Making Peace with a Violent World

There was an incident last night in Times Square – after dark, but while the tourist crowds were still at their height – a motorcycle backfired. Thousands of people mistook these sounds for gunfire and fled Times Square, trampling and injuring others, pounding on closed theater doors to be let in for shelter – terrorized by what they thought was violence in their midst.

It’s easy for us to see a situation like this, and despair – the endlessly repeating loop of mass shootings in our country has naturally led to a populace whose nerves are on edge, constantly watching and listening for violence around us, every second.

Who among us doesn’t think about a possible shooting situation when we are at a movie theater, at a concert, in a Walmart, anywhere where there are large crowds? I know I do. I ride a commuter train everyday, and just recently I thought for the first time – what would I do if somebody entered this train car with a gun? What are my routes of escape? How would I preserve my life in the face of death?

Of course, the terror that we all live with daily is nothing, compared to the lives that have been extinguished, and the families that have been broken, by the plague of gun violence in our country. At least we are still able to live – when tragically, so many others have been taken from us for no reason.

Our country shouldn’t have to be like this. But how do we change?

There are obvious answers – like reviving the assault weapons ban we used to have in our country, tightening gun control, banning high-capacity magazines,  and taking military-grade weapons out of the equation.  Better gun control laws are obviously part of the solution – but there are many other causes to address too, and this is not an entry about gun control – that is for another time.

There is much more that must change, that is not as obvious, and possibly even harder.

I love my country, but today it is divided along so many lines – race, ethnicity, gender, income – the list is endless. America in the 21st century has become a place where people stand on opposite sides of these lines, and see every situation as “us” vs. “them”. These lines have grown into walls, that we throw insults and violence over and pretend that we live on the virtuous side of.

These lines have always existed, but a confluence of factors has cooked this situation into a toxic soup – where it is easy for a person to be sucked in by violent attitudes online and by prejudices they see around them, and feel like all the “right” people in the world think like they do, and everybody else is “wrong”.

One of the things that has become blindingly clear to me as I grow older is this: We are all wrong, lots of times in our lives. None of us is always right. I’ve made assumptions about people in my life, that I absolutely know (with the wisdom of looking back) were wrong. The world is actually a never-ending series of grey areas, and most opinions are half-right, or less. The true human condition (that we all try to hide from each other) is that every one of us is often lost, stumbling through life while struggling with our fears and hopes, just trying to get through the day in the best way possible.

But because we keep that hidden, there has always been us and them, left and right, right and wrong in this country – but why does it seem so bad now? How do we even start to fix it?

I think what has died in our country is compassion. For a thousand reasons, it is easier for us to ignore, look down on, or insult somebody who is “different” from us, than it is for us to be compassionate to them. Polarization of thinking has separated us, and we have all fallen into the trap of building barbed wire fences around the ideas and beliefs that we think are sacred.

One of the basic principles that I founded Open Diary on was this – every person has their own internal story, that is playing all the time inside their being, and nobody else in the world can know or understand it all – but we can try.

Every human being on this planet is first of all a human – born into the same basics of existence as every other one of us.

We all live, we all have dreams, we all have fears, we all try to survive, and in the end we all die.

The first step to compassion is understanding that the person we consider “different” from us is really not – they may speak in a way we don’t understand, they may act in a way that makes us uncomfortable, they may believe in things that we don’t agree with – but at their core, they are made from the same elements that we are, and they have been granted the same miracle of life that we were.

Compassion to those we consider different is the first step towards finding peace with them. Trying to understand the fears of the refugee who has fled their country, trying to relate to the beliefs of the person who goes to a different church than you, trying communicate with the person who speaks in a different language, we all have to take small steps to throw away polarization and to start building connections with other people who are different from us.

There’s some interesting takes on polarization and how to get it out of your life in this article, Finding Peace in Toxic Times by Dr. Kristen Lee. I think her statement about “feelings are not facts” is so important to how we interact with other people today.

I know that this polarized world has taught my brain to react first with feelings, instead of looking for the facts of a situation. I have to remember that just because somebody doesn’t follow my own worldview, that doesn’t automatically make their worldview wrong. 

I also found inspiration from one of my favorites, the Dalai Lama. This message from him – A Human Approach to World Peace – is a long read, but so valuable. I encourage you to read the whole thing, but the Dalai Lama’s main points are:

1. Universal humanitarianism is essential to solve global problems;
2. Compassion is the pillar of world peace;
3. All world religions are already for world peace in this way, as are all humanitarians of whatever ideology;
4. Each individual has a universal responsibility to shape institutions to serve human needs.

The last one is super-important, as we think about what kind of people we elect to offices in our country – as Americans, we must serve human needs, not just our needs.

I really like #2, though: Compassion is the pillar of world peace. 

In the same way, I think compassion is the pillar of personal peace.

We all need to find ways to talk to other people, especially the people who are not like us – and have regular conversations about the normal everyday things that happen in all of our lives – so we can relate to each other, instead of being suspicious of each other.

We can only find peace with others, by first beginning to understand them.

This is what Open Diary is all about.