Emotional abuse is a major problem in our culture today, whether experienced in our private relationships or in our public discourse. From parents verbally and physically abusing their children to spouses abusing each other, our homes often are places of emotional scarring, rather than places of refuge and repose.

And what happens in our private domain gets mirrored in our public forum. We have all witnessed the shameful tension around the health care debate. That debate is no less vitriolic than the discourse around issues such as national security, the housing crisis, the national debt, education, and a host of other critical issues. While no one will debate the importance of these issues — or the passion that they deserve — what is sad, and even frightening, is the emotional abuse that we bring to our handling of these issues.

The character attacks (including racial assaults and even death threats) go far beyond healthy political discussion, and reach a level of emotional abuse at a mass group level.

Whether emotional abuse occurs at the family level or the mass group level, it stems from a struggle over power relationships. In our October 13, 2009 post, Why Do We Fight? we discussed the innate tendencies toward fighting to resolve conflict. Ultimately, we can stay stuck at this level, or we can choose to move to a new level of conflict resolution. It is the level that all the great masters tried to teach us: the way of Love.

Although this sounds simple — and it is — it is not easy. Embracing love as the way to resolve conflict is the most robust skill we can master. We must begin by mastering our own internal enemies (our ego), and along the way, being able to embrace the foibles of the other person — or group. When we truly know who we are, then we can accept others just as they are — without trying to change them.

We spend tremendous energy trying to change other people, which simply does not work. Even if a person is going to make changes, they will do so because they are ready to do so. Our inspiration may be one of many influences in their change process, but their change is a work of spirit — not our genius or judgment.

Rather than abusing each other, by tearing each other down, we need to spend all of the energy we can muster building each other up. My mother was a very wise person, although she was a high school drop-out. One of her very wise sayings was, “If you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all.” So many times I have learned to look for the good in everybody by forcing myself to say nothing until I had something good to say.

With the sheer volume of open greed that infests our society, each of us must educate ourselves in order to avoid the criminal and “barely legal” behavior of those who seek to take our wealth and names.  If you live in the U.S., a good place to look for guidelines and advice is your state attorney general’s office.  Our Google search of ten state attorney general offices (“[state] attorney general consumer”) found that each state had a web site full of consumer information.  They provided information on current scams and how to avoid them, accurate information on how to protect against identity theft, guidelines on what rights we have when faced with aggressive businesses, and instructions on what to do if we suspect theft or fraud.  Two of the states we examined, New York and Ohio, also offer free workshops to interested groups, and many counties offer similar programs through their sheriff’s departments.  Most states provide free brochures on a variety of fraud prevention topics.

Please use the information available to you to protect your name and livelihood; a small investment of your time today may make a vast difference in your future.  Please also use what workshops and brochures are available in your area to educate others, particularly the elderly, the poor, and children, so that those who prey upon others will have fewer victims to claim.  An economic crisis tends to bring out both the best and the worst in us.  Let us work together in compassion to limit the damage done by our baser natures during these trying times.

We at the IFL received the following text in an email, and we were invited to forward it.  Although the advice is very general, it contains great wisdom.

Another year is upon us. 

 

                                  Let’s get ready for “2010″ !!!!

 

                                              HANDBOOK 2010

 

        Health:

         1.       Drink plenty of water.

         2.       Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a  prince

                   and dinner like a beggar.

         3.       Eat more foods that grow on trees and 

                   plants and eat less food that is manufactured in plants..

         4.       Live with the 3 E’s — Energy,   and Empathy Enthusiasm

         5.       Make time to pray.

         6.       Play more games

         7.       Read more books than you did in 2009 .

         8.       Sit in silence for at least 10 minutes  each day

         9.       Sleep for 7 hours.

        10.      Take a  10-30 minutes walk daily.

                    And while you walk, smile.

 

        Personality:

        11.      Don’t  compare your life to others.

                   You have no idea what their journey is all about.

        12.      Don’t have  negative thoughts or things

                    you cannot control.

                    invest your energy in  the positive present moment.

        13.      Don’t over do. Keep your limits.

        14.      Don’t take  yourself so seriously. No one else does.

        15.      Don’t waste  your precious energy on gossip.

        16.      Dream more while you are awake

        17.      Envy is a  waste of time. You already have all you need..

        18.      Forget  issues of the past.

                   Don’t remind your partner with

                   His/Her mistakes of the past. 

                       That will ruin your present happiness.

        19.      Life is too  short to waste time hating anyone.

                   Don’t hate others.

        20.     Make peace  with your past so it won’t spoil the present.

        21.     No one is  in charge of your happiness except you.

        22.     Realize  that life is a school and you are here to learn.   

        23.     Smile and laugh more.

        24.     You don’t  have to win every argument. … Agree to disagree

                  Problems are simply part  of the curriculum that appear

                  and fade away like algebra class…..

                  but the lessons  you learn will last a lifetime.

 

        Society:

        25.     Call your  family often.

        26.     Each day give something good to others.

        27.     Forgive  everyone for everything..

        28.     Spend time w/ people over the age of 70

                   & under the  age of  6.

        29.     Try to make at least three people smile each day.

        30.     What other  people think of you is none of your business.

        31.     Your job  won’t take care of you when you are sick. 

                   Your friends will. Stay in touch.

        Life:

        32.    Do the  right thing!

        33.    Get rid of anything that isn’t useful, beautiful or  joyful.

        34.    GOD  heals everything.

        35.    However good or bad a situation is, it will change..

        36.    No matter  how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.

        37.    The best is  yet to come..

        38.    When you awake alive in the morning, thank GOD for it.

        39.    Your Inner  most is always happy. So, be happy.

 

Rescue workers struggled to clear rubble and bodies from the streets of Haiti's "flattened" capital, where a government official said the death toll from the 7.0-magnitude earthquake may exceed 100,000. This tragedy makes my heart go out to all the people who have lost loved ones. As a father and grandfather who has suffered near fatal tragedies, I can empathize with the gutt-wrenching pain and agony these families face. There is a passage in the Old Testament of the Bible -- Jeremiah 31:15 --that says, "There was a voice heard in Rama, Rahel weeping for her children...because they were not." This prophecy, tied to the Christmas season, which we just celebrated, calls us all to honor the least among us and care for the defenseless. When we recognize the poor, the needy and the despised among us, we bring life, healing and hope to the whole of humanity. If we neglect those less powerful, we breed the seeds of our own defeat.

Race is an omnipresent factor in our society.  It shapes how we see ourselves and is a primary way in which we classify other people.  We view race as essentially tied to social class, education, culture, income and a host of personality traits.  Race is so powerful in shaping our perceptions that it is difficult to imagine a “colorless” world.

What may be surprising is that race as we currently understand it is a very new concept.  For most of human history and across most cultures, racial characteristics have been seen as interesting, but irrelevant.  People knew that foreigners had different coloration, facial features and hair textures, but no special significance was attached to these differences.  To the Romans, for instance, a citizen was a citizen, whether born in Italy or Nubia.  The ancient Greeks believed that racial differences were entirely environmental in origin, so that a person who spent enough years in a foreign land would take on the appearance and temperament of that land’s people.  Early writers would occasionally hurl racial epithets at their enemies, and every people saw themselves as more beautiful than anyone else, but there was no real sense of racial identity beyond the local tribe.  The differences we now categorize as racial were simply the external features that indicate an exotic origin.  If someone with foreign features became part of “our tribe”, then having a different coloration became irrelevant for that person.  They were one of “us”.

It was only within the past few hundred years, when Europeans conquered and colonized the rest of the world, that the idea of race as we now understand it developed.  Europeans created this new notion of race to justify their economic exploitation of others, especially in the slave trade.  When Europeans arrived in a new land, they justified their conquests by claiming that they were bringing Christianity to an ignorant people.  The problem was that once the indigenous people were converted, there was no longer any rationale for the Europeans’ continued abuses.  The idea of race was therefore invented to create an excuse for continued exploitation.  If local people were somehow intrinsically unable to govern themselves, then Europeans were justified in staying and maintaining control.  If people from Sub-Saharan Africa were not truly human, then it would be morally acceptable to treat them as livestock.  Race became a way to define non-Europeans as less than human, so that European imperialism and exploitation could be justified.  It allowed Europeans to sleep at night because the people they were abusing were not recognized as human.

Today, while the theory behind race continues to be false, the experience of race is real.  It is no longer purely a European phenomenon; all racial groups are complicit in maintaining the notion of race, for each benefits from it.  Those of “dominant” races use race to define their own way of life as superior, requiring always that others adapt to their way of doing things and never the other way around.  Minority races use race to claim victim status, which may then be used used to justify and motivate everything from greater personal drive to calls for entitlement or violence.  All racial groups have political and religious leaders who solidify their own power by directing fear and hatred toward other groups.  In the end, race is a concept that comforts us with real feelings of self-righteousness, but those feelings are based upon smoke and mirrors.

The reality is that race does not exist except in our minds.  It only has power because we have given power to it; there is no factual basis to our racial categories.  Even the most race-obsessed societies, such as Nazi Germany and the pre-Civil War U.S. South, could not create uniform and sensible ways of classifying people by race.  A global map showing each place’s dominant skin color would not show a world of “red and yellow, black and white”, but a broad and softly varying spectrum of earth tones.  The variations between us are too gradual to fit into the racial categories we have created.  The only scientifically sound racial group is the human race.  All others are illusions.

Perhaps it is time to return to the ancient understanding that race is simply the physical features that indicate a person’s land of origin.  These features may be distinctive, but they have no inherent value.  If we let go of our obsession over race, we will lose some of our own sense of self-righteousness, but in the end, we will become stronger by unifying as one people.  Given the global nature of the challenges we now face, we need to get beyond the artificial divisions that separate us.  The illusion of race only hinders us from building a better future.

When J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattann Project, first witnessed the destructive power of the atomic bomb he helped to create, his reaction was a quote from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”  Following the war, he worked tirelessly to limit the scope and spread of nuclear weapons.  Oppenheimer recognized that humanity’s progress in his discipline of physics had gotten far ahead of our development in ethics, and until we had created an ethical framework that could cope with our new found ability to exterminate ourselves, we were all in terrible danger.  The rarefied world of theoretical physics suddenly had to deal with the responsibility of how the technology it produces could be used.

In a similar way, the discipline of biology was both excited and nervous when Dolly the sheep was cloned in 1996.  That breakthrough and the initial release of data from the Human Genome Project in 2000 has caused scientists in the field of genetics to face a time of ethical soul-searching that is similar to what the physicists dealt with in the mid-1900′s.  We now have the ability to genetically manipulate ourselves and the creatures around us; to what extent should we allow this manipulation to occur?  Both the benefits and the risks potentially affect all of life.  The scientific community and legislative bodies have therefore created rules to govern this new responsibility.

As technology continues to advance at faster and faster rates, many disciplines have had to face the ethical implications of their work.  Medicine has many ongoing ethical issues, such as abortion, euthanasia and health care availability.  Computer science struggles with issues of privacy and dehumanization.  Applied sciences such as agriculture and manufacturing must now consider the environmental and safety implications of their processes.  Educators and social agencies must consider how their projects will affect all categories of people.

What unites these threads together is the recognition (in the words of Stan Lee) that with great power comes great responsibility.  In a world where knowledge is power, where innovation can have a profound impact on millions or billions of lives, it is absolutely imperative for every discipline to undergo periods of ethical review.  We need to understand how our new capabilities affect humanity as a whole, and we must intentionally decide as a people whether the benefits of a new technology outweigh its risks.  For disciplines that affect us all, there need to be both internal standards and external supervision and regulation.

Recently, Columbia University professor Bruce Kogut proposed that those who create financial innovations must accept responsibility for the results of their creations.  This is a radically new idea in the world of finance, built upon a foundation laid by scientists over the past sixty-five years.  It is the same thought that ran through Oppenheimer’s mind when he realized the destructive potential of his creation.  It is no longer possible to pretend that our financial system exists in some kind of ethical vacuum.  Like Oppenheimer’s bomb, it has the demonstrated ability to harm millions or billions of people.  In fact, it is designed for the express purpose of benefiting a small group of people who understand the technology at the expense of the majority who do not understand it.  It is time for those who understand the financial system to deal with the ethical questions of how and when their creation should be used to benefit humanity as a whole.  It is also time for society at large, through our governments, to set clear and reasonable boundaries for how financial innovations may be employed.  We should allow financial innovators to benefit from their inventions, but not at the expense of the rest of humanity.  With great power comes great responsibility.