[youtube=http://youtu.be/wJZ3bcPr-Ds]
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Via @AnonymousOpsIRC on Twitter: From Boston to Afghanistan, nobody deserves to get blown up at anytime. #peace not #war
American comedian Patton Oswalt posted a thoughtful response to the Boston bombings on his Facebook wall, reflecting on the goodness that remains in the world:
…I don’t know what’s going to be revealed behind all of this mayhem. One human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths.
But here’s what I DO know. If it’s one person or a HUNDRED people, that is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the percent of the population on this planet. You watch videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out…This is a giant planet and we’re lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in a while, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they’re pointing the way towards darkness.
But the vast majority stands against that darkness…(click here to read in full)
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Whenever darkness crosses our path, we all have a choice in how we respond.
More links:
Boston Marathon Tragedy Met With Unbelievable Acts Of Kindness
Bomb Attacks Across Iraq Kill 50, Injure 300
Saw something similar this morning on the news, the individual noted that its the way that they helped each other that should define America. I love that!
Wouldn’t it be nice? Adbusters had an article that posed the question, “could Boston be our chance for peace?” https://www.adbusters.org/blogs/our-chance-peace.html
We would do well, Christine, if we remembered what terrorism seeks to achieve and how often we unwittingly accommodate it. The goal of terrorism is to make us afraid, insecure and accepting of authoritarianism. It seeks to force governments to over-react, become oppressive and thereby created divisions between the governed and those who govern them. Terrorism tries to show the state as incapable of protecting its citizens and therefore undeserving of their allegiance.
The more we focus on terrorist acts, the more we allow them to shape our society, the more success we hand to those who inflict these crimes and the more we encourage others to copy them.
It’s axiomatic that people do things for what they expect to get from them. Why, then, do we give terrorists what they want in such abundance?
I agree that, like other heinous crimes, publicity and the fear generated is part of the motivation. Don’t know that we want to stifle information flow, though – that’s authoritarian, too.
Reblogged this on The Free.
Thanks!
Shining the light on the darkness so resonates with me.
We humans are wired to remember negative experiences more than positive ones, so it’s helpful to have this reminder during difficult times.
Do you really believe that we are wired to remember negative experiences more than positive ones? Marketers would have trouble believing that. I think we’re actually wired to a process of ignoring most negative events and fairly rapidly purging our memories of those we were at first unable to ignore. How else can we be so uniformly complacent to famine, mass death from easily preventible disease, the butchery inflicted daily on civilians around the world. We sat by and ignored 5-million civilians being slaughtered in the charnel house called Congo.
No we’re very good at filtering all that stuff out, not seeing it much less remembering it. We’re actually very discriminating about what we will remember, briefly, and it’s invariably something that we can emote upon.
It’s this very powerful ability to filter, ignore and forget, Christine, that poses the greatest obstacle to your prime concern, fighting climate change.
It’s when you don’t ignore all the death and suffering in Kandahar and Kut and Karachi and Somalia, that’s when Boston becomes a fart in a hurricane.
I’m no psychological expert, but I do take the word of those who are. I’m currently reading “Born to be good” by Dacher Keltner, and in fact he cites studies that prove just that (that negative experiences imprint themselves on our brain more than positive ones). I can post the link/quote later, don’t have the time right now to search for it.
What you are talking about are other people’s negative experiences, which is a different kettle of fish. There the phenomenon you’re talking about is probably related to cognitive dissonance (our ability to silence/shut out those experiences that don’t resonant with our world view, or are too painful to ponder). That’s different than our own personal negative experiences.