have already been killed this year in the State of Florida, two only a few days ago in St. Petersburg, men in the flower of life, with wives and families. They were attempting to arrest a felon whose marriage had gone awry. The felon’s brother is a champion boxer, and a solid citizen.
* * *
As one who has never owned a gun, never gone hunting in his life, only fired a gun during military training when in the US Navy, I look at guns, the gun control lobby, and the whole violence with guns from a rather unique perspective.
Guns don’t kill. People who own guns do. Why do people own guns? Why do people own assault weapons, weapons that are designed for warfare? Why do people have a weapon in the glove compartment of their vehicles? Indeed, why does a jogger carry a gun while jogging? A jogger recently killed a man while jogging who attempted to rob him here in the Tampa Bay area.
The short answer may be – I say may be because I don’t know – because of fear. The longer answer is that we have always been a violent society since our earliest days.
The Pilgrims brought guns to this country to hunt and then fight off the Indians. The early settlers would feel naked without a weapon. We have made national heroes of Daniel Boone, and James Fennimore Cooper's fictional gun totters in his Leather Stocking Sagas. During the "The Age of Jackson," senators and congressmen would feel naked without a weapon during legislative sessions.
The cartoon, Doonesbury, is currently lampooning Congressmen for carrying guns as if this is unique to the American character, which it is not.
Chances are we never would have won the American Revolutionary War without the “Minute Men.” There is one story of that early war in 1777, when it was going bad for the Americans, and General John Burgoyne sent out a company of men to flush out the Americans north of New York City and take prisoners. Not a single British soldier returned.
Bearing arms is a right in the American constitution, and having that right or denying that right would be even more insane than was prohibition (18th amendment) in 1919 and then repealed in 1933 (21st amendment). Prohibition gave birth to speak easies and Al Capone. You cannot legislate morality. Morality is always in the mind of the time.
It is interesting to report as a non-gun citizen that most of our celebrated belief in individualism has eroded to the point of being nearly totally gone. The right to bare arms is apparently the last vintage of that individualism that still exists.
Rather than paying so much attention to guns and gun control, I think it would be time better spent paying attention to the evolution of our American culture. We are changing. And with change chronic perturbations need attention. We might start with why we are so self-hating and how we might rectify this draining predilection.
* * *
ARE HUMAN BEINGS BY NATURE THEIVES?
When New Orleans suffered the terrible effects of Hurricane Katrina, my heart went out to the desperate straits of most citizens. What I wasn’t prepared for was the terrible looting.
Then I thought of the Riots of Watts, Chicago, and Detroit when ordinary citizens looted the stores in which they shopped as if, given the circumstances, they had a right to loot, or to break the law.
I recent days, I’ve watched the peaceful marches for regime change in Egypt collapse into street riots, burning automobiles, breaking windows, torching commercial and public buildings, and, then most unbelievable of all, looting the Egyptian Museum of cultural artifacts that go back to the beginning of our common civilization.
Who would do this? How would students committed to building a better society resort to this cultural carnage? What gives anyone permission to take their anger out on merchants and officials, who in the main are good and decent people?
People who devote their lives to public service, contrary to stories on the media, are in the main good and decent individuals. I wouldn’t want to change places with them in a million years. But somebody, thank God, is willing to make the sacrifice and endure the abuse that public service entails.
Remember this, the media don’t sustain themselves on good news. They don’t sustain themselves on pictures of tranquility and peaceful assembly. They don’t sustain themselves on people doing the mundane things that Erving Goffman wrote about in “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life” (1959). Media are looking for stories that get our attention, the more the macabre the better, as the public feeds on the sensational aspect of otherwise ordinary existence. It is part of our appetite for collective insanity.
* * *
Are we by nature thieves? I wonder. When I was a young executive with a chemical company, we had a meeting of top managers in Chicago. Each manager at his placemat had a cigarette lighter with a diamond embedded in the casing along with the company’s logo and date of the conference.
We took a break, and I came back and my lighter was gone. Everyone knew I didn’t smoke, but my mother did, and I was going to give her the lighter. I would imagine at the time the lighter was worth about $1,000, ten times that in today’s dollars. None of those executives were hurting for cash or perks, and no hotel employee took it, as it was stipulated there would be no interruptions.
One of those top executives was a thief, pure and simple.
Why? I don’t know. I’ve tried to answer it for forty years. My senses keep being bombarded with the idea that thievery is natural to us, if we think we can get away with it, or justify it – Fisher doesn’t smoke – we steal!
Material possessions have never meant much to me. Perhaps it is because I come from so little, I’m not sure. But our society, indeed, Western civilization more specifically, has made material wealth important, which brings me to my next pondering.
* * *
WHERE IS THE CHURCH WHEN WE NEED IT?
Culture always starts with religion, leastwise this is the case of the last thousand years or so. When we think of culture, we usually think of European culture and the Renaissance. Islam and Jewish culture were underway long before the Renaissance came.
The origins of science, commerce, poetry, art, and yes, tolerance did not originate with European Christianity. The Moors from Africa, the Muslims, if you well, brought those gifts to Europe in the eighth century.
The Moors dominated Spain, which was then the seat of learning, for nearly eight hundred years (711 – 1492). Their dominance ended the same year Columbus discovered America (1492).
This period was also called “The Golden Age of Jewish Culture in Spain.” Judaism flourished under Muslim rule, as the Moors were far more tolerant of Jews than Christians. It was the Christians that established the Spanish Inquisition and persecuted non-Christians or ostracized Jews who would not convert to Christianity. It is all a matter of our Western history.
Christianity, both Catholicism and Protestantism, has reason to celebrate its cultural heritage, but it owes a deep debt to Muslim and Jewish cultures, which co-existed rather well for centuries.
Now, we have Tunisia, Yemen, Jordan and Egypt in a state of turmoil with little Israel right in the middle of this instability with few aware much less interested in a common history that Judaism and Islam once enjoyed during their “golden age.”
Religion, whatever the book that justifies its existence, is a human group. Religious denominations have all had rocky histories. And religion, whatever the naysayers may say, such as Christopher Hitchens, have had an important, no, vital role in the history of mankind. Most people believe in God – all three great religions believe in the same God – because God is a way to get outside oneself to see more clearly what is inside.
* * *
Even worshiping the same God has not made life any easier. We are in a period of transition.
Pitrim Sorokin wrote that this transition would be painful, but inevitable, that religions would lose their way, and as a consequence, so would their followers. The sociologist wrote these words three-quarters of a century ago:
“We are seemingly between two epochs the dying Sensate culture of our magnificent yesterday, and the coming Ideational culture of the creative tomorrow. We are living, thinking, and acting at the end of a brilliant six-hundred-year-long Sensate day” (Social and Cultural Dynamics, Volume III, page 535).
This explains why we are so materialistic, so preoccupied with our sexuality, so superfluous in our motivation, and so ambivalent in the choices we make.
Sorokin predicted we would become increasingly fatalistic, increasingly enamored of fantasies, the fanatical and the transitory, increasingly self-abusing and self-destroying, increasingly skeptical of law and order and social restrain, indeed, increasingly out-of-control and therefore suicidal, homicidal and genocidal. Like the phoenix, we would rise out of our own self-destruction to a new creativity.
Wars, he said, would become more devastatingly senseless and monstrous as we fought our way through our dying Sensate to the new Ideational day.
* * *
By the accident of my birth, I carry the toxins of this insanity in my genetic code. When I was a born, I never ate meat on Friday, I went to Mass and Communion every week, I married didn’t practice birth control nor did I believe in divorce.
Likewise, my Jewish friends, whether orthodox or not, married Jews, practiced their faith, kept to the strict code of observing the Sabbath and the diet of the Torah.
Catholics didn’t marry Protestants or Protestants Catholics. Both Christian faiths, they kept in the main separate from each other.
That has all changed in this period of transition and not necessarily for the worse. Yet, some aspects of that early training stay with us. I still don’t believe in abortion, that life begins at conception. However, I have divorced. I no longer go to Mass, and I infrequently attend church, and then it is usually a Baptist church, as my wife, Beautiful Betty, prefers that.
My Jewish friends often marry gentiles, who often convert to Judaism, although born Catholic. On the other hand, I’ve known Jews who have converted to Christianity as well.
Most Jews I know, even those that do not attend synagogue, observe the Sabbath and the Jewish diet. Moreover, Jewish respect for knowledge and the diligence required in pursuit of it has not diminished from any Jews I know.
The Protestant work ethic has influenced my own development in high school and at university. Less apparent is my tolerance for people who differ with my cultural roots. For example, I have always been surprised at the antipathy towards people of Islam and Judaism, or for minorities for that matter of any ilk. We’re told that education liberates us from such hatreds and fears, but my parents could hardly be called educated.
That said I’ve encountered bias against Catholics, sometimes of the most virulent kind, but I never thought to feel hatred or fear when I traveled through or worked in Islamic countries when I was young. True, I was ignorant of Islam but never thought to see the person I was dealing with as other than a businessman. Call me naïve but I was attracted to Jewish students in college, but never thought of them as Jewish, but simply the smartest ones in the subject at hand.
During my Christmas vacations while at university, I would spend a good deal of time at the library. My mother once asked, “Do you see any of your friends at the library?” I told her only my Jewish friends, which was true. I suppose a lot of college students partied during my era on holidays, but I wasn’t so inclined or felt I could afford it, academically.
* * *
It has been my experience in working across a good part of this world that most people, whatever their cultural programming, are decent and most comfortable living among their own kind without hassles or confrontations.
Religious leaders once were the messengers of tolerance and understanding but too often today they are possessed with the same toxic fears of ethnic assimilation that terrorist use so effectively to keep us hostage to their sickness and demands.
There was a time I thought I would be a priest, a Jesuit priest, because I had heard Jesuits were given great freedom to study where knowledge took them. I would imagine had that happened, given my mindset, I would by now have been excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church as a troublemaker.
Why? Because I would challenge many of its tenets, including the infallibility authority of the pope, why priests couldn’t marry, why women couldn’t become priests, why homosexual men or women couldn’t become priests, and I would have demanded (I’m good at demanding) that all priests that had abused children be not only removed from the presence of children, but be counseled to redirect their lives to useful pursuits.
Sickness is sickness, and one type of sickness is not to be esteemed more or less than another. We are all fallible, weak and needy human beings, all of us.
* * *
HUMAN RIGHTS, DICTATORS AND SOCIAL UNREST
Some fifty years ago, when I was working in South America, I made a call on the chief chemist of a bauxite (aluminum) refinery in Jamaica. He was a black man who had studied at Stanford University where he acquired his Ph.D. With me was an assistant, that I must admit wasn’t involved in much of the conversation. As we were driving across Jamaica, he finally cut into the conversation and said, “I can’t believe what terrible conditions these people in.”
The Jamaican chemist turned to him, “Don’t attempt to judge another’s culture by your own standards. Whatever you think you see, it is a lie.”
That was the end of that discussion, but the comment has stayed with me all these years because I know it to be so true.
* * *
The President of the United States, in my view, misuses his bully pulpit and influence by advocating “human rights” as he perceives them to be as American standards. It would seem that he believes it is innocuous to say, “everyone wants the right to free speech, the right of assembly, and the right to free elections.”
The problem with such a declaration is that it is better to be worked out through diplomatic channels fully understanding where the country is in terms of stability, and democracy.
It would seem that only spasmodically is our foreign policy prudent in this way. A nation is no different than an individual. You can lead the individual to water but you cannot force him to drink, even if it would save his life.
Remember those crying for democracy have within their midst those people who are looting and stealing and shooting or throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at police. The unsavory element always seems attracted to chaos. There are other ways to change.
The Czech “Velvet Revolution” of 1989 was led by the poet Vaclav Havel who was not histrionic or given to pyrotechnics. He did not seek retribution of the abuses of power of the Communist regime through vengeance, as did Robespierre of the French monarchy in the French Revolution. Havel led to the establishment of a stable government. Robespierre gave birth to the Reign of Terror.
Power has a way of corrupting, and it is unusual when it doesn’t corrupt in regime change.
The current issue of the Smithsonian (February 2011) has an article on George Washington, “The Reluctant President.”
After the Revolutionary War, Americans wanted to make him king, and when he refused that they elected him president unanimously (the only time). They then wanted him to be president for life. He refused that, too, serving two terms glad to escape back to his home at Mount Vernon. He set the precedence.
Nelson Mandela set a similar precedence in South Africa. He avoided Civil War, which people feared when I lived in South Africa in 1968. He made peace with the government that had instituted the draconian practice of apartheid, which gives some testament to the amazing man that he is.
What Washington, Havel and Mandela have in common is an enter calm, a moral center, a compass that directs their behavior. They were soldiers of the mind in different ways but they understood retribution or insane vengeance would make of them what they fought to overcome.
* * *
The stability of the world depends on the stability of the Middle East. This cannot be argued. But imagine if China were today reduced to civil war with its tens of millions, indeed, hundreds of millions of people still living and surviving in a putative nineteenth century existence, what then?
It is my view, given the situation in China, that the government, which could be called a dictatorship the same as Egypt, would introduce utter chaos should it lose its grip on control.
Dissidents don’t rule, dissidents disrupt.
Dissidents are driven by dreams, by ideas and ideals that are hypothetical and therefore untried.
Dissidents have no interest, time or inclination to examine their own motives or draconian drives.
Dissidents have no inclination to either suspect or inspect their means, as they believe their ends justify them.
Dissidents see themselves as good and those in power as evil, all issues are black or white, never gray.
Dissidents don’t have the time or the inclination to think of the disruption or the repercussions of the disruption to wholesale chaos, or to the impact on ordinary citizens, citizens who may not have had the advantages they have enjoyed to luxuriate in idealism.
Dissidents believe they know what is best for the majority when they are always in the minority.
* * *
We in the West think everyone wants to be American or European, that everyone wants our form of government and to adhere to our ideologies, wants to be Americanized, Europeanized, Westernized, when much of the world would prefer to be left alone.
This is not a history lesson but much of the damage that now is around Western ears goes back to World War I, and even earlier in the administration of Theodore Roosevelt who decided that America should be an empire. Well, now we are an Empire in Decline, and are having to deal with that fact.
* * *
These are some of the things crossing my mind of a Sunday morning.
* * *