Resilience

In May of 2015, I wrote a blog post titled "There is no Them".  I was trying to illustrate that we are all one people sharing a planet, and creating artificial divisions doesn't make anything better.

In the fourteen months since I wrote that blog post it seems that the us and them thinking has gotten even worse.  And I still don't believe that kind of thinking solves anything.

So what can an individual who is tired of the bloodshed and the hate and the divisiveness do?

It has to start with believing it can get better. It has to start with more love, more kindness, more inclusion, more understanding.

I heard a man on the radio this morning saying that believing that love is the answer is crazy, because the bad people just want to kill you.

How many of you reading this have ever been motivated to kill someone who never showed you anything but love?

Anger, and division and war haven't solved the world's problems. Why not give love a chance?

As I have said before, it is much more difficult to hate an entire group if you know someone in that group.  So some of the answer lies in making a more diverse group of friends.

How can you do that?  Join a club, find a hobby, volunteer.  America is still an amazing melting pot.  You can stay safe in a microcosm of people just like you, but it isn't all that difficult to find diversity.

What does any of this have to do with resilience?

I'm afraid that for the foreseeable future, there will be terrible, tragic events that shake our faith in human nature, and shake our hope for a peaceful coexistence where everyone has the opportunity for a decent life.

Resilience is the ability to bounce back, to recover from difficult events.

And resilience is easier when you can look at any terrible, tragic event, and look at who perpetrated that terrible, tragic event, and you can say, "I know someone who looks like that person, or who is the same religion as that person, or who is from the same country as that person, and I know they are a good person".  And then you can remind yourself that while there will always be people who will do harm, there will always be people who will do good.

And you will not get sucked into the despair that comes with thinking we are doomed.  Because we are not doomed.  We are humans, going through a sucky part of what will someday be history.

We can repeat terrible mistakes of the past and turn on each other.  We can marginalize and disenfranchise entire groups of people.

Or we can say there will always be people who wish to do harm.  We can't easily identify them.  But if we pay attention, maybe we can hear or see their wish to do harm before they act on it.

And we can only do that if we interact, if we listen, if we make sure that our circles all overlap.  So, more love is the answer.  More listening.  More compassion.  More understanding.  But most importantly, more action.  We must speak up when we think someone has the capacity to do harm to themselves and others.

We can break the chain.  We can find a better normal.  We just have to be willing to do it.