Community and Guns Again

Another shooting, 26 people dead. Everyone knows. We are hearing calls for government intervention to create a lasting solution to this uniquely American chronic cultural event. They say the government needs to have specialized experts in “threat assessment” give us a new direction of actionable legislation. This is the standard mega culture approach, fix specialized problems with specialist’s words made into law. It is the typical content based method that ignores the context, in this case how community truly functions, or not.

The content approach begins with the guns, the bullets, and then an attempt to understand (read standardize) the shooter type in a profiling sort of way. This profile concept hopes for a means to manage a specialized type of human being within our mega culture of isolation and specialization. If we can identify the outlier human being type as a digital information set “threat”, then we can control it, treat it, contain it, or so the illusion of mega culture management of social issues goes.  No one seems to notice the repeated failure of this approach.

I wrote in  Community and the Assault Rifle  that someone in Aurora Colorado knew the theater shooter was dangerous, that he had the “wrong attitude” to have and use a gun. The community member who knew was Glenn Rotkovich. Glen stopped the Aurora theater shooter from using his commercial firing range for target practice. Now, five months later we have the Newtown Connecticut elementary school shootings. In a community based search for a solution the question would be, who knew? The shooter’s older brother was immediately picked up for police questioning. He quickly acknowledged his younger brother suffered from  chronic mental health issues. Days later a neighbor who stayed with the shooter in his mother’s absence explained that the mother said to never turn your back on him. The father is silent except to the police.

Someone knew. Someone always knows. The brother, the neighbor, someone. They don’t know exactly that the isolated personality intends to fire up to eleven bullets into one first grader after another, but they sense danger,  and they do not know what do with the special knowledge they have. Glen in Aurora kept his gun range safe. His perception of his responsibility was to protect his corner of the world, his business. In previous posts here I discuss isolation and specialization as limiters of wider responsibility within our contemporary mega community. In the end when the threat assessment team submits its report, if it is like before, we will learn someone knew and they did only what was immediate to their own specialized idea of a safe community. They will blame another specialized group, probably mental health experts and move on.

I grew up in a rural area. I was given my first gun at the age of 14. My dad bought it at the local hardware store. The worst thing I did with it was to skip school to go hunting. When I was taught to shoot I was given one bullet at a time even though the gun could carry five. Having one bullet in your gun makes you think, makes you careful and certain. Eventually I carried three, a first shot, the second in the unlikely case that the prey did not move after my first miss, and a third to put down a wounded animal, just in case. Three bullets in the gun, maybe three more in my pocket. Any more ammunition than this reveals one of two things, the gunman is a lousy shot, or a paranoid delusional danger to himself and to others. Gun owners used to be proud of how few bullets they used or carried, but that was when the NRA was advocating for expanded hunting lands, not expanded political rights. I quit the NRA decades ago.

A good guy with a gun is not the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun. This remarkably narrow world view invites a mega community arms race that will result in more gun sales, the NRA’s primary objective. The way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to support the community members who know something in doing more with that information. I’m not suggesting a divisive North Korean tattle tale system that rewards children turning in their parents for taking extra food by giving the snitch children more food. I’m talking about caring, awareness of intention and respect for the community’s well being. In the post Saying nothing  I wrote about how isolation rewards commerce and undermines community. We need to start saying something. Someone knows and that can make all the difference if we say it with caring. Maybe we need fewer guns and more laws, but we need more to care.

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Diversity and Community

If we accept that one key element of community is diversity we, in doing so, accept that we will be in regular contact with people unlike ourselves.  We will have repeated interaction with human beings that have views, practices, assumptions, decision making and other processes that are different than our own.  Sounds challenging, but the alternative is perhaps more difficult, if we believe community is essential.

Years ago I had a friend who was a Native American medicine man.  He explained human diversity in the European context in terms of eyeglasses.

Contacts and glasses use lenses to correct human vision to 20/20, or as close to this standard as possible. We accept the perspective that anything outside 20/20 is incorrect. Why? My friend pointed out that in his culture nearsightedness was a gift that resulted in beautiful fine bead work, and far sightedness in successful hunting. Diversity of sight to him was a gift of creation.  To us it is incorrect because we are required to have a far more uniform experience of life. We must all read traffic signs with equal proficiency. We must stay behind the yellow line or not cross the double line, and this requires correct sight.

I suppose that our culture could have taken a different turn. It could have been audio based where hearing would be corrected to the equivalent of 20/20 so we could all hear the required cultural cues governing public safety and other necessary cultural signals (like the chirping cross walk indicators).  But somewhere, by persons unknown, a decision was made to employ visual communication as our base cultural means of expressing governance.

This visual cultural standard is a powerful metaphor of all that we accept as required conformity. I began wearing glasses when I was 6 years old. My mother responsibly hounded me to wear my glasses. I regularly lost them, broke them, and simply forgot them until they became part of my daily experience of life. I resisted glasses in a way children oppose the unnatural meaningless aspects of life. And then I didn’t.  What would have been my life in a pre-traffic sign culture? How would have my true vision impacted the formation of my Self?

What would community look like if we supported diversity as a gift and did not correct it in one another? How would individuals feel and grow without the imposition of a 20/20 standard of vision, behavior and experience? My friend the healer tried to explain my vision gift to me. And when he succeeded, I felt the lost liberation that might have been and sadness for opportunity lost.  I then understood that I had been victim of the cultural theft of my gift of uncorrected vision. I could have been …

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Why “Intentional” Community?

Human culture began in tribes and clans. It would seem that the tribal unit is the most tested and longest lasting governable body on the planet. Much of the world in still in the tribal phase of cultural evolution.

For example, Afghanistan (population 33,000,000), a country smaller than Texas (population 26,000,0000) has sixteen ethnic groups, made up of more than 150 tribes with an average size of 200,000 members. Each tribe has a culturally distinct sense, however subtle or dramatic, of  belonging, recognition, ritual, education, service, trust and other values that guide their member’s daily lives.  If this number of 200,000 is a governable population scale, the size of Richmond VA, Tacoma WA, Little Rock AR, we could assume it is the scale of “natural community”.  But Richmond,  Tacoma and Little Rock are not populated by people who are blood relatives with centuries of common experience. While these city’s scale might lend them to natural community, their diversity of background and ethnicity might indicate a smaller scale population would encourage natural community. So, what is the the number of people who would tend to move with some sort of natural impulse toward community?

Our American culture has a set of guiding principles contained primarily in the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. When these documents were created the scale of our population was far smaller than today. The population of Philadelphia in 1776, for example, was approximately 30,000 with its diversity being essentially among Quakers, Anglicans and Presbyterians, all white European, English speaking “tribesmen”.

In the 21st Century we still apply these documents and their principles to vastly larger scale populations, yet the Philadelphia population today exceeds 1,500,000 with 19 cultural groups with more than a 5% share of the population. Despite these radical changes in scale and diversity, there are “strict constructionists” of our Constitution bent on ignoring these fundamental contextual changes.

Given these shifts in cultural scale and diversity, it seems irrational to assume that our American guiding principles can be effectively applied to today’s American culture in any way similar to when these principles were first defined. When our Constitution was written there was an inherent assumption of community as context for its application.  Assumed natural American community has vanished. White men who own land are no longer the electorate, yet generally we still harbor a mythical assumption of shared natural American community when applying our long ago  defined national cultural values.

I find this antiquated assumption of natural community both amazing and ridiculous. One of our national political parties recently ran a candidate for President who openly dismissed 47% of the population in favor of this myth of unified American culture being still comprised of white males of wealth. Amazing and ridiculous.

If we take a lesson from our current state of divided national affairs, political, economic, cultural, nearly everything, it is that we cannot assume that community will occur naturally in America, or in any part of the developed world outside the tribal cultures. Our contemporary mega cultural scale and its unfathomable diversity precludes historically  “natural” formation. We must, if we want community, build it with conscious intention.  This is the contemporary challenge.

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Why the Iona Model of Community?

The 6th century Iona community changed the world. It was a small community of dedicated capable people, some of whom could read and think as evidenced by what they left to culture.  Legend has it that the monks of Iona traveled out from their Scottish island and repaired bridges throughout continental Europe during the Dark Ages so that pilgrims could more easily make their journey to the Holy Land.

The Iona community members were builders and engineers who’s inheritors eventually “signed” their work in the Gothic Cathedrals with subtle, often hidden, Celtic crosses. There is very compelling evidence  (The Mysteries of Chartres Cathedral by Louis Charpentie) that it was at Iona that the simple half sphere keystone stone arch

evolved into the far more sophisticated stronger Gothic arch.

As the Dark Ages ended this new arch appeared “out of nowhere”, with no preceding or transitional form, in the 11th Century Gothic Cathedrals . The small band of Iona monks had used insight, mathematics and modeling to create something entirely new and culturally gamechanging.

Without computers or slide rules, the monks reasoned that there was a more efficient means of carrying weight over an open span than the keystone stone arch. They elegantly applied the stability of the triangle to the arch.

The Iona community discovered the connection between this new arch technology and the hyperbolic curve. The monks drew floor plans of hypothetical cathedrals on the ceiling of their “laboratories” and hung upside down string arches from the points of the spans, forming natural hyperbolic Gothic arches, on their up-side-down floor plans in order to engineer the structure.

The process of moving from the simple stone arch to the Gothic arch is essentially a process of insight. If this discovery could happen on an isolated Dark Age wind blown Scottish island, it is theoretically possible that similar insights can happen today in small communities of insightful people.

New Iona is about discovering the conditions that foster community insight.  What the Iona community accomplished has touched us all in large and small ways.

The Iona members integrated the Christian cross with the Celtic cross, and they integrated the principle of structural triangulation into the spherical arch. Insight leads to integration, which leads to change. It’s a useful model for community.

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Intentional Community

I’m going to try again. I still have the same goal, to create a community intentionally that has real time smells, tastes, tactile experiences, sounds and images. I am interested in community where ideas are valued in relation to their tangible outcome in human and global life. This community is for some things and against others. It has judgement. I believe in this aspect, the development of judgement, it is regularly in opposition to the abstract nonjudgmental social cyber world, and for the cyber world that began the Arab Spring. To discover the way between beauty and ugliness, we need both. I trust life will supply both in sufficient measure.  What we do with this supply of good and evil is judged by this blog to be the path to meaning in community.

I am sitting at a computer that is located on a Pennsylvania USA farm.

It is a very physical experience to live here in this small community. There is joy here and suffering. stuff happens.

Yesterday I gave a riding lesson to a young girl who is sensitive and seems always to find a connection with the horse she rides, and she rides several. This girl is calm and moves in a mindful way that never threatens the safety of a horse. They trust her. Yesterday I was teaching her a very technical riding movement called a flying lead change. This change causes the horse to create a very precise rebalance in motion in order to change direction.

I can describe this flying lead change in foot falls. When a horse is cantering left on a left lead, the three beats of each stride are, (1) right hind, (2) left hind together with right front, and finally (3) left front. A right lead is (1) left hind, (2) right hind together with left front, and finally (3) right front. To change from left lead to right lead the horse must do the following, (1) right hind, (2) left hind together with right front,  (3) left front. (1) right hind,  CHANGE (1) left hind, (2) right hind together with left front, and finally (3) right front.

The (1), (2), (3) beat of the canter footfalls

Got it? The change, which horses do naturally in the wild, is a very simple yet complex “skipping” motion at  the (1) right hind,  to (1) left hind. We teach horses to do this change on command because the horse’s balance with a rider requires greater precision, in order to be safe, when the rider directs the horse.

I am teaching this 12 year old girl to do this with a horse. It’s a dance.  Her mother is a rider and a professional woman. She is watching. I am slowly and methodically having the girl do the steps that lead to the (1), (1) change. Her mother is constantly interrupting me and telling me that I should explain the concept, the pieces to her daughter so she “will understand”.  I am giving the girl pieces of the complete experience, one by one, without explanation or analysis in order to insure the girl’s direct experience.

The mother leaves, probably frustrated at my obvious ignorance.  After about 20 minutes of varied success and failure, each of which the girl feels directly, she gets the horse to do a flying lead change on command, her first. The mother sees this from a distance and comes over.  Again, the mother instructs me to explain the experience. The girl is smiling, she felt it, a 1100 pound horse “skipping” underneath her. It is stimulating. I refuse to steal the smile from her face with intellectualizing of the moment.

I am amazed, then drained, then sad at how the mother denies the importance of the experience in favor of conceptual understanding.  It is this space between experience and concept I struggle with in teaching and in blogging.  Experience is the best teacher. I will work to be in the experience of blogging. Until I cannot.

If you have a perspective, please make a comment.   

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Closed For Repairs A Summary Blog

I’m done here, at least for a while, perhaps forever.  I am leaving some things here that I wrote. If I get an email saying that someone left a comment, I will respond, maybe write a post about a comment. Dialogue toward concrete action is all that matters to me.  If you have that, please comment.

I feel I have more to do in the world of earth and air than here.

Farewell.

Bob

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The Brother’s Keeper Element of Community

This is a photo of a group therapy session at San Quentin prison.

image thanks to http://www.eideard.com

Jails have jail keepers. It is more clear in this circumstance that one human being is keeping another. It is a place to start when thinking about how in various ways and at various times we are our brother’s keeper.

This picture is for me very American. It reflects codes and standards of how we must act and treat in a human keeper situation. The priorities are very clear in the manifestation of these standards.  It seems obvious that clean is the top priority, followed maybe by uniformity. The cages are all the same. The monochromatic setting devoid of texture is another indication that everything must be even, the same, equal.

Sensory deprivation makes people crazy. There are studies beginning back in the 1960s at Stanford that demonstrated this. The fact that the prisoners in the picture are receiving “group therapy” is a pathetic cruel irony. It is a wellness program located in a toxic waste dump.  My point is that standards and codes are ineffective without the substance of humanity. And thus in real community when it falls to us to become our brother’s keeper, the substance of being that keeper is within us. There are no codes or standards that will result in responsible keeping.

This is a third world prison. Not a pretty sight, but more humane, I feel, than the American prison.

There is texture in this picture that provides sensory stimulation.  It is clean enough, the inmates are fed. It is awful, but less dehumanizing than being in a cage and being told you are receiving therapy. It is more honest.

In community we are our brother’s keeper. My neighbor across the road is losing his mind.  I returned his garbage can to his house after the garbage truck came and emptied it, and he called the police.  The police man told me to ignore him. There is noting that can be done “until something happens”.  This is the standard of freedom. We must wait for my neighbor to become a criminal or to be the victim of one.  Ignore him, I was told.  Be like the monochromatic room, be neutral, treat the old man with equality. The code is to protect his right to talk to himself in his driveway, to leave his garbage can out by the road all week long, to be alone as his mind erodes until “something happens”.  Then the keepers of the codes and standards can and will act. Perhaps he will receive group therapy then. Until then the garbage truck will keep the garbage from piling up. Clean is a priority.

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Human Spacial Syntax – Another Element of Community

A big part of what I am attempting to do in this blog is identifying elements of community. Someday when I have posted several defied elements, I will catalog them is some sort of order, but now I am just throwing them out for consideration.  Here comes another.

Bees have hives.

People have houses, condos, RVs, mansions, bungalows, yurts, tipis, igloos, and semidetached zero lotline developments.  We are versatile, but are we satisfied and at peace in our space?

The stress of refugee camp living offers a potential laboratory for studying human basic spacial needs, and perhaps the answer to understanding fundamental human spacial syntax.  Animals, and we are mammals, reveal their core brain stem impulses and needs under stress. I like Felix Stark of Cologne Germany http://www.formstark.com . He concluded that human beings feel most stable in a communal circle at a scale of around 20 family units. Or more simply, he is an advocate of the “sitting around the campfire” principle. The result is his Sphere Refugee Tent.

http://www.greenmuze.com/climate/heat/763-the-sphere-refugee-tent.html

NGOs that address the global refugee challenge are more used to seeing large arrays of small separate tents and shacks, laid out in endless disorienting lines that create a sense of non-identity, a high incidence of violence against women, and crime. Why?

This kind of dwelling layout lends itself to the needs not of the inhabitants, but of the providers. This is evidence of another human impulse, the efficacy impulse that says it is easier and thus more important to our culture to deliver goods and pick up waste in a linear arrangement above all else.  This is the impulse that believes in a culture of effective living through better garbage collection. It is the technocrat impulse that ignores the greater cost of crime,  lost hope and crushed creative productivity. In this model the requirements of commerce trump the syntax of instinctual human need.

In the blog post The Scale Of Our Experience I addressed the principle of scale as an element of community. Here I am addressing something different, the syntax or arrangement of the content of our community. We have the skills and the information to design resonant community on every level, yet we appear to be locked into a pattern of providing ourselves with dysfunctional spacial syntax. This shows up in our collective focus on garbage collection, that admittedly contains disease, but this pattern also ignores social disease that results in a dysfunctional spacial syntax that in turn opposes the human spirit’s hope, safety and creativity.  This is a critical element of community, and it is a huge blind spot in western culture. Spacial syntax might be one of the most significantly meaningful elements of community. I believe it is.

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How Do We Download the Common Sense App?

I thought when I wrote the previous blog post it would get comments on what amounts to an illegal/unconstitutional confiscation of property (firearms) in the hypothetical story where Police Chief Bill takes the guns away. I posed the story as a question between individual judgement and action, i.e. a local policeman sees an obviously insane well armed man, and simply takes his guns in order to protect the local community, versus and the far more cumbersome and complicated Constitutional law issue in the context of mega culture. This is a question of local judgement contrasted with the ultimate top-down contemporary mega community standard of the U.S. Constitution.

In my view, Jefferson and the other authors of the U.S. Constitution assumed small community as the context for this guiding document. I also believe that they, as persons of sound individual judgement and action, assumed small communities (the population of Philadelphia in 1776 was approximately 30,000) would produce individual leadership guided by, not imprisoned within, the rather short and un-detailed Constitution that they left to us as a moral compass. I do not believe these wise men intended the Constitution as a rigid rule for mega community that would eventually result in granting person-hood to corporations and interpret money as free speech.

In other words, in a sensible sane world of community, Police Chief Bill in the story would have been supported in his confiscation of the insane man’s sophisticated weapons, and gun range operator Glenn Rotkovich in Aurora Colorado would have felt sufficient community support to share his good individual judgement that a local mentally ill person was a threat to the community. With this community support for individual common sense, the killing and maiming of dozens of people enjoying a movie would have been prevented. Community common sense would have trumped mega community isolation, which is far more dangerous than a gun with a 100 round magazine. The NRA is looking out for the guns. Who is looking out for common sense?

“Now the Senate is looking for ‘moderate’ judges, ‘mainstream’ judges. What in the world is a moderate interpretation of a constitutional text? Halfway between what it says and what we’d like it to say?”

– Supreme Court Judge Antonin Scalia,  Chapman University address 2005

Another view …

“And what, monks, is the Middle Way realized by the Thus-Come-One, which gives vision and understanding, which leads to calm, penetration, enlightenment, to Nirvana?

It is just this Noble Eightfold Path, namely: Right View, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration.”

– The Buddha, North India 2,500 years ago in

Another view …

“Thirteen virtues necessary for true success: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility.” – Benjamin Franklin, Philadelphia 18th century

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Community and the Assault Rifle

As the news media, now morphed into an entrainment media, continues to ring every last drop of ratings out of the Aurora, CO movie theater shootings, I reflect on the breakdown of community.  TV anchor persons analyze the event with the skill of a jr. high school student dissecting a biology lab frog. Like the guts of the formaldehyde pickled reptile, it is unfamiliar, ugly and curiously strange, but no one in the lab thinks it’s exciting except the teacher.

 

This shooting was an act of insanity. There are laws intended to stop people who are insane from owning guns. Once again these laws did not work.  They failed to stop a tragedy because in the mega community the same forces that work to push every individual into specialization also push people toward isolation. This man was part of a university community, and State and City  community, and still he attained a degree of isolation sufficient for his intense insanity to go essentially unnoticed.

A mail carrier or package delivery person presumably delivered the 60 plus boxes of ammunition, special firearm accoutrements, and body armor sent to his home from internet vendors. Was that a clue? If it was, it went unnoticed.  But he did try to join a local gun club with a firing range so he could practice shooting.

This insane gun owner contacted Glenn Rotkovich at a local gun range, who said after the shootings, “I get picked up pretty fast on somebody’s attitude. And firearm safety and the things that happen are all based on one main thing, and that’s attitude. And somebody with a bad attitude, it always shows up no matter what you do when you talk to him for any length of time, that attitude comes out and that was — that’s the main decision factor, is attitude.” Glenn didn’t think this gun owner had the correct attitude to shoot guns safely, and he denied his application to join the gun club and shoot on the firing range.  Way to go Glenn.

Glenn did what he was supposed to do, control and keep safe his specialized piece of the greater community.  Should Glenn have done more? Not by mega community standards.  Glen did what was right. He kept his club and range safe. This is how isolation and specialization works.

Back in the little town of my childhood where Bill the police chief kept order (remember Bill  from the post The Scale Of Our Experience ?) Glenn would have seen Bill at the barbershop across from the volunteer fire station and said to him, “I had a real fruitcake come by the range the other day”.  They would have talked and laughed, and Bill would have gone to see the insane man.  Or more probably Bill would have said, “Yup you know Margret, over at the Post Office, she told me about him and a bunch of packages he’s been receiving. Officer Gene and I was up to his house and had a chat with him. Told him we had to check his guns for finger prints, loaded them all in the patrol car and took em to the station. Don’t think he’ll be needin those fancy guns. We left him a .22 for squirrel huntin.” No isolation, not much specialization, just community versatility, and small community caring at work.

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