To say that the events of the past several months are distressing is a gargantuan understatement.
From the first news of the coronavirus to today’s social and political unrest, we have been bombarded by bad news, bad behavior and too many images of cruelty, violence and destruction during much of 2020.
The human mind, while exceptionally resilient, can only understand so much. When reason falters and emotion takes over, we are all at risk. And we struggle to know what to do, what to say, or how to act.
Perhaps it was this profound sense of emotional unrest that caused me to wake up abruptly in the early morning hours several weeks ago with an urgent thought: This is “Lord of the Flies!” Somewhere in my deepest psyche, the memory of a book I’d read in high school emerged. At 2:30 a.m., I flipped on the lights as I went bookshelf to bookshelf searching for the thin paperback I thought I had somewhere.
Indeed, I did. Pulling it off the shelf and setting it on my kitchen table, I doused the lights and tucked in for the remaining hours of the night.
I finished re-reading the book several weeks ago. It was more frightening than I remembered. With incredible prescience, it lays out what happens to people when they become isolated, frightened beyond reason, and hungry for power and personal loyalty.
Over the past several months, I have also been reading “The Gulag Archipelago,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s harrowing historical account of the communist Soviet forced labor camp system. I was compelled to read it thanks to another book by Canadian author and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson, “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.”
After several mentions of the Gulag, I became intrigued. I had not learned much about this remarkably destructive period of history when I was in school. History, as I had experienced it in the classroom, was an antiseptic chronicling of dates and events, devoid of the human drives that make it so important.
Reading “The Gulag” and “Lord of the Flies” contemporaneously was powerful. Frightening. Incredibly depressing, if one is so inclined. I am not. But this impromptu exploration of literature left me with several thoughts.
If you allow yourself, you can certainly be overtaken and paralyzed by fear. This weakness invites aggression. Conformity is a natural response to threat. When safety is your primary goal, you won’t rock the boat, any boat, by doing or saying something that might threaten your safety. Long-simmering disappointment never resolves on its own. We have seen too many instances in which it reaches a flashpoint of fury and all hell breaks loose – and I do mean hell. Fire, destruction, death. Tearing down structures and statues. A collective losing of our minds that has no outcome other than heartbreak.
The remedy starts with you and me. It is built upon a commitment to value life, property, and decency. It requires self-control and a refusal to be pulled into situations, conversations and actions that are inflammatory. It grows with an understanding of history and what human beings are capable of, both good and evil. It begs for personal resolve.
You’ve heard some simple things to do. Turn off the news. Put down your phone. Refuse to engage in contentious debates. Listen. Keep listening until you begin to understand. Stop demanding that others know your pain. They have their own. If you insist on rank ordering pain, everyone loses. No one will ever feel entirely satisfied, but that’s not a requirement in order to work toward something better. The past, however painful, has equipped you for today.
I don’t know what something better looks like for you. But you do. And when you can find a way to express it so that others can appreciate it and join you in creating it, you can be an agent of positive change.
I’m not suggesting you put on rose-colored glasses; they represent their own kind of danger. Life is difficult. Violence exists. And in the midst of difficulty and danger is bravery. Kindness. A refusal to retaliate. Be that. That’s where strength is born, where triumph breathes, where healing happens.
