I don’t oppose all wars. …What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. Barack Obama’s first anti-war speech
Sometimes we have to fight back. As I write this bombs are still falling on Ukraine. A mother and her child are killed trying to get into a shelter. Beloved pets left to wander the rubble. This has been going on for far, far too long. So many war crimes committed by Russia. Millions of people have fled the country, and the people still there have to deal with senseless death falling from the sky. We cheer as we watch the Ukrainians bravely fight back against what at first seemed hopeless odds. Sometimes there is no choice but to meet violence with violence. In World War II most of the world had collapsed into authoritarian Red. The only thing that saved us was armed conflict; nothing else would do against Hitler and Tojo. Unbelievable numbers of people died in the resistance but it was sadly necessary. The people we were fighting, the Germans, the Japanese, believed that they too were doing the hard but necessary thing. They also were dying for something they believed in. When it gets this bad we have no choice but to fight. But our goal is to create a world where it doesn’t get that bad. How do we do that? Again, we need systems thinking. We need to go deep enough to really get to the root of the problem. And as always that leads us right back to ourselves.
This war mentality is not just something that lives out there disconnected from everything else. We also have wars in our own minds. Of course we do! This is where war springs from – where else would it come from? And just like those determined Germans thinking they were doing the hard but necessary work of fixing the world, we sometimes declare war on ourselves thinking it is the only way. I know because I did it to myself back when I declared war on myself in high school over the acne cysts. So many of us attack and belittle ourselves. We tell ourselves stories about how unattractive we are, or stupid, or lazy or whatever. And it really hurts. This pain is real and it cripples us. We can’t start to heal until we stop this violence within.
And violence has no place with our children. None whatsoever. And yet we stand by and watch children get hit or screamed at. Stand by and watch as if those kids have no rights of their own. As if they are simply their parent’s property to do with as they please. And how did those parents end up like that? From their own parents. It is a long, sad cycle of pain. Putin’s childhood was quite harsh. He grew up in a traumatizing environment where he was abandoned and bullied. The psychologists, Alice Miller writes:
“Children who are given love, respect, understanding, kindness, and warmth will naturally develop different characteristics from those who experience neglect, contempt, violence or abuse, and never have anyone they can turn to for kindness and affection. Such absence of trust and love is a common denominator in the formative years of all the dictators I have studied.”
She goes on to talk about how harsh Hitler and Stalin’s childhoods were and how that inevitably lead to their acting out later. We seem to have a huge blindspot here. Again the revolutionary vanguard has to have preschool. teachers leading the way. I am quite serious about that. We are not going to get to the world we want without vastly better child raising.
At my daughter’s alternative high school every student has a weekly visit with a therapist. It is built into their schedule. Since everyone does it, it has no stigma. We had been trying to get her to a therapist for years, but now it just happened naturally. And it helps! Why don’t we have at the very, very least this for every child. It costs too much? How expensive is it to have a school shooter, or send someone to prison? What is the cost of a teen committing suicide?
What a good therapist does is help us create a safe place within us. A place where it is OK to know our truth without immediately taking that truth and using as a stick to beat ourselves with. Make no mistake — we all have dark truths within us. Things that we don’t really want to know about ourself. We point at extreme examples like Putin and Hitler and try to “other” them. As if we don’t have those dark seeds within us as well. The very first step is to make peace with that darkness. To not other it and to not lash out at in anger and fear. And this is usually way, way too hard to do on our own, so we find a therapist or powerful personal growth organization to help. And once we secure this first beach of safety we are ready to go on. We are ready to step into Truth.