Two days after the massacre of children in Uvalde, Texas, and 12 days after the racist mass murder in Buffalo, New York, Chenxing Han, a teacher and school chaplain, told a Buddhist parable.
A man is struck by a poisoned arrow, Han said as he led a group of high school seniors to visit a Thai temple in Massachusetts.
With the arrow stuck in his flesh, the man demands answers. What kind of arrow is it? Who shot it? What kind of poison does it carry? What feathers does the arrow have, peacock or hawk?
The problem is that all these questions are distracting, the Buddha tells his disciple. What really matters is removing the poisonous arrow and healing the wound.
“We need to be moved by the pain of so much suffering. But it’s important that it doesn’t paralyze us,” Han explained. “It makes us appreciate life because we understand that life is very precious and life is very short and can be gone in an instant.”
These days have revealed the presence of an arrow stuck deep in the heart of the United States. It was exposed in the massacre of 19 elementary school children and two teachers in Uvalde and in the murder of 10 people in a Buffalo supermarket by a man with a supremacist ideology. America is a country that has learned to live with one mass shooting after another.
And yet there are more arrows that have been incorporated into everyday life. More than a million people have died of COVID-19, a number inconceivable in another era. The virus already ranks third among the leading causes of death, despite the fact that there are already vaccines available, in one of the most advanced nations in the world in medicine. A surge in drug deaths, combined with deaths from COVID-19, has led to a drop in life expectancy in the United States to levels not seen since World War II. Police killings of unarmed black men continue long after law reform was promised.
The mountain of calamity and the paralysis of options to overcome it indicate that we live in a nation that is struggling with some fundamental questions: Has our tolerance as a country increased for such horrors, and then we just dust ourselves off after each event to make way for the next? How much value do we give to a human life?
Is there no limit to the number of victims?
After Uvalde, many Americans have begun to ponder in earnest for answers. Rabbi Mychal Springer, who is in charge of clinical pastoral education at New York Presbyterian Hospital, has taken up an ancient Jewish text from the Mishnah that says that at the beginning of creation, God created a single person.
“The teaching is that each person is so valuable that the whole world is contained in it, so we must honor that person completely,” he explained. “If one person dies, the whole world dies, and if one person is saved, the whole world is saved.”
The only way to value life, he said, is to be willing to truly grieve, to truly face the reality of suffering. He quoted a biblical passage of lament, the first line of Psalm 13: “How long, Lord?”
“It’s not that we don’t care. We have reached the limit of our ability to cry and suffer,” she added. “And yet we must do it. We must value each life as the whole world and be willing to mourn what it means that this whole world has been lost.
However, instead of prompting us to mourn together and take collective action, the crises now seem to be plunging the country deeper and deeper into division and intensifying clashes over what actions we should take in response.
The human brain mourns the death of a loved one differently from the death of strangers, and in times of crisis, grief isn’t the only feeling, said Mary-Frances O’Connor, an associate professor of clinical psychology and psychiatry at the University of Arizona, who studies the relationship between the brain and grief.
“We cannot underestimate the need to belong,” he said, adding that when something terrible happens, people want to be in contact with “their group”, to which they feel they belong, which can lead to more people settling in camps. partisans.
In recent decades, Americans have been living through a time of diminished belonging, with widespread loss of trust in religious organizations, community groups, and institutions. Valuing life and striving to heal means stepping out of oneself and one’s group, he said.
“This is going to require collective action,” he said. “And part of the problem is that right now we are very divided.”
The question of the inestimable value of life is present in some of the most intense debates in the country, such as that of abortion. Millions of Americans believe that annulment in Roe v. Wade will raise the value of life. Others believe it will underestimate the value of women’s lives.
American culture typically values individual freedom above collective needs. In any case, human beings are born with a tendency to appreciate others and not turn their backs on them, said Cynthia Bourgeault, an Episcopalian minister and teacher of Mystical Theology. She reflected on the myriad crises and compared them to the clouds that darken a spring day in Maine.
“Human beings are born to seek purpose,” he said. “We have very, very big souls. We are born for generosity; we are born to be compassionate.”
He added that the obstacle that prevents us from properly valuing life is “our very messy relationship with death.”
In the United States, denial of death has reached an extreme, he said, in which many focus on themselves to avoid the fear of death.
That fear cuts through “all the tendrils of consciousness, of the common good and the ability to act together,” he said, “because in the final calculation we have become animals saving our skins, and it seems that we saved our skins with repression and dissociation”.
The United States is an outlier in the level of gun violence it tolerates. The rate and severity of mass shootings is unparalleled in the world outside of conflict zones.
The United States has “an affair with violence,” said Phillis Isabella Sheppard, who heads the James Lawson Institute for the Research and Study of Nonviolent Movements at Vanderbilt University. The institution is named for the Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., the civil rights leader who was expelled from the university in 1960 for his role in peaceful protests in which they occupied white seats in cafeterias.
Violence, he said, is almost a normal part of life in the United States, and valuing life requires constantly asking how I am and how I commit to nonviolence today. Also, he told her, it requires letting go of some things: many people believe they are not violent but consume violence in entertainment.
“The question that should scare us is: what is it going to take to force us to push for change together?” he said.
“Maybe this is our life’s work,” he said. “Perhaps this is our work as humans.”
When Tracy K. Smith, former poetry consultant for the US Library of Congress, heard the news about the Buffalo and Uvalde shootings, her immediate reaction was anger and fury at “these monster people.” She said it’s easy to get stuck in that feeling and we even have incentives to do so, to think that these are “exceptional cases.”
“But when the emotion sets in, I realize that there is something alive in our culture that has harmed these people,” he said. “Whatever it is, it is harming us all, we are all vulnerable to its action, it exerts some kind of influence on us, no matter who you are.”
At the Harvard University graduation on May 26, he read a poem. She mentioned that it was a reflection on history, the violence we live in and what our times require. He explained that in his version of the poem, she thought of his children, but it was also a wish for his students. Many of them have dealt with enormous problems in recent years, from illnesses to having to care for their relatives.
“I want them to survive,” he said. “I want their bodies to be inviolable. I want the Earth to be inviolable.”
“It’s a wish, or a prayer.”
Elizabeth Dias covers faith and politics from Washington. She used to cover similar topics for Time magazine. @elizabethjdias