I only have to say the words "Gun Control" to spark a heightened energy in people. It's one of the new taboo topics. It used to just be politics and religion. Now we can add Covid, Vaccines, Guns, Health care and many others. My belief for all of these is that we're fighting the wrong battle and asking the wrong questions.
If our REAL goal was to heal, then surely we'd work to find some common ground. Instead we bicker about rights and being right in an argument that will never end. For me it's not about the number of school shootings, or terrorist acts that cause me to move to the side of opposing the availability of guns; it's that this is the way young people are dealing with their dysregulated emotions.
What is wrong with our society that is creating this amount of angst, rage, and negative emotions in the first place. Many countries have domestic violence issues, the US obviously has the school shootings, for some it's radicalisation of its people. Add a little ignorance and racism, sexism, and many other 'isms' to the mix and here we have it. A perfect storm.
What can we do differently? With all of our talk of anti-bullying, fair treatment, equality, and neurodiversity inclusion we sure do miss the mark much of the time. Infact it doesn't even have to be much of the time, just enough that too many people are suffering unnecessarily. Having said that, there are many efforts to reverse this. There's a great film called "The Dhamma Brothers" about a regular prison, with murderers, rapists and other serious crimes where they introduced Vipassana meditation, which is quite an intense version of meditation. Of course the outcome was awesome, and very positive, reducing fights in the prison, transforming those who took the program to a much more peaceful member of the community.
In Australia there's a program at schools where a guy called Hugh van Cuylenburg had a theory about why the children in India he worked with were apparently so happy with so little. "These people practise gratitude, empathy and mindfulness every single day. They literally stopped their days to practise it." He then started a school program called The Resilience Project where every day, the school would stop and practice these 3 things gratitude, empathy, and mindfulness for a short period of time. After of course the usual obstacles he got it up and running and it had many positive impacts on the schools he introduced it to.
These are examples of the right question and answer. Forget about the guns argument. We need to get to a way of raising the energy vibration of young people. THEN when everyone is in that calm state - teach the three R's. Not
'riting,
reading and
'rithmetic,
but rather
REGULATION,
ROLE PLAYED HEALTHY COMMUNICATION
RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS
Change your POV on what the question is. Maybe if there were American Ninja Warriors in school, there'd be less school shootings. Maybe if meditation was the first thing a company did in the morning instead of their daily meeting, there'd be much more respect in the workplace. Anti-bullying isn't working. Let them FEEL what it's like to feel good. Trying to fit neurodiverse people into a normative structured education, or workplace isn't working. Develop newer systems that are around now but are not government funded, and are not enough given the number of neurodiverse kids. As for work - the 9-5 is dead. It doesn't work for a large number of people or businesses. Clock watching, mistrust of employees, legal slavery where although the policy says X, the unwritten policy says that there is no work life balance and you should be happy about that, is done! Start asking the right questions that effect the CORE of our dysfunctions as a society. Then we won't have so much healing to do costing the government 100 times more than if they'd put in some real guidelines for the above.
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