“And you never ask questions, when God’s on your side.” – Bob Dylan
December 27, 2023
The current bloody conflict in the Holy Land, also known as Israel and Palestine, has me reflecting on the challenges of breaking through religious dogmatism to find anything that looks like common ground. I’m sure there are currently Jews and Muslims alike who feel God is on their side of the conflict. I’m mindful of the 1431 trail of Joan of Arc in which the English were desperate to prove the teenaged “Maiden of Orleans” was a heretic and not carrying out God’s mission to drive the English from France in the Hundred Years War.
When I was working on my dissertation research on white supremacists, I spent a lot of time with members of the Ku Klux Klan and members of a religious sect called Christian Identity. They were all quite sure the Christian Bible mandated their racism. In fact, the doctrine of Christian Identity states that a white God created white Adam and Eve in his image and the Jewish race are the descendants of Cain and the Serpent (Satan) and are inherently evil. And what about non-white and non-Jewish people? Oh, they are all the offspring of the soulless beasts of Eden. “It’s right here in Genesis!” They would tell me, quoting chapter and verse.
When I would bring up the concept of liberation theology and how Martin Luther King, Jr. found a very different message in their sacred texts, they would tell me that all that was “the devil’s work.”
We are in a similar moment where chapter and verse are quoted around the world to legitimize political positions, whether it’s opposition to LGBTQ rights or in support of Hindu nationalism. While many, and I hope most, people of faith are open to conversations about how their faith frames their political views while honoring that there are alternative faith-based interpretations, there is a significant phalanx in all religious traditions who are quite convinced that they have the one true interpretation of scripture. To those of us on the outside, that dogmatism seems pathological.
While toxic dogmatism can come in all ideological and theological disguises, it can be particularly tricky for us folks on the outside to have productive conversations with those who don’t share our foundational beliefs. When we don’t agree on foundational premises, like in the authority of scripture, or if we use vastly different interpretive lenses to make sense of the same passage, common ground can seem impossible to find.
So how do you talk to someone who has God on their side?
In most settings this might be a situation where a person backs away slowly, so as to not get stuck in the tarpit of religious debate. There’s a great spot in London called Speaker’s Corner where people have those debates/shouting matches as a form of entertainment. The rest of us have more productive things to do, like doom scroll through our social media feeds. However, some of that dogmatism becomes violence very quickly. And we don’t have to go back to Joan of Arc and the Hundred Year’s War to see it. Just turn on CNN.
This project I’ve been working on for the past two years, called Cure-PDX, is charged with reducing political violence and some of that violence has a religious element. For example, there is an evangelical church in the region that has preached that God does not punish violence against gays and lesbians. There is a church right down the street from them that preaches a more inclusive message from the same Bible, and they have experienced vandalism from the anti-gay church. Here is an opportunity for us to bring in the de-escalation work before somebody gets hurt.
One of things that makes our team so well positioned to do the work is that we represent a wide variety of political and social positions; we are liberal and conservative, Buddhist, Christian, and wandering agnostic. We have pastors on our team that help facilitate outreach to various faith based communities and I thought I’d rely on their lived experience and vital insight into this matter. Here’s the question:
Americans often rely on their faith traditions to inform their political opinions. However, there are those who are so wedded to a narrow interpretation of their sacred texts that it often leads to the vilification of those who don’t follow the same interpretation, as well as others, who may all fall under some label of “infidels,” and may become targets for violence. For example, we’ve seen a spike in religiously motivated hate crimes across the country, as well as attacks targeting the transgender community. Given this dynamic, is there a way to talk to the more dogmatic members of faith communities that encourages them to accept more nuanced interpretations of text that allows them to take a step back from more hostile rhetoric?
I asked this question to Pastor Jeff Hoover, who founded and pastored a church in Longview, Washington for 31 years, when he got a new “assignment.” Today, he leads an organization called CitiServe of Cowlitz County, where he walks with pastors and leaders, encouraging, equipping, and uniting the church in the local area and is a new member of our Cure-PDX team.
“I feel the key to having a conversation with someone you may disagree with is curiosity. Instead of going into a potentially difficult conversation wanting to prove or discover who is right or wrong, go in with authentic curiosity about just how the other person arrived at their particular viewpoint. It is astounding just how much we can learn from and about each other if we would simply be open to see things through someone else’s eyes.”
Pastor Jeff hit on a key tool that has been so useful in this project, the power of curiosity; the power of asking instead of telling. Between people’s strongly held beliefs and their relationship with the world is a whole backstory worth investigating. Spending time getting to know a person will likely create more openings in that dogmatic wall than going at it with a sledgehammer of counter arguments.
Sociologists use the term “religiosity,” to describe how committed people are towards their faith traditions. Some completely define themselves by their beliefs and practices, bordering on fanaticism. Others have no engagement with any religious beliefs or practices. Most folks are comfortably somewhere between those two poles. (You will find me at mass most Christmas Eves, on my knees praying for peace, and the other 364 days of the year offering lectures on the problems of religions rooted in Bronze Age thinking.) But, unless there is a mental health issue involved, even people on the “fanatical” end of the religiosity spectrum have a very human story about how they arrived at their conclusions.
We are looking for ways to interrupt violence. Much of this work has to do with finding ways to identify common values with people who may be escalating towards violence. I’m guessing matters of faith provide a perfect place to find those values.
Note: Thank you to team member Ryan Nakade for some of the framing in this piece.
As a “subject matter expert” on right-wing extremism, I often get asked, “What about the left?” There are obviously some stark differences between the two political wings (I would offer bodycount as one measure), but there also might be some parallels worth considering as we look for ways to reduce political violence.
I’ve spent a lot of time in this blog discussing the “militia funnel” that became a useful tool in explaining anti-government violence in the wake of the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City. I even got to sit down and explain it with W. Kamau Bell on CNN’s United Shades of America in 2021 (and CNN turned it into a cool animation). There was a great need after the bombing in Oklahoma City, that included 19 children among the 168 casualties, to explain how “average people” were falling into the world of domestic terrorism.
In April 1995, I was just finishing up my dissertation on right wing extremism, when the news of a massive bombing in the “nation’s heartland” blasted across the news. It was devastating, and the images of dead children in the building’s daycare center brought the country to its knees. I stayed up that night, listening to talk radio from my Atlanta apartment. The talking heads were sure the carnage was the work of the usual suspects, Muslim terrorists. It wasn’t a crazy hunch. Two years earlier, Ramzi Yousef and a small band of jihadists tried to blow up the World Trade Center in New York City, killing 6 people. But Oklahoma was on April 19th, so I knew it was probably one of my guys.
April 19, 1993 was the culmination of the standoff in Waco, Texas that had become a rallying cry for the far-right. That carnage (that included the death of 28 children) was being framed as the result of an out-of-control federal government that was no longer by and for the people. So when on April 20, 1995, a white guy named Timothy McVeigh, who had been at Waco, was arrested for the Oklahoma bombing, I got a chill. These were the anti-government white supremacists I had spent the last seven years studying. The radio hosts who had been quick to blame “Muslim terrorists,” pivoted to the “Wacko from Waco” narrative. It was the act of a crazy person. It certainly couldn’t have anything to do with their aggrieved white male hatred of the government.
The structure of the militia funnel
I learned about the militia funnel from Kenneth Stern’s excellent 1996 book, A Force Upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate. He got it from Ken Toole, at the Montana Human Rights Network. The funnel model explains how people can enter a world that sees violent revolution as the only solution from very mundane starting points that have nothing to do with violence or terrorism. For decades, my work has focused on the movement of people through a ‘right-wing funnel.’ I have written and spoken extensively about this dynamic. At the bottom of this article, I set forth how the funnel analysis applies to current willingness to use political extremist violence among some people in the left wing of politics. First, let’s address how the funnel has been used for the last nearly 30 years to frame pathways to right wing extremism.
At the top of the funnel are just a lot of people who are activated by fairly mainstream conservative issues. They are second amendment gun activists, tax protestors, or think the federal government shouldn’t be taking perfectly good timber land to save spotted owls. They come from a wide variety of backgrounds, including black and Jewish conservative spaces.
Some (importantly, not all) fall into the next level, based in a deep hatred for the federal government. Instead of “we the people,” the feds have too much power and have superseded their Constitutional mandate. Some of these folks are part of the Posse Comitatus movement who believe the highest legal authority is the county sheriff and any constitutional amendment after the first ten is hokum. But the bottom line is the federal government is the bad guy. Growing up in the rural South, the term we’d hear for this was “revenuer.”
At the third level down the funnel, some of these folks start buying into some pretty pervasive conspiracy theories. We are now into the world of Freemasons and the Illuminati and who REALLY killed JFK. Just watch those Nicholas Cage National Treasure movies for a dose of this world. Here the Republican and Democratic parties are both controlled by the same puppet master, leveraging the federal government against hard-working (white) Americans for their own benefit.
Some of those conspiracy believers make it down to the next level, where the conspiracy takes a familiar turn. The elite Bilderbergers are rebranded as simply “the Jews.” In a same way Hitler used anti-Semitic tropes to explain Germany’s downfall, anti-government conspiracy theorists here see a global Jewish cabal behind everything from immigration to gay rights to why their kids are listening to rap music instead of Lee Greenwood.
Again, this is a funnel, so each level has fewer people than the one above it. In the final stage of the model are the revolutionaries. It’s one thing to have analysis, but here is the belief you have to act on it. The people who make it to the bottom of the funnel are consumed with language about a second American Revolution, and a second Civil War, and “Rahowa” (short for Racial Holy War) and a whole bunch of stuff concerning the “blood of patriots.” The funnel starts wide and ends very small, but as we saw in 1995, it only takes a small band of self-proclaimed patriots to change the face of a nation. And McVeigh’s intent was to inspire other like-minded Americans to commit similar acts of terrorism.
The militia funnel in the MAGA-era
The militia model became useful again in the Obama era when anti-government militias roared back into action. Here in Oregon, a militia group occupied a federal wildlife refuge for 40 days in 2016, resulting in one death. Then the surge of militia activists, like the Oath Keepers and the 3 Percenters, under Donald Trump’s MAGA movement made the militia model even more applicable, especially after the January 6, 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol.
In the Trump years, I regularly updated the 1990s militia model when explaining the “new” right-wing activism. Because of social media and reach of the Trump message, the mouth of the funnel was much wider than it was in the 1990s. It included some of those same conservative issues, like gun rights, but now included “culture war issues,” like opposition to rights for transgender people and hostility to Critical Race Theory, but also a rejection of lockdown mandates to prevent the spread of COVID-19. This wider funnel served to attract not just rural white men who were the 90s candidates for patriot militia groups, but suburban moms, aging incels, and others who thought America was last great before the civil rights movements made “inclusion” a weapon against white privilege.
The rest of the funnel, took an updated sheen. The anti-federal government level was rebranded as “the swamp,” full of libtards and RINOs (Republicans in Name Only). The conspiracy theory level was now the domain of QAnon adherents and beliefs in the “deep state.” Below that were the anti-Semitic theories about “global Jews,” including George Soros, Anthony Fauci, and a belief (spread by Robert Kennedy, Jr.) that COVID was created to kill non-Jews. At the bottom of the funnel, the revolutionaries renamed their call to arms the “Boogaloo,” and began stockpiling weapons. In 2020, I had a chat with a 3 Percenter in a Home Depot parking lot and asked him what he thought about the escalation of violent rhetoric. His only reply was, “We’re locked and loaded.”
That this funnel was exponentially wider at the top meant more Americans were ending up at the violent bottom level. This was evident in the massive turnout for Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6th, motivated by the President of the United States, not a fringe website, spreading a fully debunked conspiracy theory that the “deep state” stole the 2020 election. While organized militia groups, like the Oath Keepers, were key players in the attack, many of the over 1,2000 people arrested have claimed they just got “swept up” in the moment. They had fallen down the funnel into the land of Timothy McVeighs and Stewart Rhodes. I half expected to see my Trump-loving father there that day (but his feet are bad).
The value of the militia funnel in this work is that there are multiple points along the pathway down to violence where intervention can take place. Someone who angry about public school dollars going to a student Gay Straight Alliance isn’t automatically destined to become a domestic terrorist, but if they are, there are places where that path can be diverted. Could there be a similar trajectory for activists on the left?
Constructing a left-wing funnel
The origin of the right-left political spectrum, that has its roots in the French Revolution, is all about who should have power. On the right, power should be concentrated and on the left, power should be dispersed. That’s why the far right values fascism and the far left values communism. But all along that spectrum there are values concerning fairness. The liberal is concerned teachers’ low pay is unfair and the conservative thinks their tax dollars supporting a curriculum they think opposes their values is unfair. Oh, yeah, and plenty of people on both sides think the government sucks.
The structure of the militia funnel offers a guide to what a left-wing militia funnel might look like.
At the top level are widely popular liberal issues related to social justice-based matters of equity, including Black Lives Matters, abortion access, and LGBTQ+ rights, along with other stalwart liberal causes. The next level finds strong distrust of the federal government as the historic defender of status quo power dynamics. The feds are “the Man,” who surveilled MLK and protected alleged sex-offenders, like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. And also, all cops are “bastards.” Further down the funnel, we see the appearance of all-encompassing conspiracy theories that see Republicans and Democrats as puppets of corporations, the monied class (Google “Bohemian Grove”), and the World Trade Organization. Like on the right, there is a darker level that introduces anti-Semitism to the conspiracy theories. This is where Robert Kennedy, Jr. lives and where anti-Zionism slides into a broader anti-Jewish narrative, most recently seen as an element of some pro-Gaza rallies. (It should be pointed out is that anti-Semitism is less visible on the left than it is on the right, but it does rear its ugly head in places.) At the bottom of this funnel is the rhetoric of Marxist revolution, which sees the entire capitalist system, and all its institutions, as corrupt and in need of overthrow.
Those of us who are older than millennials and Gen Z kids will remember that in the 1970s there were hundreds of terrorist bombings in the United States. They weren’t from patriot or neo-Nazi groups. They were committed by radical leftist groups like the Weather Underground, the New World Liberation Front, and the Symbionese Liberation Army. And there were casualties. In 1970, a group of leftists angry about the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s participation in military work related to the Vietnam War, detonated a massive bomb in Sterling Hall, killing one researcher and injuring several others. The FBI has counted 2500 bombings connected to the Weather Underground, including one that killed four people in a Wall Street restaurant in 1975.
When the Right-Left political spectrum becomes a circle
There is also a weird space where the extremes at the end of the left side and right side meet to form a circle. In the 1990s, some neo-Nazi groups began publicly (and financially) supporting the PLO’s campaign against Israel under the guise of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” The Seattle WTO protests in 1999 that brought labor union members, environmentalists, and other liberal activists to the streets also saw participation far-right activists, who saw the “global bankers” behind the World Trade Organization as the hand of Jewish control. In the 2000s, the right also joined the left on issues related to climate change. Their angle was the climate crisis was the result of immigration, non-white population growth, and (again) Jewish monied interests.
More recently, the language of “accelerationism” has pervaded extremists on bother the far-right and far-left. The philosophy states that standard democratic forms of social change, like voting, are too hopelessly glued to institutions of power to ever affect real change. Each November we vote for a Tweedle Dum or a Tweedle Dee and hope things will be different. Accelerationists believe the only way to achieve their desired society is to bring the current one crashing down and rebuild the new one out of the ashes. The right and left have radically different visions of what those societies look like. (I know the right has no place for progressive academics like me, but they left would probably see me as a “collaborator” with “the Man” and exclude me from their Utopia, so I’m likely SOL whoever wins fantasy league fanaticism.) We have seen extremists on the right, like Proud Boys and active clubs look at their counterparts on the left in anarchist and Antifa circles, not as enemies, but as allies in bringing the system down. In 2021 a Boogaloo activist said, “Right now it’s about provoking BLM, antifa and militias or 3 Percenters into engaging in violence that will provoke disproportionate police response, which can be used to fuel further unrest.”
If the value of understanding the militia funnel is to interrupt well-meaning conservatives’ slide down the rabbit hole of violent extremism, there should be a similar opportunity for those escalating towards left wing violence. Again, the intent is not to “de-radicalize” anyone one either side, just to prevent the violence that might emerge at the bottom of those funnels. Working on constructive engagement with the government as, not an oppressive entity, but a reflection of our collective will can slow the roll down the funnel. Also, the work on critical thinking skills that disrupt simplistic conspiracy theories can be hugely helpful in dismantling the binary thinking that characterizes extremist ideologies.
The vast majority of activists are doing the important work of putting democracy to the test and advancing their shared values. A small fraction fall into the black hole of political violence. Understanding these paths across the political spectrum allows to us design strategies to reroute those who may see terrorism as a legitimate expression of their political agendas.
It was three years before I found a bumpersticker that I liked enough to put on my first car. I was 19 and in Washington DC, lobbying for the nuclear freeze movement. It was 1983, and I was starting my work as a peace activist. There was a table in a DC church, with various progressive swag, and I bought a baby blue bumper sticker that read, “PEOPLE NOT PROFITS.” It seemed a summation of our struggle in Reagan’s war machine eighties.
People, not profits. Forty years later, I think, why not both? People AND profits!
When I was young, I lived in a world of black and white, good versus evil. It was a simple terrain to navigate. “You are either with us or you’re against us.” The us and them mentality had clear dividing lines. The misfits versus the straights. Left versus right. The oppressed versus the oppressors. Then I grew up and realized it is all shades of grey, context, and nuance. Nothing is black and white. And Ronald Reagan did a few (a few) good things.
I love how my fellow travelers on the left have worked at smashing binaries with regard to gender. Men and women are not “opposite sexes.” Gender is fluid in definition and performance. And so is sexuality. As Kurt Cobain sang, “Everyone is gay.” Well, at least a little bit. And more and more people define themselves as belonging to more than one racial category, including my daughter. We are a nation of “mulattos” and it’s beautiful. Smash the binary. Reality is intersectional!
I was at a pro-Palestine rally at Portland’s city hall this weekend where hundreds of people had gathered to call for a cease fire in Gaza. The young organizers were leading the crowd in boisterous chants, some calling for peace, but other refrains included, “2, 4, 6, 8, Israel is a terrorist state,” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” I get it. I imagine that if you are a parent in Gaza right now and your child has just been killed by an Israeli bomb, you are probably not blaming Hamas. I get it. And I get that Israel is probably facing an existential crisis in this moment, as these chants grow louder and louder around the globe. “Was this the best response to the slaughter on October 7?”
I thought about the death on both sides and the hostages who may still be alive somewhere in Gaza. I thought about how I was being pushed back into a binary. Israel versus Palestine, which side are you on, boy? I want to blur the binary, and say I’m for Israel AND Palestine. Obviously, there are people who want to eliminate Israel and/or Palestine from the face of the earth. But there are lots of people who don’t, including Israelis who have had family members killed by Hamas rockets and Palestinians who have had family members killed by Israeli rockets. I stand with them. Defend Israel. Defend Gaza.
I went through this three years ago when I was showing up for the Black Lives Matters protests in downtown Portland. Graffiti started popping up around the city that read, ACAB. “All Cops are Bastards.” I groaned, because I knew this reductionist thinking was appealing to the teenage brain, but A. It doesn’t help foster real systemic change, and B. It’s not true. Some cops are bastards and I’ve been lecturing about them for 30 years and trying to find real ways to keep them off the streets. But I know lots of police officers who are doing their work because they are dedicated to the same social justice values that I am. Maybe the left needs better slogans, or just a push to get out of its teenage brain.
Barack Obama’s political rise was based on the simple idea that America is not divided up into red and blue states. We all live in various shades of purple. We have been told we’re divided and we’ve swallowed the sales pitch fully. There are millions of Americans who are dreading the holidays, when they will be stuck at the dinner table with family members who have “opposite” views. We’re constantly being lectured about how polarized we are. All this divisiveness does not make America great. It turns the nation into a schoolyard screaming match. No member of the MAGA brigade ever turned in their red hat because some progressive called them an idiot. (And whatever the “vice versa” of that would be.)
This project I’ve been working on for the past year, Cure-PDX, is looking for ways to break through the us versus them binary that all too often spirals into political violence. We can recognize that our teenage brains want to “fight evil.” But what if there was no evil? What if it was all just ancient systems of oppression that we all get sucked into either reinforcing or resisting? A gay man suffers from the weight of a heterosexist society but also enjoys the privileges of patriarchy. Is he the good guy or the bad guy?
When the Israel-Hamas war exploded, I saw people get pulled in either direction, just like I witnessed with the “Black Lives Matter/Blue Lives Matter” narratives that must have made every black cop’s life nuts in 2020. Then, as now, I want to embrace what is valid about both sides. There is a line that for one side to exist, the other must be destroyed. We have the capacity to reject that simplistic world view. The goal of the powerful is to divide us, conservatives versus liberals, black lives versus cop lives, Israelis verses Palestinians. That’s how the status quo is maintained.
As we head into this fractious election cycle, where some are screaming for civil war, I’m going to look for the humanity in the other side. Instead of dropping verbal bombs (or real ones), I’m going to ask questions and find where our values align. I’m going to work for peace. And I know there will be those that say this position somehow empowers the “bad guys.” I anticipate the name calling, the accusations of betrayal. But maybe, just maybe, the frightening truth is that progress comes from building bridges, not dropping bombs.
Side Note: I’m still writing an imaginary musical, called Northwest Side Story, where an Antifa girl and a Proud Boy fall in love. Maybe instead of the tragic Romeo and Juliet ending, I’ll have them move to a kibbutz on the River Jordan.
This weekend I had assault rifle, a FN-Herstal PS90, pressed against my shoulder. I adjusted for the mechanical offset of the laser scope of the rifle and put a bullet right through the heart of my target. The gun was light and the trigger action was easy. In that moment I had a flash of God-like power in a world were we all feel all too powerless.
I’ve had a long history trying to understand the appeal of guns that began when a deranged fan shot and killed my hero, John Lennon, in 1980. As kid in the South, I was buried in gun culture. From watching The Rifleman after school (“Paw!”), and the toy weaponry of my G.I. Joe, to the gun racks in the back of pickup trucks that drove around Stone Mountain. I even had a plastic Tommy gun that shot out sparks when you squeezed the trigger. But the murder of Lennon turned me into a 16-year-old gun control advocate. Why did we need all these guns?
My work as a criminologist put me back in the middle of gun culture. Whether it’s the law enforcement agents I engage with or the right-wing extremists I study, everybody is packing heat. While I’ve lectured for over 30 years on America’s bizarre obsession with guns, I’ve also worked to respect the gun and the gun owner. I fashioned sticks into pistols as a boy. Could that childhood fascination provide a clue into the fact that 32 percent of Americans own a firearm?
In 1995, when I was a fresh young PhD., I was lecturing my criminology class about the statistics on gun ownership. About how homes that contained guns were more likely to see those guns used in a suicide, a domestic homicide, or in an accidental shooting, or be stolen, then they were to ever use them to defend the home from an intruder. A had an aspiring Oregon militia member in that class who was routinely aggrieved by my anti-gun rantings and invited me to the shooting range to experience the appeal of unloading high caliber rounds into some paper targets.
Needless to say, that day we hit the range was both terrifying and exhilarating (and loud). He brought several weapons for me to try (most of them legal). By the end of the morning, I was going full Clint Eastwood, firing a 45 with my left hand and a 357 Magnum with my right. I remember the guns feeling lighter as each round was launched toward the target. And I hung that target in my university office, as a subtle message to my students, “I am not one to be trifled with.”
After the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, that left 15 students dead, I began to explore the connection between guns and masculinity. School shootings mimicked workplace shootings, where (young) men were somehow emasculated and made the fatal decision to “go out like men.” My experience shooting certainly played into some macho fantasy of myself I’d harbored since I was a skinny boy in suburbia.
In 2005, I participated in the FBI’s Citizen Academy and got more formal weapons training, including with semi-automatic rifles. It was intense, but also gave me a deeper respect of the weapons themselves. I felt like I couldn’t have opinions about guns unless I knew what it was like to fire them. That training played into that macho fantasy of myself 17 years later while I was in Ukraine, when I secretly wished a Ukrainian solder would hand me a rifle and ask me to repel some Russian invaders. Fortunately, for my family (and for Ukraine itself), that never happened.
In 2021, 48,830 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S. and that number only trends upwards. Over the years, I’ve considered owning a gun since my work has generated some seriously scary enemies. But I’ve always thought there were essentially two-parts of gun ownership. The first was acquiring the weapon and the second was looking for an opportunity to use it and I’m not sure that a creak in the house wouldn’t have me reaching for the ammo. And now that there is a kid in that house, guns are off the table. But, according to Pew Research, nearly 4 in 10 American adults live in a household with at least one gun in it and a lot of those homes have kids in them.
My experience at the range Saturday wasn’t just meant as a day to reclaim my inner-Rambo. I was there with members of my anti-violence team, one who is a bonafide gunsmith and brought his 45 handgun and rifle for us to fire. As soon as we entered the firing range, my heart rate shot up. About a half dozen men were firing off countless rounds, as shell casings flew through the air. It was the sound of war and mass shootings and domestic terror. But, with our skilled guide, we took our positions and fired at our targets, like I did at the Lickskillet shooting gallery at Six Flags amusement park, when I was a kid. Guns blazing around me, I focused on BRASS, “breathe, relax, aim, stance, and squeeze,” and tried to cluster my shots at the center of the target.
The term “gun culture” is overly broad. Yeah, it includes extremists on both the right and the left who are waiting for the call to play out their John Wick fantasies on real and imagined enemies. The faith in a soon-to-come civil war is very real to them. But there are also a heck of a lot people that enjoy the sport of shooting that includes the kind of recoil you don’t get in a video game. Going shooting helps me break through the “us vs. them” mentality I tend to have about gun owners, because now I can see the appeal. But I can also walk away from it.
I’m at a complete loss. Tomorrow, it will have been one week since Hamas’ barbaric invasion of Israel that left so many people, especially those beautiful young people at a music festival, dead or kidnapped. Since then, those images and the images of Gaza, the most densely populated place on earth, being bombed into dust have kept me in a constant state of nausea.
I’m at a complete loss on how to talk about Israel and Palestine, in general. I have so many friends on both sides of the issue. Being an undergraduate at Emory (a Methodist university) was a crash course on the Jewish diaspora and how important Israel is to the stability of the Jewish people in the wake of the Holocaust. I read Leon Uris’ 1958 novel, Exodus, like it was first-person history. I’ve also met so many Palestinians, including students of mine, who describe the apartheid they now live in since the state of Israel was created in 1948. They both present the need for their states with such complete legitimacy, it seems insane to even think one side has the most airtight claim on the land.
Since the 1990s, we’ve been able to put our faith in the “two state solution,” that the Gaza Strip in the south and the West Bank in the north will be the nation of Palestine. As a teenager, I watched Jimmy Carter broker a peace deal between Israel and Egypt, so maybe this would work. The deal, which turned the two territories over to the Palestinian National Authority, allowed me to not think as much about Israel and Palestine. The problem was solved, right? But when the terrorist group Hamas, took over Gaza in 2007 and the Gaza Strip became a walled-off prison of 2 million people, I probably should have paid more attention.
I don’t know if this war, which is now almost a week old, ends the idea of a two-state solution. There are already reports of Jewish settlers and Hezbollah militants clashing in the West Bank and media and politicians seem fixated on the war spilling over into a “wider conflict.” Like on 9/11, it does feel like the Earth forever shifted on its axis on 10/7. I saw the image of a child’s bedroom in Ashkelon, Portland’s sister city in Israel. The blood of that child, similar in age to my child, was spattered across the wall by Hamas raiders. I couldn’t hold back the tears. The next image was an apartment block in Gaza City flatted by Israeli rockets, a child, again like my own, covered in dust was searching for her family in the rubble. And again, I cry.
There is a tidal wave of false information already flooding social media about this conflict. Some of it is misinformation that is just wrong on the facts. But much of it is disinformation, purposely shared misinformation to inflame one side or the other, or malinformation, which is true but is shared to cause harm, like the showing of child casualties to enrage viewers to violence. It’s so hard to know what is real. I have to start out with the assumption that most of what I see on social media (and all of what I see on “X/Twitter”) is false. If people are getting their primary information from TikTok, we have a huge problem.
There is also a weird false narrative at work. People (especially non-Jewish Americans) often conflate “Israel” and “Jews,” making anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism fast friends. The opinions among Jews about the policies of Israel are probably as varied as the opinions among non-Jews about the policies of Israel. But there is a parallel line that conflates “Palestinian” with “Hamas.” One could easily argue that the vast amount of suffering in Gaza is because of Hamas. But then this conflation then equates “Hamas” with “Israel,” and that is madness. Israel, like all nations, has all kinds of problems. As in the United States, Israel has human rights issues to answer for. But, unlike Hamas, Israel is a democratic state that submits itself to the scrutiny of its global neighbors. The recent peace talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia are evidence of that. Hamas, harbors genocidal fantasies akin to Hitler’s, and has no desire for “peace.”
So much of my work on violent extremism highlights the role of trauma. And yes, there is a story to be told of generations of Palestinian trauma that would produce the type of mind that could have been capable of slaughtering kids at the “Supernova Sukkot Gathering” music festival last Saturday. But one could argue the history of Jewish trauma is much longer and deeper and doesn’t lead Israelis to rape, murder, and torture anyone in the manner we’ve seen this week. Again, I don’t know how to talk about this because it all defies the limitations of words. I just want to understand how humans are capable of this.
This conversation could go into all kinds of directions. How Putin, neo-Nazis, Iran, arms dealers, and evangelicals who believe Israel will soon be delivered to Christians are the likely beneficiaries of this mess. About how we have already seen a spike in anti-Semitic and Islamophobic hate crimes in the United States in response to the war. About how dare we enjoy our pumpkin spice latte’s and post-season baseball while hundreds are being held hostage in Gaza. I’m just here to say, as a human being, I don’t know how to talk about this.
As a college professor, I find my young students tend to fall into two categories. The first are emphatic and righteous. They firmly believe that “Israel is a terrorist state” or that “Hamas are subhuman aberrations that must wiped from the face off the earth.” The other, larger group are just completely checked out, endlessly watching reels on their phones. They couldn’t find the “Middle East” on a map, let alone the Gaza Strip. I was trying to engage them in class yesterday and they looked me like, “What does this have to do with me?” I don’t know what’s worse, their indifference or the students who are actively cheering for Hamas.
It’s clear that Hamas wants to escalate the violence and kidnapping Israeli babies is a good way to do it. If rockets and a ground assault from Israel leads to the death of thousands of Palestinians, it furthers their dream of a “holy war” in the region. But I don’t know what the alternative is. A zombie apocalypse (a la World War Z)? An alien invasion? A faster, deadlier version of COVID? I told you I don’t know how to talk about this.
I’m at such a loss for words. The trauma being levied on the children of Israel and the children of Gaza will forever shape their brains. Unlike my emphatic students, I have no idea what the solution is. I can urge for de-escalation, but I also understand the impulse to take up arms and fire rockets. Inaction is off the table but what is the action? We must respond immediately but also wait to better assess the situation.
So I’m here to say I have no answers to this. I’m angry and I’m heartbroken and I know this is so much bigger than me. It seems like the international community, especially Muslim nations in the Middle East, need to defend Israel’s right to exist while fully enfranchising the citizens of Gaza and the West Bank. I don’t know. And I’m going to have to be OK without knowing. As a citizen of nation founded in violence, I can’t tell others not to use violence to form their nations. I can only bear witness to this moment of fire and pain.
“Regrets, I’ve had a few,” Sinatra once sang. We can claim to have no regrets but any thinking human has gobs of them. I’ve often joked that my epitaph should read, “He was his own worst enemy.” Better than Frank singing, “My Way,” would be Cher singing, “If I could turn back time, if I could find a way, I’d take back those words that have hurt you” (to a boatload of sailors). We’ve all been Cher.
When I was a young criminology professor, I would occasionally spend my lunch hour at the county courthouse, watching trials and hearings. The vast majority were for men who had made insanely stupid choices. Almost all offered the same defense, “It might have been me who committed that act, but it wasn’t really ME.” I remember one case of domestic violence that was particularly dramatic. The man attacked his wife after she said she was leaving him. In tears he told the judge, “I don’t know who that person was that hit her. It wasn’t me. I’m not that kind of man. It was like I was possessed.” I could tell the judge had heard that excuse many times and she booked him straight into the county clink for 90 days.
We have all done or said stupid things and wondered, who was that mad person in my body? I was commuting on my bicycle when a woman in an SUV ran a red light in front of me. I chased her down, accused her of being drunk, and spit on her window. That was 15 years ago and I still think about it with shock. (If SUV Lady is reading this, I’m sorry. I’m not that kind of man.)
Why do we do these things? Is it brief demonic possession?
There’s actually a simple answer and it has nothing to do with the devil and everything to do with our lizard brains. And fortunately, you don’t have to be a brain scientist to understand it.
Think of a lizard in the desert. It’s constantly on alert. It doesn’t sit around trying to figure out what’s funny or what’s hip. It’s constantly in survival mode. If there is a shadow on the ground, it isn’t going ponder what caused the shadow. It’s going to assume that it’s a hungry hawk and with zero pondering it is going to race under a rock or freeze and try to blend into the background.
Lizards have itty bitty brains that are primarily made up of something called the amygdala. It is quite literally prehistoric and it is the part of the brain that keeps animals alive. We think of it as the center of the fight or flight or freeze emotional response. Dinosaurs didn’t sit around wondering why the local T. Rex was hangry, they just ran or fought. The amygdala is connected to the sympathetic nervous system that turns those instantaneous brain impulse into immediate action. The lizard brain does not think. It makes a b-line for safety, fights with all its might, or freezes like a deer in headlights. The lizard brain is driven by hunger and, mostly, fear.
Humans have amygdalae. (I just learned that was the plural of amygdala.) Fortunately, millions of years of evolution have built an insanely complex structure around it that we call the “human brain.” One of the best parts of the human brain is the prefrontal cortex that gives us the ability to reason, imagine, and, yes, ponder. The prefrontal cortex regulates the lizard brain so we’re not alway freaking out every time we see a shadow on the ground. The prefrontal cortex allows us to function, otherwise we’d be overwhelmed with fear, aggression, and paralysis.
There’s an easy way to illustrate this point. Since the prefrontal cortex is the thing that makes us cognitively human, it’s the last part of our brain system to develop. Newborn babies are a lot like lizards. They just want their basic needs met. Babies don’t think, “I should wait for the sun to come up before I demand breakfast.” Babies are in survival mode all the time. Neuroscientists believe the prefrontal cortex isn’t fully formed until around age 25. So take a moment to think of all the epically stupid and impulsive things you did when you were a teenager that you would NEVER do now. It’s because your brain was like an IKEA kitchen that still had a thousand pieces to connect. Every time I go on Instagram, I see endless “reels” and “stories” of young people doing things that will make them cringe when they are older. You don’t see any 59-year-olds participating in street takeovers or skateboarding off of cliffs. Young brains can be dumb as lizards.
Side Story: When I was a 16-year-old in Stone Mountain, Georgia, one of my favorite TV shows was The Dukes of Hazzard. I would regularly borrow my dad’s 1978 Pontiac Grand Prix to “go to the store,” and end up doing donuts in the field like I was Bo and/or Luke Duke. If I happened to side-swipe a pine tree, I would tell my dad that it got hit in the parking lot. Fortunately, my father won’t read this. But if he does, I’M SORRY DAD! MY LIZARD BRAIN MADE ME DO IT!
If the human lizard brain had a motto, it would be, If it feels good do it. It is the knee jerk reaction that gets us into stupid fights, drives us to be sexual in situations where we shouldn’t, or causes us to completely shut down all normal interaction skills. Basically, our lizard brain gets us into trouble if our prefrontal cortex doesn’t regulate those very primitive impulses. Our brain (and body) gets hijacked by our amygdala. Sometimes, we need to fight or run away or freeze, but usually there’s some “context” to analyze. Bear is brown, lay down. Bear is black, fight back!
As adults, most of us develop the ability to self regulate. We know that throwing a punch ends up hurting our hands and getting the cops called. We know that sexually harassing a workmate gets a call to HR and makes us look like a serious creep. And we know that shutting down emotionally doesn’t really get us what we need, emotionally. In addition, or human brain allows us to develop empathy for others, so there is a greater benefit in centering others than just centering ourselves. But we do know that one of the things that throws the human brain into primitive lizard mode is trauma. Whether it’s something that happened when our brain was still forming, like childhood sexual abuse, or something that happened last week, like experiencing a serious car crash, trauma locks the brain into fight/flight/freeze mode. And it takes a lot of work to get the prefrontal cortex back on line to do the heavy lifting of regulation.
So we all have a lizard brain inside our heads. And we all have varying levels of ability in regulating that lizard brain. Some prefrontal cortexes are hampered by trauma, mental health issues, brain injuries, or substance abuse, but even the most sober “healthy brain” can find itself in a “road rage moment.” Something triggers us and we’re off to the races. And an hour later, we are singing that damn Cher song. “If I could turn back time…”
In my current work on political violence, we see a lot of dis-regulated lizard brains in control. The escalation of violence between protestors on the right and left in Portland is a sad example that has led to people dead on both sides. A case could be made that many of the insurgents at the January 6th riots in Washington DC never intended to storm the Capitol. They just got caught up in the mayhem and their lizard brains took over. It’s so easy to go from sane to insane when our amygdala is activated. We’ve all been there.
Fortunately, there are some well proven strategies to reign in our dino-brains and prevent the need to bust into the Cher song from the county jail (or divorce court). Here are a few:
1. Be aware of your triggers. If the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, avoid the factors that lead to escalation. If you know booze makes you more “lizardy,” moderate. If you know arguing about Trump sends you into the red zone, argue about sports instead. And if you know your crazy Uncle Ernie really likes to push your buttons, try not taking the bait.
2. Regulate when your lizard brain is activated. Uh oh, you’ve been activated and the fight/flight/freeze siren is wailing. What do you do now? You have the ability to insert your prefrontal cortex between the impulse and the action. This could be something as simple as a few deep breaths or a walk around the block. Anything to calm the lizard brain down before it gets your ass in trouble. Meditation is a great way to train your brain to become calm and see your thoughts AS thoughts, and not as orders to act.
3. Get curious. Your prefrontal cortex gave you the potential for radical empathy. That driver who cut you off or that politico who is trying to shove a nutzo conspiracy theory down your throat has a story. They are human beings with something that drives them. Instead of defaulting to fight/flee/freeze mode, get curious about their story. What makes them tick? Maybe you are more alike than different.
We live in fearful and polarizing times so it’s very easy for our lizard brains to be activated. Traffic, news stories about shootings, bizarre weather, people on TV screaming at each other, and the fact that so many of us (myself included) are walking around with scars of trauma, it’s shocking that we’re all not constantly living in fight/flight/freeze mode. But the fact we’re not reflects the triumph of our collective prefrontal cortex. We have the ability to not to be slaves to our impulses. We have the ability to calm our minds and make wise choices. We just need a little practice and thinking about how we think is a good place to start.
I spent most of my life in a narcissistic head cloud. I put it off to being a Pisces, but the fact of the matter is that I was habitually more interested in myself than other people. After all, both Mr. Rogers and my mother had told me, “You are special.” When my first wife was on her way out the door, I remember her saying, “You suck all the air out of a room, Randy.” I thought that was meant as a compliment. I would think that. Turns out Mr. Rogers (and Mom) were wrong. I wasn’t special. I was an asshole.
This “COVID-era” life change I’ve been going through has forced me to stop. Stop my awesome rocket ride through “Randyland.” I’d had plenty of clues along the way. As an ethnographer, my job was to skillfully interview subjects without them knowing it. I’d come out of the field after months of hanging out with white supremacists realizing I was missing data because I’d spent more time talking than listening. I realized my biggest grammar mistake was forgetting to end queries with question marks. One student’s review of a sociology class at Portland State was one sentence long: “Nobody loves Randy Blazak more than Randy Blazak.”
This lack of curiosity became an issue between Andi and I. She didn’t need another story. She need someone who was interested in her thoughts and observations. Someone who talked with her not at her. I needed to figure this curiosity thing out.
Even though it might be too late for Andi, I finally cracked this curious nut. I’ve mentioned in this blog how lucky I’ve been to find a somatic therapist who could help be corral my unwieldy lizard brain and help find methods to get my parasympathetic nervous system to help my behavior be in line with my “I’m a feminist!” values. She recently suggested a book by Buddhist Oren Jay Sofer called Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication and it’s been a game changer. I’ve really relied a lot on mindfulness practices to get away from to my bad habits. Ruth King’s Mindful of Race and her emphasis on “Impact not intent” has been vital in deflating some of my patterns of harm. These books are sacred.
I’m currently working on a federally-funded project to interrupt violent extremism so I figured out I could read Sofer’s book for work. Turns it’s more about people like me than the Proud Boys. (Does that sound narcissistic?) While I was focused on the eminent fist fight between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Joe Biden, the conflict here was less domestic terrorism and more just domestic. Our interpersonal conflicts certainly can escalate into some ugly areas, of which, violence is only one stupid scenario, but fighting over someone not doing the kid’s laundry is enough.
The book follows three main strategies to get us out of the combative way we communicate; 1) Being present in the moment, 2) Bringing in curiosity and care, and 3) Focusing on what matters. Sounds simple but there’s a lot of detail in the process. The bottom line is we are really good at reacting and getting pulled into a fight to prove the validity of our position. But more often than not, that just ends in a pointless stalemate. My Facebook page is an endless battle between my blue state Portland friends and my red state Georgia homies and the line of scrimmage hasn’t moved an inch.
A key part of the middle of Say What You Mean is developing empathetic listening skills by practicing curiosity. Let’s be honest – for most of us – when other people are speaking, we’re just listening for a gap to say whatever we were going to say anyway. That’s what we’re listening for, not what that person is saying, but for a chance to hear our own voice. That’s why modern speech is full of linguistic space holders, like “like,” “um,” “you know,” “well,” “literally,” and my least favorite word on Earth, “actually.” All those linguistic cock blockers serve to keep the stream of sound coming out of our gobs and preventing anyone else from actually getting a word in edgewise. Literally.
I started trying empathetic listening out on my students. I broke my diversity class up into random pairs and gave them five minutes. Student A had to ask Student B, “What’s the most challenging thing about being your primary identity?” (For example, their race or their gender identity.) Then Student A had to SHUT UP AND JUST LISTEN FOR FOUR MINUTES. On the fourth minute Student A was to say, “It sounds like the hardest thing is…. Did I get that right?” At the end of the five minutes they’d switch roles and Student B would ask same question. Afterwards, the students reflected how validating it felt to be actually listened to and how they created a new bond with someone who seemed, at first, very different from them.
Was there something to his power of asking questions? I was soon to put it to the test myself.
My last blog post was about transphobia and the hellnado that was unleashed by Kid Rock going Columbine on a case of Bud Light. Being the king mixer that I am I posted it on the Boycott Bud Light Facebook page. Very quickly I got a DM from some dude named Jamie that read, “Fuck trannies faggit You look like a fucking freak from Portland.” I went into my standard battle mode, trying to convince Jamie that he was in the closet. And the fight was on. Then I stopped and thought, WWOJSD? What would Oren Jay Sofer do?
So I switched gears and started asking Jamie questions. Were transgender people an actual problem in his life? (No.) Did he know any transgender people? (No.) What did he think WAS the biggest problem in America? He went off on a vector about the war on drugs and pharmaceutical companies and I said, “Hey, man, I agree 100%!” All of a sudden we were on the same page and talking about a bunch of stuff we agreed on. Jamie texted, “Sorry for calling you names, that’s pretty immature of me. I shouldn’t be like that. You take care. I’ll be more open minded.” Wow. It was all I could do to not ask Jamie if we could be Facebook friends and maybe go grab a Bud Light. Just being curious changed everything. I talked to him like human being and not a sparing partner and we both benefited from it.
So if this approach worked with transphobe like Jamie could it work with my estranged wife? I started trying the technique out with Andi. “How did that make you feel?” “Can you tell me more about that?” “It sounds like that was really hard. Am I hearing you correctly?” And it wasn’t an act. The more I asked the more I wanted to know. She asked me to stick around so we could continue the conversation. I didn’t tell a single anecdote. Each one of her sentences left me wanting more and we talked for hours.
Curiosity won’t solve all our problems. I still have a lot of work to do to de-program my asshole tendencies. But it’s a start. And what if there’s something bigger at stake here. What if Congressman Jamie Raskin got curious about Lauren Boebert? What if Antifa Annie asked Proud Boy Billy about his childhood? Or what if Road Rage Rob asked Road Rage Roy, “Do you need a hug?” So whether it’s political incivility or fractured marriages there is great value in the advice of Vanilla Ice; stop, collaborate and listen. Let’s get curious. Stop talking and start asking questions. People just want to be heard. And then they’ll listen.
Another day, another story about how much Republicans hate trans people. Opportunistic MAGA bigot Kid Rock aside, how did transgender Americans become the primary target of hate mongers? Did the Ku Klux Klan run out of objects of derision? “It ain’t ‘cool’ to hate black people no more. Let’s go after them non-binary kids!”
We have seen a dramatic spike in hate crimes against transgender people. The numbers of anti-trans attacks jumped 29 percent in 2021 over the numbers in 2020. There has been a corresponding increase in anti-trans murders, with black trans women being the primary target. Fueling this wave of hate is a bizarre obsession from many Republican politicians who delight in finding ways to make the lives of transgender Americans hell, especially if they are kids. According to translegislation.com, 2023 has already seen 499 anti-trans bills in 49 states (thank you, Delaware), and 43 that have passed.
How did transgender people suddenly become the demographic that it was politically expedient to hate?
If I’ve leaned anything in my 30+ years of studying hate groups, hate mongers never miss a passing bandwagon. In the 1920s, the “America First” Ku Klux Klan pivoted from anti-black hate to anti-immigrant hate as immigration patterns shifted to bring waves of Catholics and Jews to our shores. In the 1980’s, the KKK got in on the anti-gay hysteria as the AIDS epidemic gripped the country. A few years ago, hate groups leveled up their anti-Semitism as a means of going after Anthony Fauci and any Jewish doctor who thought it might be a good idea to wear a mask. Now that COVID has subsided, it seems to be transgender folks who are in the crosshairs of those that are perpetually angry about something that doesn’t actually affect them.
Let me put an underline on that point. If you are not transgender, another person being transgender has absolutely no impact on you one way or another. There are probably about 1.6 million trans people in the United States (according to a recent UCLA study). You don’t have to do anything or not do anything. Just let them exist. Just like we do with left-handed people (who right-handed people used to think were evil). Fox News would have you believe there is an army of transgender backstrokers competing on girls swim teams. These are the same people who previously wouldn’t shut up about “black rapists” and “Jewish pedophiles.” There’s not. And if there is one or two trans athletes raising the bar, it doesn’t effect you or Travis Tritt.
So why are rednecks across America pouring Bud Light down the drain and trying to find a “less gay” shitty beer? (Good luck on that one, Cleatus.)
Here’s two explanations.
First is the obvious one. Right-wing politicians, like Florida Nazi-wannabe Ron DeSantis, are using transphobia to gin up their white evangelical base. Let’s not forget the previously mentioned white-evangelical outfit known as the Ku Klux Klan. There’s a grip of white Christians that don’t know that Jesus was a brown-skinned socialist and think the Lord approved on shitting on marginalized people instead of gifting them loaves and fishes. This group is easier to manipulate than a prom full of horny teenagers. All you have to do is mention “sex” and “children” and the pitchfork and torch-carrying villagers are officially triggered.
Let’s be clear. Kids are more at risk from child molesting preachers than drag queens or anybody in the entire LGBTQ community. The religious right thinks transgender people are “sexualizing” kids. Not anymore than sex crazed cis-gender heterosexual people are. Everywhere I look I see those folks sucking face. I’ve already written about how not-kid friendly TV shows likeFamily Feudare. Trying to protect my 8-year-old from the nonstop sexuality coming from the non-queer folks is a losing battle. Someone expressing their gender is not “sexuality,” it’s life. And trans kids are dying by not being allowed to do it by an opportunistic political movement that sacrifices them at the alter of MAGA votes.
Second is a cognitive reason and has to do with our less-evolved friends who are firing on their knee jerk lizard brains. Research shows that these limbic brain creatures cannot handle complexity. Everything has to be in a very black or white binary. These are the same folks who feared “mulattos” and “quadroons” a hundred and fifty years ago. You had to fit into a nice racial category so they knew where to put you. Now that over 9 million Americans (including my daughter) are biracial they’ve moved onto to another anal retentive need to put people in a box.
To be fair, the last few decades America has been on a public education project to learn that sex and gender are two completely different concepts. We’ve spent so long conflating biological sex with sociological expressions of gender, you can’t fault folks for having trouble disentangling them. (“Gender reveal parties” are not. Genital reveal but not gender.) But we’re fully past that point now. Anyone who has a brain developed enough to understand the complexity of reality (“One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter”) gets that gender can be extremely fluid and doesn’t exist in a neat either/or binary. So we’re left with troglodytes, like Kid Rock, who flip out when “dude looks like a lady.” Their brains just cannot manage boundary bending. Take the Bud Light banning morons back to 1883 and they would have coming for biracial people with ropes. Have you ever seen Birth of a Nation (1915)? “Those mulattoes are sexualizing our children!!”
The saddest part of this political fad is that there is already a body count. Trans kids who can’t get gender affirming care have an elevated suicided rate. Trans people suffer from all kinds of health problems because of inequities in our health care system (just ask a trans man with ovarian cancer). Physical attacks on trans people has now taken on a sport-like aspect. There was a brutal murder here in suburban Portland in 2001. The killing of a trans woman named Lani Kai became a focal point of my early hate crime work here in Oregon. The good news is her murder would now be classified as a bias crime in Oregon, but the bad news is her murder is still unsolved 22 years later and joins the increasing number of case files that end up with trans women of color (and other queer folks) chilling in the morgue.
There is a historical parallel the maps the current anti-trans hysteria to the hundred and sixteen years of lynching African-Americans after slavery ended in 1865. The thousands of racial lynchings were driven by an irrational fear, that somehow black people were an existential (and sexual) threat to white people. The modern irrational fear, bubbling over in bastions of hate like Texas, Tennessee, and Florida, is that transgender people are a threat to cisgender people. They’re not. They are human beings. The rest is convenient hysteria and it’s fueling the Republican death cult. Where southern Democrats championed the dehumanization of black people a hundred years ago, MAGA Republicans are now dehumanizing transgender people and it has to stop.
Now, I’m all for donating Kid Rock’s brain to science or sending thoughts and prayers into the void that one of Ron DeSantis’s three kids comes out as non-binary, but what I want to do is just beg the MAGA base to chill the fuck out and find a social problem that actually impacts them, like full access to healthcare or full access to lite beer. Whatever. Just leave trans kids alone.
When I was a young punk, I had this dumb mantra, “Impulse to action!” I believed that any thought that came into my head should be acted on. It seemed “mod” and “vibrant” and “rebellious.” In reality, it was the reflection of how unformed my young brain was. How my prefrontal cortex was not yet able to reign in my limbic system. I was all unchecked impulse and unmoderated action.
What I did that look like when I was 16? Talking my dad’s Monte Carlo and, channelling the Dukes of Hazzard, doing donuts in the fields of rural Georgia and then telling him it got hit in a parking lot (again). By 20, it was less bad behavior and more the belief that I could say whatever thought came into my head without first saying, “Should I say this?” Brain scientists believe the pre-frontal cortex is finally fully developed around age 25, but by that point my “impulse to action” synapses were well worn grooves in my head. My cake was baked.
We live in a culture that over-values the individual (“Me!!!”) and celebrates impulse to action behavior. Carpe diem gets rewritten as permission for road rage and buying stupid crap on credit cards. We can escalate from zero to a hundred in a heartbeat. My own centering of my impulses was a severe case of my white male entitlement. “I’m entitled to everything I want!” When women, BIPOC and queer folks are impulsive, they’re often raked over the coals for being “overly emotional” or “uncivilized.” We all need to calm the fuck down.
So much of this impulsive behavior is linked to our experience of trauma. I know my sexual abuse at age four is wired right into my limbic brain, what we lovingly refer to as our “lizard brain.” Like lizards, our limbic brain works on the fight/flight/freeze option to keep us safe. Lizards don’t ponder their options when an eagle is overhead. They skedaddle. Those of us with trauma histories are often locked into the fight/flight/freeze mode. Much of my life has been some version of looking for a fight, from battles with my little brother to running off to a Ukrainian war zone. I am the master of the knee-jerk reaction and it’s a 4-year-old boy who is doing the kicking.
One of the most important books I’ve ever read on this topic is My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (2017) by Resmaa Menakem. Menakem points out that white bodies carry the historical trauma of the centuries of brutality of medieval Europe and when white people had the opportunity to unleash their unresolved trauma on black bodies, in the form of slavery, they went hog wild. The trauma levied on black people didn’t magically disappear in 1865 and is manifest in black bodies today. The need for African-Americans to make sure white people are OK is one manifestation of that trauma, which ads “fawn” to fight/flight/freeze. Additionally, police carry the unresolved trauma of dealing with traumatized people everyday and act out their trauma on the (mostly black) bodies they are charged to protect. Hurt people hurt people.
Manakem suggests a mindfulness approach to all this drama caused by people acting on their lizard brain impulses. In a fast-paced world, what if we all just slowed down and learn how to soothe ourselves? What if cops, before hitting the streets, practiced meditation and thought about their own thoughts? Maybe instead of cop lizard brains seeing black bodies as a threat and squeezing off a few rounds, they’d calmly assess what was actually needed in that situation. Calming the brain can interrupt micro-aggressions and explosive anger. Think of all those times you fucked up and wished your thinking brain had been in charge instead of your “impulse to action” brain.
This has been a huge issue for me. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard Cher singing, “If I could turn back time” after I did or said something stupid. I apologize and swear I’ll never do it again. Then I do it again. The lizard brain doesn’t think. It just reacts. That baked cake has been my trauma response for over 50 years and has not made my life any better. Worse, it’s driven away the people I claim to love.
So finding a space between impulse and action is now my mandate. Daily meditation has become a requirement. Exercise and yoga, too. Breathing exercises, also. Anything to slow myself down and give myself the space to think before I act. I knew this past Saturday was going to be particularly challenging given the sad turns this marital separation has taken and I meditated six times throughout the day, which kept me from sending angry texts or stewing in my juices on a rare sunny Saturday in Portland. I’m having an ongoing conversation with the 4-year-old me. He can’t drive the car anymore, but he’ll be protected and safe.
There’s a quote attributed to David Bowie that says, “Aging is an extraordinary process where you become the person you always should have been.” If I could speak to that younger version of myself, I’d tell him to ditch that “impulse to action” bullshit as soon as possible. Slow your role and calm your soul. Give yourself permission to first see your thoughts and then, the ones that don’t actually serve you, let them go like big red balloons.
And to all the people that are screaming at each other, shooting each other, storming capitols, and hurting each other, please learn soothe yourselves. The lizard brain trauma response that tells you to pop a cap in his ass or street race down Broadway is the same impulse that tells you to text someone that they are a piece of shit or blow off someone’s sincere need to communicate. We can all be better at managing our tendency to cause harm. We have a buffer between our impulsive lizard brain and the mistakes we will later regret. That buffer is our ability to calm ourselves before we choose to act.
On Groundhog Day, 2023 there were 68 reported gun assaults in America with 30 people killed and another 33 injured. The recent mass shootings in California were quickly replaced in the news cycle by mass shootings in North Carolina, Texas, and Florida. And, hey! Is that a Chinese spy balloon? Are they watching us kill each other, too?
Another day, another two mass shootings. According to the data kept by the Gun Violence Archive (gunviolencearchive.org) there are an average of 1.87 school shootings a day in America. Add that to workplace shootings, gang violence, and domestic terrorists shooting up power stations and it’s just hard to keep up. These shootings have become so common, only the most extreme cases rise to the tired rank of “Breaking News.” And when they do, we are more than likely to see it as another passing headline, unless it occurs in our community. Have we become immune to the carnage? Are we no longer shocked by the body counts? Is this just normal life now?
Pioneering sociologist George Simmel, in 1903, defined the “blasé attitude,” a state of absolute boredom and lack of concern caused by life in the metropolis. For Simmel, this was a defense mechanism, an adaptation of our nervous system to the intense stimulation we experience from the explosion of stimuli in modern society, But in 2023, that defense mechanism may be helping to facilitate the death toll from gun violence. What’s the point of trying to prevent today’s mass shooting when there will be two more tomorrow? In reality, our growing immunity to gun violence all but ensures the trend will continue and spread like a contagion. We certainly have seen this dynamic in other epidemics, including AIDS and COVID.
But when people begin to act together those seemingly unstoppable pandemics begin to slow their rate of infection. They didn’t disappear but death rates dropped. In 1995, the peak year of the HIV pandemic, 45,213 Americans died of AIDS. By 2000, that number fell below 20,000 (16,072 deaths) and has declined every year since (7,053 in 2019). Part of what led to the change in our collective response was seeing the victims as disease as “us” and not “them.” When people began to see friends, neighbors, workmates, and family members contracting coronavirus, for example, the masks went on. It was no longer an abstract news story happening somewhere else. Action was required.
The contagion of mass violence has a similar trajectory. You don’t have to tell the parents of Uvalde or the African-America community in Buffalo or Asian-Americans in Monterey Park that action is required. However, to the rest of us, the urgency of another mass casualty event blends into the background noise with all the other pressing issues, and takes a backseat to our own economic, family, and social struggles. Added to this mental malaise is the hyper-vigilance we also experience as fear of our own potential victimization becomes part of that background static. “I’m not really paying attention to the upward trends but I know that I (or the the people I love) could fall victim to the random nature of gun violence.” Paralysis sets in.
So what’s the solution?
We make it personal. The high school students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School organized the March for Our Lives movement after a gunman killed 17 of their classmates in 2018. They realized the school shootings weren’t just news stories, they were a part of a constellation of gun violence in America, not an isolated incident, requiring thoughts and prayers. They organized to highlight the vulnerability of all Americans to this disease of violence.
We need to shift to a state of radical empathy. The hedge against the blasé attitude is to see all gun violence victims, including those killed and injured in today’s 1.87 mass shootings, as members of our community. They are all our family members and action is required.
Watching the Wheels 