Looking back to go forward

Controlling our Outrage

Again.   

Revised December 14, 2020

Not long ago we had in place more controls over the passionate emotion of outrage. We can return to these controls to resolve our polarity now.

The Creator blessed us humans with the shared emotion of outrage. Throughout our past, we used it to collectively to unite around real threats to ourselves and others of our kind. The emotion blessed us. Misused, it has cursed us. Jesus himself encountered it from before his birth, and charted his way, recorded in the Gospels of the Bible, to defeat threats of uncontrolled outrage and thrive together. It’s an easily missed part of the first Christmas story.

 

We are again in a time of uncontrolled outrage. We have been watching trusted people collecting power to eliminate others of our own kind. These are no longer dangers of a rogue bear or tiger bent on human flesh. It’s time to direct our attention against uncontrolled outrage against our own flesh and blood (see NPR’s podcast “The Hidden Brain,” from last week).

 

Following is a story from an acquaintance of mine. I first heard him tell this story decades ago. Last week I requested and he sent me his own words of this story.*

 

When I was a young boy, my grandfather, father, and I travelled some distance from our home community to go fishing at a spot ‘known only to my grandfather.’ Having driven as far as roads would take us, we got out of my grandfather’s old beater, and gathering our gear, set out on the trail toward this favourite fishing spot. We soon found ourselves in the middle of a deep, dark woods making our way along a narrow trail where, with each passing step, the way ahead and behind became less and less perceptible. On more than a few occasions I expressed my concern to my grandfather; each time he sought to reassure me.

 

Finally, unable to hold in my anxiety, fearful about what lay ahead of us, even more anxious that the way back would never again be found, I tugged frantically on my Grandfather’s arm. “Grandfather, Grandfather,” I cried out, “We’ll be lost! We’ll be lost!” Sensing the rising fear in me, my Grandfather knelt down, and after reassuring me more fully, taught me a lesson, one that has guided my thinking and actions from that day to this. In the mixture of languages that was his habit of speech, he told me that each new trail we take could seem like it leads along an uncertain path; the way back can seem unclear, obscured by the landscape. “But,” he said, “When you set out on a new trail, if you spend twice as much of your time looking over your shoulder at where you have come from as you do where you are going; if you fix the landmarks behind you in your mind the way they will appear to you when you turn to take the trail back, you will never become lost – you will always be able to find your way home.” 

 

That day my grandfather gave me the ability to find my way to and from all of the various destinations in life that would lie before me; all of which, as I set out on each new trail, were initially unknown. Contemporary societies – not just North American – are no longer used to looking at where they have come from. They are far more fixated on an as yet unknown and unknowable future – on what comes next. Rather than use the past to help determine where they are on the trail of life in relation to where they started, they plunge ahead, frequently blindly, expecting that the future will correct any mistakes they make in navigation.

 

How can we recover the good use of outrage, as felt by this child? Might this be a late night topic this holiday season? Join the conversation on my blog:

Greenwoodback40@blogspot.com

 

 

* Terry LeBlanc, a Mi’kmaq-Acadian, is founder and Director of NAIITS, An Indigenous Learning Community as well as adjunct professor at several Canadian and American seminaries. He holds a PhD in Theology and Anthropology from Asbury seminary. Terry has worked in a variety of roles equipping Indigenous people for leadership in their homes, communities and places of faith. Working with Elijah Harper at the Sacred Assembly in ’95 Terry co-authored the event’s “Reconciliation and Principles” documents. He is an award-winning author, speaker and professor, teaching about Indigenous peoples, cultures in context, anthropology, missions, and the church.  

 

Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2016 1

 

 

The following additional paragraphs have possible discussion points:

 

1.     We are peaking a centuries long trajectory of tyrants increasingly gaining power over other people. They have been building outrage against other human beings to the point of extermination. It’s a dangerous emotion even for a child as portrayed here. It was undermining his confidence in the most trusted adults in his life. The emotion blocked his normal ability to see evidence his father and grandfather were trustworthy. 

 

2.     Why didn’t they present his confused distrust with the facts? They knew he couldn’t see it by being corrected. That’s where we are now as a nation, with a sizable portion of our population unable to see evidence, unable to receive correction. And a sizeable portion of us believe this outrage-generated falsehood: “All we need to do is force the truth as a weapon against those who refuse to believe it, and our power over them will get them to believe truth again.” 

 

3.     Fortunately, we Americans have the world’s best judicial system­—the father and grandfather in the story—with a possible process to arrive at evidence-based truth. It allows acting on the truth more than trying to attack the lies. But it is a new for us, old for indigenous culture, way forward. 

 

4.     What steps can help us navigate away from the no-evidence outrage endangering our nation from both sides of our polarity? 

 

5.     What can help us past the outrage fanned by President Trump’s continued aggression against even victims in his own party? 

 

6.     How can we support the discredited professional Republicans who have found the courage to stay on the evidence track for the good of all of us? Are these not our real heroes: our police, teachers, healthcare providers, election workers and attorneys who help us access responsible, caring ways to grasp us lovingly, turn us around, and point us to truth that frees us from consequences of unregulated outrage? 

 

7.     How can we answer words of outrage with love, like Jesus did, and ignore the evidence-missing outrage still emanating from too much of our political, news, religious, and entertainment media.

 

 

A Thanksgiving Parallel

 

Wampanoag still fighting for their land and water 

written November 25, 2020

Disinformation and outright lies flooding our media have darkened our vision. Getting past Thanksgiving invites us through our fears directly into this darkness. We best can’t go around it, we gotta go through it. Just maybe, more of these leaders with courage can help us throught the darkness false fears many of us have taken for granted. It’s possible the branding of religious, racial, gender, economics, birthplace and ethnicity groups of real people as enemy can now be removed. The Bible can show us truth through these falsehoods by “whatever is true, whatever is honorable..” (read on, Philippians 4_8). Now is a good time, after Thanksgiving, for truth to take us through the darkness of our lies about pandemics and politics, guided by the light Jesus gave us.

 

The Wampanoag nation’s elders and the documents of that history offer us  a historical example of this truth. This is the nation who first hosted the pilgrims (look up Patriot Pledge 2020/11/25/ National Day Mourning). After they disembarked bad things happened. There was a brief sharing of food and celebration. It will not be obscured for us by finding the evidence in the darkness. It’s true a small nation of some 40,000 citizens mostly perished from a combination of a pandemic and bloodshed from gunfire. But there were hundreds of survivors, unlike the report in some of our children’s history books that this nation went extinct (See Time Magazine “Wampanoag First Thanksgiving”).

 

Historical revisionism was almost inevitable as settlers arrived on our shores. Yes they were fleeing slavery and mass extermination. There were real reasons for fleeing to the New World. President Roosevelt did want to honor and update this national holiday in 1941, celebrating the welcome by those who hosted the Pilgrims as honored guests. But the tragic truth of what happened, the words actually spoken and written down as well as documents from the time, are now supported more by teachers in our schools and elders in our families. These good people know a right time to give children access to this real evidence, when they are ready. And the process is healing.  

 

The 400-year-old story is long, and difficult. The present story of our pandemic and increasing violence could now repeat the original Thanksgiving history of pandemic and war. We can grow in strength nationally from the pain of the truth of the first Thanksgiving. Will there be a similar truth behind our nation’s covid19, and its continuation into the next months or years? The greatest benefit would come as we discipline ourselves to the pain of truth-telling and hearing, and change our behavior accordingly as we are able.

 

The Wampanoag people believed a logical lie. The sound of gunfire had to be the cause of their deaths. The closer they were, the more immediate and bloody their death.  With no projectile visible, people died when close, and much later when far. No wonder it took generations.

 

Their pandemic spread, along with the gunfire, and 80% and more of the nation’s towns and villages had been wiped out already by the first Thanksgiving (see Wikipedia, or the Times article on Day of Mourning Thanksgiving) It appeared to many that the whole nation perished as the Indian wars, guns against spears and arrows, raged on. But hundreds had fled, and survived to keep their nation alive. These are the remnant tragically threatened again by our pandemic and by land seizure by our politicians.

 

After 400 years the Wampanoag are still fighting for their land and lives. In late March, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. Department of the Interior announced proposed termination of 321 acres of tribal land in Mashpee and Taunton, Mass., to lose reservation status because the tribe supposedly didn’t meet the definition of Indian. In June, a federal judge described this decision “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion and contrary to law,” and the matter is not resolved. The tribe awaits Interior’s new decision, and is hoping for permanent protection through an act of Congress.

 

A parallel history of hidden truth is becoming accessible to our Montana students and their teachers, and to the Wampanoag in Massachusetts.  This is now:

1)    Covid19 is in fact extremely dangerous.  We can learn from our epidemics in the past if we stop the blaming and get to work.

2)    Wear a mask. The fabric of even the best filters cannot prevent virus transmission when we must mix with those outside our family circle. But a mask properly worn, with proper ambient ventilation, drastically reduces the catching of each other’s breath! It’s in the air we share.

3)    Base our kids’ learning upon our families, not on our factory culture curriculum. Our schooling loss and our covid transmission can be stopped simultaneously. But it takes a huge change to recover trust for our 5,000 year-old outcomes-based learning unit: the family pod, its circle of security, the learning circle it encloses, with cross-generation engagement in real life needs. See The  Atlantic article, “School Wasn’t So Great Before Covid,” November 2020.

4)    And prayer changes things. There’s real evidence. Mostly God changes our own hearts. Let’s welcome some change, it’s part of living life.  Christmas is coming.

 

 

Parting our Covid Cloud

 

Written November 18, 2020

Our human need is relationship. All of us agree on this

 

But do we agree it's key to our covid cloud needing parting?  Covid clouds our capacity to know and respond successfully to each other. It’s a job to build the courage to care and respond around the constrictions, mandates, and yes, legitimate fears.

 

What can we do when we must have a mask? We still have our eyes. They talk too. And we still have our voice. Many young children not easily heard need help realizing they can actually be heard through a mask. Our eyes, our hands and our voice can reach past a mask. Physical distancing makes it harder to hear and touch, but when the attempt is seen it counts too.  Most of us don’t like stopping our voices in fear our larynx might slew out a virus cloud against a loved one.  Most of us can be asymptomatic super-spreaders like this. It all assumes physical presence.

 

Enter the digital age. Can this be a gift to part our covid cloud? We need to thank our caregivers who often focus on our shared technology to connect with loved ones in case of exposure or a positive test. It is not a diversion from health care. It’s at the heart of our loved ones’ capacity to survive an infection.

 

All of us can prepare for the possibility of isolation. We can be sure phone numbers are updated and working. We can practice active face video so we know how to see and respond with faces unmasked.  We can ask hospital caregivers to help our family elders make our digital connections work–and thank God we have this option.  

 

What’s not widely known is that loss of human responsive relationships almost certainly will damage human health, mentally and physically, and interfere with recovery. Medical schools now train integrating physical medicine with the spiritual and relational, a practice deeply centered in the heritages of indigenous people here in Montana. All of us have a generations-old heritage of valuing mutually responsive relationship with children. We now have an urgent need to understand how.

 

The Adverse Childhood Experiences study helps.  In 2014, retired, I responded to an ad to attend a conference in Billings with Center for Disease Control epidemiologist Dr. Rob Anda. I signed up and took two additional training sessions with his training group in Montana the next two years, and was certified a master trainer. This is where I learned the often ignored importance of responsive relationship in children’s development.  I thought it was enought to get children's responses to me. I had no idea this needs balance with response to them. Now I know this extends to elders as well, and to all family members. And after this past week of funerals, visits, and phone calls with best friends and family members ill with covid, I thought of this training. It changed my mind, and charts a way forward with covid.

 

I always knew the fun of mutually responsive interaction.  I enjoyed my kids; building and crashing block towers, peekaboo, playing catch, learning to dance or drum with our adopted family–when I had time. Now I know that learning and doing things back an forth, exchanging giving and recieving responses, is really fun work. In younger children it is essential to develop the executive function of the human mind.  Skills needed to do things, skills being with family to cooperate, care and share, all help children grow strong, and builds capacity their capacity to heal and grow through life.

 

But most important is the science-based fact that we need mutually responsive physical interaction through life. We all were born in an experience of trauma. We reached for and found human response beginning with our mother. Now when older, more vulnerable to covid, when connections like these are clouded, we need the same deliverance we found at our birth. Again we all need games, even the World Series, and being face-to-face in real time even if it must be digital screens.  It’s not “just for fun.” It’s where the Divine is present in the human realm. It’s why our religious practices are so important. We know God responds to us, and we know it best when humans do too.  In joining in religious practices together, even online, we are parting the confusion of the covid cloud.  God gifts us to see and cherish our human relationships as He did in the story of Jesus. Let’s join more in parting the covid cloud here.