How is it that our society today decries the beauty and sacredness of sexuality and invites with baited breath the blow by blow coverage of a war?
Why do people provide the means by which the media may report hundreds of thousands of acts of violence every night across the country on the six o’clock news by watching it and skyrocketing the ratings to imply they want more, more, more?
We maysay we abhor violence as a society, but we watch it, we thirst for it, we invite it into our living rooms every single night. Those entities, both individuals and corporations that make money giving us our dose of daily violence will never stop as long as a buck is made from peddling it through that window we leave open in our living rooms-- the television. We peer through that window nightly as a collective group, pouring money into the coffers of those that sell it to us and then wonder why our nation’s children do the things they do?
"Save the children". "Help the children". "Think of the children". We have all seen some form of that slogan used for everything from a political agenda by presidents to marketing campaigns for every imaginable product and we still do not get it. It is not the children we need to be concerned over; it’s the adults. Children learn from adults. If all the attention is paid to the children while the adults are broken hopeless people who could not provide an example to children if they were given a college degree and all the time in the world to figure it out.
Broken adults make for broken children makes for a broken society period --end of sentence.
How do we stop the violence? The answer to that question is simple-- we can’t. The truth is that violence is not meant to be stopped, its there for a reason, it is part of our psyche and a very important part. Violence in our natures is raw archetypal energy that has existed within us from the beginning. It is there for survival, it is there for protection, it is there for creativity to come spewing out from inside of us bolstered by that indefinable source of energy that the dark side provides. Violence has to be channeled; it has to be re-routed into what it was intended to be.
Young men are typically more aggressive than young women overall. In ancient times the Elders of the tribe would teach the younger men how to dance wildly in the spiral dance of the flames to release that aggressiveness into music; music that would rise up and eventually deliver balanced, even young additions to their society. Today there are no such elders, there is no rite of passage, there is no one paying any attention to the need to create the music in those who come after them.
People are so beleaguered with the business of their daily life that they don’t have time to give it any thought and that includes most parents.
Mythology has become lost in the mire of mis-understanding. People think myth means false or untrue. Myth is a mirror of our society, of its hurts, its pains, its joys, and its dreams. We are natural storytellers whether we ever open our mouths or not. Our lives are stories within themselves.
How would thousands of news channels across America find something to put on the tube every night to fill those endless hours of programming if it weren’t for stories? It is the stories that make it all come together. And if there are no stories some will be fabricated -- hence Hollywood.
Stories are at the core of who and what we are as emotional beings. The fact that we today, as a society, do not take the time to investigate where our storyline has come from is a travesty that is nigh on being a holocaust. Our disconnection from our past is within itself an act of violence against ourselves.
We do not know what those who came before us, the human beings who first walked on the earth were all about. We take the word of the latest conquerors historians to tell us and go no further.
We should not moan and groan about what is going on in our country, in our cities, our towns, and our schools when we will not take the time to know where we came from and how we got here. We should not look to place the blame on everything and everyone else when something goes horribly wrong. We must look in the mirror to see who is responsible for Columbine, for Kosovo, for Iraq, for South America, for Afghanistan and every other societal or political tragedy.
When we as individuals finally reach the point where we stop looking somewhere else to place the blame for the things we see going on around us, that is when we will begin to move forward as a society-- as human beings. We will begin to move ahead in our continuing evolutionary progress when we stop looking everywhere but in our own eyes, in our own hearts for what the answers are to help heal all the broken people.