Memorial Day 5.30.22
State of the Soul Part 2: “Talkin’ World War III Blues”
Greetings from newShrink this Memorial Day, plus an anniversary.
The initial Welcome Shrink-wrap 5.30.21 posted a year ago. My sincere thanks, both to you charter-readers who supported from early conception phases and to all of you whose “joins and shares” continue to expand this community.
I wish this year’s time of past reverie also held more celebratory notes on the present and a more hopeful tone looking ahead.
Still in the wake of this week’s news, that’s just not possible. Not in a nation that at the moment is feeling more broken than merely divided. And not within newShrink’s commitment to track the soul of America by paying close and deep attention to its news and the people in it.
It’s a good reminder, this week, from the depth-psychology dimension of things: The unconscious soul includes murky shadow. It is not only the sweet or the bright or the known.
So maybe it’s apt, and unsurprising, that the cynical ironies of the classic-Dylan song of today’s title became the immediate ear-worm soundtrack as news of the devastating mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, entered our collective awareness and began to unfold on Tuesday.
Connecting Themes & Stories
This Part 2 Shrink-wrap edition was to conclude the past several weeks’ reflecting on this tracking of the soul of America through its news by operating more like journalists, the scholars and experts of various fields, and psychologists.
This week’s was to revisit the state of the depth soul-engaged dimension of psychology in America. Though I’m finding it too soon as yet for much of my own deep reflection or commentary, two depth-psychology themes to look for seem obvious here. One is the essential, especially in a democracy, holding dynamic tension of many sets of opposites, including the conscious and unconscious ones, in order that a creative or transcendent solution can emerge. The other theme is the ever-present shadow and the destructive results when it is denied by individuals and groups, then projected onto demonized others.
Today’s story is told first through images in the visual above, in three sections, followed in the same order by selected news headlines, quotes and commentary.
🔷 First at the images’ center column are the literal wars of a nation and the Memorial Day that’s our national holiday (with a few discovered surprises I found interesting.)
🔷 Illustrated in the far-left column begins coverage of the Uvalde school mass-shooting itself with various of its dimensions, opinion and stories.
🔷Then the far right column takes a more future focused stance, what’s possible, likely, or at least hoped-for.
Notes On Timing, June Editions and Topics to Come
There will be NO newShrink next weekend, June 3-5, due to a much-COVID-postponed high school reunion. It’s one of those classic “archetypal occasions” depth psychologists savor like a tasty treat. So it will surely find its ways into upcoming June editions along the month’s themes of beginnings-endings, departures-returns with graduations, weddings plus annual tribute to fatherhood and healthy psychological masculinity.
On the June news side Shrink-wraps will feature the State of Politics with the midterm election season so far. There’ll also be a closeup of the annual meeting of the enormous Southern Baptist Convention. The conference is sure to be dominated by this week’s explosive comprehensive report exposing massive, decades-long sex-abuse by Baptist clergy and systematic cover-up by high-level leadership.
The usual navigating details for accessing all links and references on the newShrink website are at the bottom of this post after closing comments.
🔵
#1. Memorial Day and Wars: More Than Metaphors
The Dylan song had been a bit of background-hum since a pitch-perfect reader’s share in a different news context several weeks ago. (In both cases the lyrics’ final two culminating stanzas especially linger.)
So as it resurfaced Tuesday, in quick succession as news of the school-shooting tragedy converged with this Memorial Day time of honoring lives lost in all of our nation’s wars, came a repeated sentence I may have actually exclaimed aloud:
These so-called culture-wars are not — or no longer seem to be— just metaphor.
Maybe it more easily escapes our notice without a colorful mortar-fire bombardment of Fort Sumter across Charleston Harbor or clear geographic north-south/Mason-Dixon lines delineating enslaving and non-enslaving states.
Or maybe we are collectively numbed, in fight-flight-freeze mode of reaction to such varied, frequent and wide-ranging breaches and erosions of our democracy. In any case this year’s commemoration of those lost in American wars seems neither long ago nor far away.
Here are a few things you may not know about Memorial Day from Time Magazine and Memorial Day facts from history.com.
🔷The holiday began in May 1868 as Decoration Day to remember those who died fighting for the Union in the Civil War.
🔷Southern States honored Confederate dead on separate days until after World War I, when the holiday came to be called Memorial Day and began to honor those killed in all U.S. wars.
🔷Even today some Southern states still have legally designated Confederate Decoration Days on their books.
🔷A federal law calls for a formal national moment of remembrance to be held at 3 p.m. each Memorial Day. Some records show the practice began with one of the earliest Memorial Day commemorations that was organized by a group of formerly enslaved people in Charleston, SC, less than a month after the Confederacy surrendered in 1865.
🔵
#2. Pericles of Ancient Greece: Helmeted Archetypal Image of Memorial Day
One of the first known public tributes to war dead was in 431 B.C., when the Athenian general and statesman Pericles delivered a funeral oration praising the sacrifice and valor of those killed in the Peloponnesian War — a speech that some have compared in tone to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. (History.com)
The so-called golden age of Athenian culture flourished under the leadership of Pericles (495-429 B.C.), “a brilliant general, orator, patron of the arts and politician and the first citizen” of democratic Athens, according to the historian Thucydides. Pericles transformed his city’s alliances into an empire and graced its Acropolis with the famous Parthenon. His policies and strategies also set the stage for the devastating Peloponnesian War, which would embroil all Greece in the decades following his death.
🔵
As the pictured familiar quote from depth psychologist James Hillman reminds, this month’s domestic wars drive everything else off the front page.
Uvalde was a barely breath-catching 10 days after a body-armored white male 18-year-old opened fire and killed 10 Black shoppers and employees in a predominantly Black Buffalo, NY, neighborhood grocery store. Three others, two of them white, were wounded in the racist attack. That shooter’s online manifesto had declared his intent to “kill as many Black people as possible.” The Uvalde killer had posted his intention to kill children.
There are few more brutally personal wars imaginable than this uniquely American carnage, particularly targeting children.
#3. The Uvalde, Texas, School Massacre
By this point I am sure most of us have read, watched and absorbed an enormous range of coverage, commentary and analysis of issues related to the shootings and aftermath. For thorough news and issues coverage with frequent live updates I can recommend The New York Times’ stories and commentary with embedded video as well as PBS News Hour, NPR and major TV news networks. Here I’ll share an assortment of quotes and links that caught my attention, not chronological or any attempt to be comprehensive.
Political historian Heather Cox Richardson’s daily Letters from an American newsletter and lawyer-activist Robert Hubbell’s Today’s Edition have provided particularly strong historic and political contexts. At heathercoxrichardson.substack.com, HCR’s Wednesday, May 25, post is one of the most essential-must-read and terrifying things I have read in this most terrifying of weeks She opens this way:
All day, I have been coming back to this: How have we arrived at a place where 90% of Americans want to protect our children from gun violence, and yet those who are supposed to represent us in government are unable, or unwilling, to do so?
This is a central problem not just for the issue of gun control, but for our democracy itself.
It seems that during the Cold War, American leaders came to treat democracy and capitalism as if they were interchangeable. So long as the United States embraced capitalism, by which they meant an economic system in which individuals, rather than the state, owned the means of production, liberal democracy would automatically follow. [She goes on to explain how alarmingly it has not.]
Here’s an excerpt from Hubbell’s piece May 27, “He Did Not Act Alone,” in which he announces the national March for Our Lives scheduled for June 11. (roberthubbell.substack.com).
The delay by nineteen officers outside the classroom door in Uvalde did not start when the gunman began shooting children. It began two decades ago, when the gun industry revitalized itself by marketing weapons of war to immature, insecure, rash young males looking for a way to release their testosterone-fueled rage. The sale of military style assault rifles revitalized the gun industry — as did the congressional law that immunizes gun manufacturers from civil liability for deaths caused by their guns. Congressional Republicans contributed to the excruciating forty-minute delay outside the classroom door in Uvalde. They gave an eighteen-year-old the right to buy more firepower and rounds of ammunition than nineteen law enforcement officers who stood in fear and indecision outside a classroom where children were calling for help.
Hubbell takes firm stands also in his May 26 post “It’s On Us” in which he excoriates behavior of Texas Governor Greg Abbott and politicians at the Wednesday news conference.
Every politician that Abbott crammed onto the stage during the press conference failed the children of Uvalde—including Ted Cruz. Not a single one of them had the decency to admit that they bore some responsibility for the failure to protect the children of Uvalde. It took Beto O’Rourke to confront Abbott. O’Rourke approached the podium from the audience as Abbott was finishing his evasive remarks. O’Rourke said,
Governor Abbott, I have to say something. The time that you could have stopped this was after Sante Fe High School. The next shooting is right now, and you’ve done nothing. You are offering us nothing. You said this was not predictable, this was totally predictable, and you choose not to do anything. It’s on you.
Republicans on the stage with Abbott, including Ted Cruz and Lt. Governor Patrick, called O’Rourke a “son of a bitch,” and “asshole,” among other things.
I happened to be watching the conference in real time when the challenge by O’Rourke occurred, and find Hubbell’s description here largely accurate. O’Rourke’s calmly firm voice tone, body language with slow, smooth strides both toward and from the stage all expressed the effective demeanor of a legislative leader, courtroom litigator or strong orator. In stark contrast were the outraged raised voices and crassly cursed name-calling by the Lt. Governor and another official.
The following piece in USA Today presents a tone and some statements of fact that are different from what I saw and heard. (And as an indictment of people we elect from either party to engage effectively as politicians, I find “politicizing” absurd.)
'This is on you': Beto O'Rourke confronts Abbott, Cruz at Texas school shooting press conference
🔵
Here is a list in order of the top Senate recipients of NRA lobby donations, along with immediate one-click tweet option if you happen to use Twitter. (NC readers might want to note that both of our senators Burr and Tillis are near the top rank held by Mitt Romney of Utah.)
If your mind is as blown as mine by that Houston NRA convention this weekend — with the high-profile Republican speakers and attendees and multitudes of gun-safety protestors outside — here’s just one look at it from CNN.
🔵
By late in the week, the outrageously slow police actions — and the obfuscations about it from Texas Governor Greg Abbott flanked by fellow Republican politicians — were dominating the emerging narrative about the shootings and immediate aftermath.
Texas officials investigating if police acted fast enough to stop shooter at Uvalde school
🔵
And in Washington, before Senators left for a two-week break:
After Uvalde, angry Democrats assail GOP over resistance to gun laws
(The Washington Post)
"I am here on this floor to beg, to literally get down on my hands and knees and beg my colleagues: Find a path forward here," Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) implored his colleagues. "Work with us to find a way to pass laws that make this less likely.”
🔵
Here’s a helpful attempt by Nicholas Goldberg of the L.A. Times (in The Charlotte Observer) to explain the inexplicable about our U.S. gun laws, specifically our 2nd Amendment and the way its “well-regulated militia” wording has been interpreted by the increasingly right-wing Supreme Court.
What’s holding us back from getting our gun laws fixed?
In a politically healthy society the obvious solution would be to amend the constitution.
So much for that idea. (Italic emphasis is mine.)
🔵
#4. Seeing America, Again…
(The New Yorker)
Nineteen children and two adults were murdered in Texas. This is the country that gun-rights advocates have chosen…
…One of the many unforgivable obscenities of America’s gun obsession is how it can render the image of an anguished child and her caregiver, captured in real time as they absorb a life-altering trauma, as commonplace, interchangeable, even banal. Wait, which one is this again?
On Tuesday night, the poet Jana Prikryl shared the “Alas, poor country” passage from “Macbeth,” in which Ross laments that Scotland has become not a place to live but merely a place to die: “Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot / Be call’d our mother, but our grave . . . where violent sorrow seems / A modern ecstasy.” A modern ecstasy—and a habit, or a ritual, with its attendant ceremonies and scripts and rites. These always include cut-and-paste expressions of sympathy and concern from various bridesmaids of the National Rifle Association.
Some common threads quickly appeared in word and visual commentary alike.
America’s Hands Are Full of Blood (The Atlantic)
Amid our pain and grief, we must face a bitter truth.
This excellent essay is by longtime moderate-conservative David Frum of The Atlantic. For readers who seek and value reading and hearing regularly from this viewpoint, as I do, you might check out his bio. Harvard-educated, he’s worked at senior levels in both long-respected conservative news organizations and in the Bush White House. (For various reasons I’ll be thinking then perhaps writing about, I am comparing his work some with that of David Brooks… and often preferring Frum’s.)
From Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times — definitely not a conservative voice — here is a remarkably similar assessment:
America May Be Broken Beyond Repair
🔵
#5. “Melancholia” statue by Albert György, at Lake Geneva, Switzerland
This statue is widely circulating online in recent days in response to the Texas school shootings — under the erroneous name “Emptiness” and without the artist or location information. By description attributed to the artist it depicts an expression of the hollowed-out, yes, emptiness, of grief. For me here, it represents the depth- or felt-psychological experience following such tragedy.
It also evokes my responses to the several mental health, neurological, and developmental arguments being made regarding both gun-safety efforts and laws and this and many other largely adolescent or young-adult male perpetrators of mass shootings. In briefest terms here, if “better mental health steps” really were the best or primary goal and solution:
🌀The very first standard-of-care action and policies to reduce or eliminate risk of harm to self or others is removal of firearms and halting the person’s access to them.
🌀The legal age for gun ownership nationally should naturally be at least 21, not only because adolescent males are by far most likely to commit these crimes but because psychologically and neurologically their brains’ capacity for impulse-control and cognitive overriding of reactivity and emotional arousal like rage is not yet fully formed. (There is a reason young men this age are sent to fight in war zones and onto fields of violent contact sports.)
🌀As is illustrated by this week’s devastating freeze-inaction by even trained police officers confronting such volatile and deadly attack at close range, arming schoolteachers or lay volunteers in extra “hardened” schools is a dangerously insane idea. Schoolteachers in a state of high-alert reactivity sufficient to notice, respond and take down a heavily armed, rapid-fire attacker would be far more likely also to make dangerous over-reaction errors themselves. They also would not otherwise be able to teach and respond appropriately to developing children from that constant hyper-vigilant-alert state of mind and body.
🔵
#6. One nation under guns…
The poem pictured is from Amanda Gorman, former Youth Poet Laureate who read her stunning work at President Biden’s Inauguration.
The view from across the pond, an apparently prolific and perhaps popular British Twitter-poet named Brian Bilston:
AMERICA IS A GUN
England is a cup of tea. France, a wheel of ripened brie. Greece, a short, squat olive tree. America is a gun.
Brazil is football on the sand. Argentina, Maradona’s hand. Germany, an oompah band. America is a gun.
Holland is a wooden shoe. Hungary, a goulash stew. Australia, a kangaroo. America is a gun.
Japan is a thermal spring. Scotland is a highland fling. Oh, better to be anything. Than America as a gun.
Here’s an assortment of ideas and efforts toward changing that with prospective solutions and future action.
🔵
gun violence prevention
These Gun Reforms Could Save 15,000 Lives. We Can Achieve Them. (NYT Guest Essay by longtime former Times columnist Nicholas Kristof)
6 Modest Proposals to Prevent Gun Violence in America (The Week)
If GOP wants to protect life and children, start with guns (The Charlotte Observer)
NC Gov. Cooper calls for gun safety in NC (The Charlotte Observer)
🔵
a worldwide view
Along with significant statistics regarding our nation’s nearly 400 million guns owned by civilians — nearly 40 percent of the world’s total — this excellent piece unpacks complexities of our gun laws and how the issue has evolved here.
How does US gun policy compare with the rest of the world? (PBS News Hour)
How to Prevent Gun Massacres? Look Around the World (From John Cassidy in The New Yorker)
Australia, Britain, Canada, and other countries have enacted reforms that turned mass shootings into rare, aberrational events rather than everyday occurrences.
New Zealand collects about 56,000 guns in buyback program after Christchurch massacre (From CNN)
🔵
#7. Just because we can…(doesn’t mean we should)
The final, bottom right, quote and clip has long been a favorite from the Jeffrey Goldblum character Dr. Ian Malcolm in the original 1993 Jurassic Park movie. Malcolm is commenting on the moral judgment and wisdom — and lack thereof — in the theme park’s cloning of dinosaurs and exhibiting them with humans.
To me he captures here an essential element of all moral choice and judgment from the profound reckonings involved in reproductive decisions… to the various other individual rights — including bearing of arms — enshrined in the Constitution… to the free-will aspect of many of the world’s major religions.
The Jurassic Park example is not without irony, considering the coming June 11th release of Dominion, the seventh movie in the enormously popular franchise. Dr. Malcolm’s wisdom certainly hasn't slowed or stopped the cloning of more dinosaur movies.
🔵
On a closing note, actor and Uvalde native Matthew McConaughey took to social media Wednesday to address the shooting in his hometown.
“look in the mirror…”
(from NPR)
His concluding call to action:
"The true call to action now is for every American to take a longer and deeper look in the mirror, and ask ourselves: 'What is it that we truly value? How do we repair the problem? What small sacrifices can we individually take today, to preserve a healthier and safer nation, state and neighborhood tomorrow?"
🔵
I’ll leave you now with a couple of images.
Even in a week like this, a few things look and smell delicious…
Full glory peak-time is now on its way, about mid-June…
And, that is all I have. Talk to you in two weeks.
🦋💙 tish
•🌀🔵🔷🦋💙
… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”
🔵
To link all newShrink content:
• You can click directly to links from phrases that are underlined in the text.
• You can also go directly from a browser to newshrink.substack.com.
• From the home page you can find all posts in Archives and About.