There was no screaming

From a report on the Binghamton shooting: “As the shooting began '…some people hide in closets, some people under table — everywhere you can hide,' said Than Huynh, 45, a high school teacher from Vietnam who translated for some of the Vietnamese survivors when they were interviewed by the police after they fled.
There was no screaming, Huynh said. ‘They told me they tried to be quiet and run away.’ ”
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It is affecting that the Vietnamese were silent. Even if some of them were too young to have experienced the Vietnam war, the survival tactic they used is part of Vietnamese culture and lore, maybe for generations into the future. Hiding and running, watching others being killed, watching villages and homes burn -- the terrible war brought and re-enforced this pattern for years that must have seemed as if they would never end. Who can be the counselor for an entire country suffering from Post Traumatic Shock Disorder? Here in the U.S. we finally have begun to treat some of the PTSD veterans, usually with medicines and therapy. How do you do that with a whole country?
Binghamton and the other shootings are shocking and sad to us. We keep looking at these as random events. Is there a possibility these events are symptoms of a culture, ours, that has reached a state of disease -- or, at least, intolerable un-ease?
We were mostly silent -- perhaps too afraid? -- while many of the elements of our government were stolen during the past eight years. Mostly silent too when our government started another war that brought death to hundreds of thousands. Some of us were frustrated and confused and some of us didn’t know anything about it when mainstream media declined to proportionately cover the largest planetary anti-war protest in the history of the world.

Emperor-minded men and large corporations have played fast and loose with us, demoting us to consumers and unrespected cogs, those who can be manipulated infinitely and at will.

Of course we shouldn’t open fire on one another. But who is looking, analytically and compassionately, at how much we are being hurt by where we are, where we have arrived after the last eight years.

The brilliant and engaging young strategist has moved into the White House. We are quick to criticize him about his budget while we were silent as plane loads of newly printed money went over the ocean every day since the Iran invasion began. We look to Obama with yearning and hope but I wonder if we have another and deeper fear now -- a fear that maybe no one, no matter how talented and honorable, can heal our society now. We are an impatient people -- other nations stress how young we are. We don’t adjust easily to a dilemma so large it has to be solved in years, not weeks and months. While catastrophe can bring out the best in us it seems in the dailiness of life as if the diagnosis hasn’t been adequately delivered. Or if it has we can't hear it. We're like the patient who denies the dreadful diagnosis, who weeps and pleads for the doctor to "fix it"so we can get on with our lives. Maybe if we can see and learn, even become one of those who helps analyze and gather information about our societal illness we can rally to the treatment plans, gather our patience and our decency for a long struggle. Beyond national concerns, maybe we'll see that, as the apex predator on the planet, it is not wise or safe to commit continual assaults upon the co-inhabitants, the lands and waters of earth, our only home.

Where are the culture doctors? The shamen for society? The acupuncturists for corporations? The healers who can help us, even if timidly, even if afraid, even if hurt, to walk into a new history?

They are probably us. We have a lot to learn. And a lot to do.