Can Police Practice Love Instead of Intimidation?

Why do some police lack calm or a steady demeanor when encountering “a person of interest”? I’d say it’s because compassion and love haven’t been a concern of the American justice system for a long time, if ever.

There’s no love in Juvenile Justice, where parents of color worry about their children getting sucked into the Pipeline To Prison — and if you don’t know about it, a 2006 complaint against the Winner School System, filed by Lakota parents in South Dakota, is a very good example. 

In that school, Native American children had been treated badly by teachers, coaches and white students. Some children were removed from school by law enforcement, incarcerated without telling their parents. Some of their offenses included pushing in the lunch line and being accused of actions they hadn’t done. Some of their parents waited days before the school told them where their children were, and by then, the children had already been processed into the juvenile justice system and the parents couldn’t get them out.

Judgement, not love, has been America’s guiding principle and it is strange to me that a country that is primarily Christian systematically re-enforces punishment and death rather than love and compassion.

These days, I would expect most people want a change in the way police deal with intense situations. The numbers of death by police has become impossible to ignore. In 2017 and 2020, 457 white people were killed by police. African Americans, who are approximately only 14 percent of Americans saw half as many deaths: 223 in 2017 and slightly higher at 241 in 2020. Half as many deaths in only 14% of the population is also impossible to ignore, especially since George Floyd was martyred in front of the entire nation. 

These horrors have been magnified to the point where even people living in the whitest communities in American cannot ignore this anymore, and Thank God for that, because it has been going on forever. Killing minorities has been a national tradition since the country was founded and has been ignored ever since. Now, America’s police have become the scary bad guys.

Have you ever heard of Death By Police? There are certain states where, when someone wants to die, all they have to do is antagonize a police officer and they are assured a hasty death by gunshot.

In my opinion, fear (or hate, based on fear) of minorities is the basis of much of the problem. White Americans, especially in segregated areas, imagine people of color are angry or dangerous. Perhaps that’s because if anyone had treated their ancestors or their children so meanly or rudely, they too might hate and seek vengeance. 

Perhaps they fear poor people might steal. White fear might mean that deep down, white people know they have done a lot wrong, and if not them specifically, then America in general. They know people of color have a lot to be angry about. 

And yet, I have found in my life that is untrue. People of color I meet are never angry towards me. Instead, I treat everyone with a smile and a handshake and I approach everyone I meet with love. Love thrives easily when there is no fear. 

In the last twenty-five years, I have lived among people who look nothing like me. My life is infinitely better for repeatedly finding my white self in the minority.

I had to overcome fear but I did it with a smile. 

Many years ago, I found myself walking down a city street late at night. I was a young 26 years old and mine was the only white face in sight. It was just me and my expensive Nikon camera. I turned a corner and walked a ways, a little nervous, anxious to reach my car ahead. 

A group of young men, far darker in complexion than myself, approached me and seemed to glare menacingly at me. I did the one thing I knew how to do to protect myself. I lifted my camera to my face, smiled and said, “Hey, you guys! Strike a pose!”  

And they did! They cracked up and made silly smiling faces, and we all laughed and went on our way.

Decades later, I moved into a very diverse community. I decided to smile and greet everyone I encountered. Within weeks, all of my neighbors, including gang-bangers in low riding, bouncing cars, honked, waved and smiled at me as they passed on the street. It was delightful. 

When people have never lived in a diverse situation or find themselves as a minority for the first time, they may be fearful of what they don’t know. All they know is what they have seen on television, even if they believe in equality for all.

My smile experiment continued into California. I moved onto a street where whites and Hispanics ignored each other as if they were invisible. I smiled whenever I strolled and quickly saw the beginnings of upturned mouths of passing neighbors. Before I knew it people were full-on smiling at me when they saw me in the street. Here, however, there was also a language barrier. No one my age spoke English, but the children did.

I hosted a Day of the Dead cookie and hot chocolate party for the kids after the Halloween Parade on Main Street. It was a hit. Before long, I was invited to the Saturday night carne asadas (barbecues) and the children were nonstop visitors in my home. 

There were gang members in that neighborhood. To me, they were just big kids with giant smiles, always polite and respectful to me. When my daughter came to visit, she was terrified when we encountered them on a darkly lit street. I promised her that we were not the enemies, not targets, not the oppressors. These were just neighborhood kids and I was their neighbor. 

One time, I was sitting on my porch and those boys were playing cards at a picnic table in the park across the way. I read my book as they sat in the park for hours, killing time on a hot summer day. A police officer came by and asking the kids if he could search them. They had done nothing wrong but they allowed the police to search them. They handcuffed one boy when they found marijuana, but he produced a medical card for his prescription and they removed the cuffs. 

Another time, I came around the corner on my street and saw the police had lined the boys against the wall of a building and were searching them all. The officers were tense and yelled at me when I asked what was going on. They acted like they were at a crime scene; all edgy, jumpy and snappy. They were yelling. Seriously, they acted as if they could kill someone. 

A young man in his late 20s left his home across the street holding the hand of his four-year-old son, and the police called him to stand against the wall with the teens to be searched. The officer was very stern with the boys, even though, as it turned out, nothing had actually happened. A neighbor had complained that the boys were wearing black t-shirts and she feared violence was about to burst out.

A few nights later, I saw all those boys sitting in the park and I printed out instructions from the American Civil Liberties Union website about how to deal with the police when stopped and questioned. 

One instruction said to ask the officer if they were under arrest and if not, were they free to go. One large teen looked at me in earnest and said, “But Miss. You don’t understand, they pull us out of the car and slam us to the ground before we can say anything.”

My heart was pretty broken by that.

Listen, I know those boys weren’t always innocent, but did the police officers help them with constant unnecessary nitpicking, needless searches, humiliating a young man in front of his tiny son? Did it ever build relationship with them? No. For sure it did not. It seemed to me the police believed instilling fear was a positive goal. My heart was pretty broken by that, too. 

A few years later, the police addressed a community meeting saying they wanted to install cameras because there had been an increase in crime on the street. We neighbors knew it was virtually always committed by outsiders. Almost everyone had been effected but no one on that street would rob anyone else. There was just too much love between neighbors who shared everything, anyway.

The police said the cameras were forthcoming, like it or not, and neighbors asked why the only time the police visited the street was to drive through slowly with flashing lights, as if to intimidate everyone. One woman asked the police to stop their Arrest Training Program of sirens, loudspeakers, and bull horns so close to our homes. She said everytime she heard them it was traumatizing, and it went on for hours. Everytime they did it, she feared for her children. People asked, “Why don’t the police come around and get to know the neighborhood? Why did they seem to want to scare everyone?”

The Chief of Police replied, “We’ll come around more but there may be more arrests if we do.”

That summed up the problem, right there. The neighbors knew they were being targeted by outside criminals but the police assumed the neighborhood was riddled with crime because it was poor and of color. That was their evidence.

One time, after a Trump rally in town, a car came through our streets and shot up the neighborhood. I ducked as the car passed my house but I had seen the fire from the bullets leaving the gun. Another time, at about 2 am, I stood in dark of my living room and saw two women case the neighborhood for bikes, tools, even my flower pots. I let them know I was watching and they got in their car and drove away.

If the police are only looking for the worst, they will find it or imagine they did, or worse, they will create it. If people assume the best about others, if they do not approach people with unnecessary power struggles, judgement or fear, they would find it much easier to diffuse the situation.

After that community meeting, a couple of officers began to come around and join the carne asadas, and they even brought gifts for the kids (which went slightly overboard). The overall feeling between community members and those officers saw a big change for the better. They were welcomed into the community and one of those officers made a beeline for our community when there was a problem, while the rest of the police force ignored it. He had started to care about the people he had begun to know.

Years ago, relations improved in Montana when police officers of different races were partnered together. Depending on each other, getting to know their stories, home lives, senses of humor, maybe even sharing home cooked specialties, caused a feeling of humanity and respect, even a touch of love for each other. 

Love in Practice supports well being. Fear, ignorance, misunderstandings, simple lack of friendship, can result in a tension overload. If a young man in a car is resisting arrest: Officers! Take a break and step back. Assess the situation, listen to the person in the car, and CALM DOWN. Tell the person — and believe it yourself — there is no reason to get all upset because right now, every televised police encounter seems to be a life or death situation. That is scary for all involved!!!

Very recently, I encountered a black woman who believed I was threatening her freedom due to circumstances caused by someone I knew. She attacked me with a hammer, chasing me down the stairs when I had come to visit her to try to clear the air.

A few days later, I saw something I thought her children would like, and as a peace offering, I brought it to her house. She came outside when I called upstairs, “I thought your kids would like this.”

She came down and looked in my eyes. Her shoulders relaxed. She looked me in the eye and apologized for the hammer incident. I knew it must have been hard for her to do, and I offered her a pandemic-style air hug. The next time she saw me and my friend who had incited her rage, she told us she wanted to get along, that she loved us and we told her we loved her, too. 

I knew she had to have suffered horribly in her life to have acted that way, and I forgave her. I didn’t give up. I came back with an open heart and we all lived happily ever after.

Drug addicts, drunks, gangs and criminals, I know I am safe with them all. I accept them and I don’t fear them, and I love them for the hardship of their journeys. I offer them a lack of judgement and compassion. You may think change by a smile is simplistic, but I challenge you to smile at your crankiest neighbor and watch the changes begin. It never fails me.

Police: What ever happened to the police trained in talking someone off of a bridge? Aren’t there time tested actions to reduce stress? In every case, treating people with Love and Respect under all situations is a place to begin and if you don’t know how, just smile the next time you pull someone over so they aren’t fearing for their life. It’s a start. 

Our justice system needs serious training in PRACTICING LOVE. Keep Calm and Love Your Neighbors. 

Christina Rose

INTERVIEW WITH TIOKASIN GHOST HORSE

First Voices Indigenous Radio 

Connection With Earth Matters to ALL

In previous blogs, the importance of relationship between peoples — friends, relatives, neighbors, even strangers — was examined. In this interview, we look at the importance of relationship between humankind and nature. 

Tiokasin Ghost Horse, Lakota, Cheyenne River, has been a talk show host for 29 years focusing on the need for change of relationship between western culture and Earth. His radio show, First Voices Indigenous Radio, is heard worldwide and he has traveled extensively to spread the message, some of which was covered in the interview below.

This is it, folks. This is where Indigenous culture meets the western world, and saving the earth begins. 

In South Dakota, farmers turned to Natives to help deal with effects of pollution. In California, public lands fire management is now using Native methods of burn control. So what do you need to know now? 

You can check out the First Voices Indigenous Radio show where he hosts a podcast talk show featuring speakers from across the indigenous world. You can hear this week’s show and listen to archives at https://www.firstvoicesindigenousradio.org/

INTERVIEW with TIOKASIN GHOST HORSE

Tiokasin: I have been using that form of communication for a long time, and trying to articulate the Indigenous perspective. There is something else moving and society is not ready yet to understand it. There is a stagnating paradigm of thinking, and the mental reality forced upon the Indigenous, that there is no other way to think but in the Western or the Occidental (a person of European ancestry) way.

Christina:  I think the problem is that people haven’t been given the opportunity to think another way. No other way has been presented to the western world, it has been hidden. It has been part of the American way to dismiss this alternative kind of thinking.

T: yah

C: Since you are such a messenger for the earth, what changes do you see in the dominant culture, in terms of the earth, in a positive way?

T: The most positive thing is that people are becoming more aware of something else other than the paradigm we have been thinking in — and of, and with, and for. This other thinking process has been present all the time.

T: I have always said, we have been so heavenly we are no earthly good anymore.  What we need to do, right now, is become aware that this current system has not been conducive in working with Mother Earth. I think people are realizing there has got to be an end to it. We are out-resourcing Mother Earth. We are scrounging for scraps to get oil, minerals to keep the system going, and the system is becoming anemic. The system is in a place where we all have to realize, and it is going to happen to us, anyway, because of the way this Occidental system treats Earth.

When the lights went out in New York City, for three or four days in 2003 and then for two weeks in Hurricane Sandy, after a few panicky days people understood it was more about helping each other and community, 

But there are others who are coming from this very same system, who are saying there must be a new paradigm, that must be a new narrative.  But it is still coming from the same system. 

If people continue to think in this modern day western thinking, we are going to be surprised beyond its own belief system. That is not a warning, it is something I have seen during the time I have spent here. 

I am well aware of the thinking process in the upper echelon, with those who have the money to those who are very poor. One thing that ties the rich and the poor together is in the attitude, there is no gap in the attitude because the poor people want to be rich and the rich don't want to be poor, and that greed is extracting and exacting everything from Mother Earth. It's that greed.

C:  In looking at a new (and very ancient) paradigm and looking at the earth and exploitation and greed — which is based on fear of poverty — what is the new paradigm, what has to shift? What is wrong with the relationship?

T: The dominant paradigm is one in which the word domination works very well. You have the other system, in the Lakota/Nakota/Dakota nation we have no word for the concept of domination. So, in this context, you look at Mother Earth and the concept that is applied to her is domination.

And this system, which is basically not in touch with Mother Earth, destroys our ability to have any intimacy with her.  Any kind of thinking is shoved aside and put over there and called Indigenous; which means poor people over there, Indigent means poor and genus means race or people, and that is the etymology of the old latin word, but the new meaning word was glossed over to mean Oh, it’s the place that you are from. The updated version started being used in 1570.

C: Yes, and the culture of guns, germs, and steel is failing now, and this time we are going to listen. And across the country, in places like California, the state is turning to the tribes to learn how to manage the land without wildfires. In South Dakota, farmers began working with the tribes to improve land quality. It’s time for that.  

For any change to happen, westerners will need to begin to see themselves in terms of connected to each other and the land instead of individualistic and separated. That concept is so foreign to Native cultures.

I think it is hard for most Americans to imagine a world that is not individualistic and self serving. I talked to few Native people in California and in conversation, they each said “If I were so arrogant as to use the word I…”  And in the Mexican neighborhood where I was living in California, I used the word Mine, and a little boy said to me, “My dad won’t let us use the word mine. He said it is a bad word.”

T:  That self centered, only soul in the body mentality rather than the opposite, of the body is in the soul, one says I have the right to Mine because I am an individual. It has nothing to do with relationship, it rations you away from relationship. What I found, what I was relating to, was when you have a language such as English and other romance languages based in Latin, you find there are 427 words in the English language to describe self. In Lakota maybe one or two, and that is in relationship with something.  

In English, we have so many layers to peel off to get back into that continuum, that red road of relationship. When you say I, that is the first word that separates.

“I think therefore I am,” Descartes, that is a very damaging thought. It removed people from connection from Mother Earth. Everybody had that relationship from birth but it was lost through language and programming.

Then, as you know, they got rid of the earth people, and what comes out of that is people who fear. People who will do anything to survive; to try to make some kind of sense of what’s going on, of what’s put into place, as if you have to be this way.  It doesn’t work with Mother Earth. 

Wakan is mystery and energy, but we are not saying Mother and Father, we are saying Great Mystery. That is what we have forgotten. People do all these things: I must follow the model as a servant to the system. There was always another way that was prevalent here before that mindset showed up in the western hemisphere.

And that is what I feel we are all connected to, that balance that we had and may still have; and out of that balance, that to relate to other brother and sisters that some call race and divides it up, and we understand that they are included, too. 

Our original instructions are to listen to that cloud floating by and the wind blowing by and it doesn’t make sense in English, because look what we do with it. That’s poetry and prose in English, it is Wakahan in Lakota which basically means to consciously apply mystery to everything, everything is alive and has its own consciousness.

I was at the Morgan Library in NYC and there were all these people for Peace Consciousness, people who came together from all these big organizations, but it felt more like we were missing in that whole sacred earth community, a contemplative alliance, sacred earth community, people from all over the world, and what was interesting to me, we are revolving in this system that created a war/peace society, we are defining peace through war, and we don’t understood that the war is against Mother Earth and they don’t want to go there. They are so well intended and they have all this knowledge, but when we talk a heart language thats what that colonization did to those folks back in Europe, they were taken away from their heart and put in their head, 

to think feudalistic, king, idolistic, hierarchal, linear all those things, that’s way out of balance, proving that if you are coming from your heart language, which Lakota is, We are talking 150,000 electromagnetic waves come from the heart, that intuitive, prescient values that we are all born with as children, and if you are coming from there, then you have it and it grows and expands 

But folks are telling us we should only go in our heads and information is only in the head, but the head only releases 50,000 electromagnetic waves compared to the heart. We are working with the weaker part without working with the strongest source, so that whole world, of working with what I call the heart language has been dismissed as something magic and put in what, you know, illusion, romanticized.

C: This is what religions couldn’t grasp, the relationship with earth as a being. It’s looking at everything as it applies to me rather than seeing oneself as being within it.

T: Yeah, and it’s conscious, the thing we don’t give them credit for this bench, but that blade of grass is hearing everything we are talking about, we say a blade of grass is only going to last a season, but we don’t know that we, too, last a season.

We put science into the supernatural state that we hold it in now, that science is going to have the answer for everything eventually and that shows a real disconnection,

Me: Don’t know if you saw it, there was thing going around on Facebook and there were these little kids in Africa standing on a hill talking about the poor kids in America, they have to sit in a classroom all day. It’s that whole — there is so much fear of domination and because of the fear, it’s like watching a scared person running and they could have stopped running a really long time ago but they just keep running.

T: The Forest Gump mentality. When you think about the domination, symbology is very important to me, and it’s very telling. I was talking to Birgil Kills Straight and Steven Newcomb, I asked if there is there a word in Lakota for domination and he thought and thought and a few minutes later he said, ‘No. We cannot even think that way.’

Steve Newcomb and I cornered this Catholic priest, and he went away with a big old frown and he came the next morning with a smile on his face. He said, “You know, you guys almost converted me.”  We said, we are not trying to convert you, that’s your thoughts, and I am sure he is wondering to this day, how do they not have domination, other than think, they need to be dominated.

Columbus said, They can be slain with 50 men, and you don’t have a god. And I think about that concept. We didn’t have gods, we have relationship. We don’t have a god, we are in relationship with the mystery, everything, all things. 

Next week, the relationship of language to culture and the combined relationship of both of those to the scientific study of the environment.

 A Culture of Happiness

Christina Rose

“Aren’t you worried about old age? No career! No savings! No 401K! How are you going to live?”

“I didn’t know poor people could be happy.”

“How come I have all this money but I am miserable and alone?” 

“My kids are grown, and I feel like I have no purpose.”

“Christina, why are Americans so unhappy?”

I think most people would agree that a life of sustained happiness is not only elusive, but unrealistic. 

Fear of poverty drives a five day work week much of our lives. I get that. I work, too, and the man who asked me why Americans are so unhappy has two or three jobs and his wife works full time. In terms of the American Dream, their life is far from financially secure, but they are happy. Visibly and tangibly happy and it has nothing to do with finances.

America offers everyone the opportunity to have what the upper classes have had: nice things, abundant food, maybe even help in the house. But in the old days, middle classes didn’t expect to live like royalty. They were connected to their communities in which everyone’s talents played a part. 

Wealth doesn’t really improve life more than by providing physical comfort and accessories we don’t really need. What wealth does do is give people a sense of entitlement. Some people of recent comfort seem to feel they have earned special treatment if they can afford fancy restaurants and nice clothing. It isn’t respect gained by actions, but an expectation of respect for all they have earned.

I have spent time with a multitude of cultures and for most of the world, acting entitled is not acceptable behavior. Frightening road rage, impatience with clerks in shops or services, even just a competitive nature can set people against each other instead of bringing them together.

The class systems were not left behind at Europe’s shores; they are woven into the fabric of America. Grace, kindness, warmth towards others, feeling secure, helpful attitudes—all of that may exist within our circles of peers and family. Towards strangers on the street, or anyone we think might be less than us, maybe not so much. 

In Asian and indigenous cultures, politeness is important. Being kind, honest, having integrity and showing respect towards others are valued.

When people win at the American Game of Wealth, a sense of privilege and our love for the less fortunate may start to fall away. People may donate financially to needy people but hobnobbing with the suffering is rare In America. If life is about winning, there is little incentive to be kind unless you want to be.

Now, I know for a fact that there is tremendous kindness to be found in Americans, but we also all recognize America’s competitive spirit and unfortunately, that can have a negative effect people on people. 

America is country of colonization; of going after countries in the guise of lifting them up. Most people know that colonization is more often about exploiting countries for their resources. Mostly, though, colonization is about changing one culture into another, sometimes from a smaller traditional culture to one that values the dollar and economic growth. That effects everyone, the new country and the old alike.  

As colonizer, America has an egocentric attitude of being better than others and usually that is based on wealth. On the other hand, America’s goal is often to destroy a culture in which the economy wasn’t the reason for existence. Traditions were. Traditions that may have served to hold a community together where people relied upon each other.

Colonization often has sought to crush the older traditions. The mission of America has been to seek and destroy but sadly, when we destroy cultures of old traditions, we are also crushing our own happiness. How, you may ask. 

Let’s step back a minute and imagine another way. 

In an immigrant community in California, a couple works four jobs between the two of them. Grandma stays home with the kids and they live seven people in a two-bedroom apartment. They know all about the pressures of keeping a roof over their head. Yet, they taught me more about happiness than I knew possible. 

For one thing, their small living space kept everyone close and the rent low. Their kids have name brand sneakers, the two oldest have iPhones, the parents own two cars and a truck for his business. Paying rent for a bigger home would cost them quality of life. 

Three kids sleep in a triple bunkbed and the baby slept with the parents until he was almost three. In the evenings after dinner, all the neighbors, myself included, go outside where everyone is talking and laughing, sometimes with music, loads of kids running safely up and down the street. The whole neighborhood is like living with family. For me, my apartment was only a place to sleep. Life was outside.

I often asked the father of that couple about Mexico, where he said people lived a freer lifestyle. 

A man of impressive size, he swept his hands across the community. Men were playing cards in the garden across the street. Women were watching the children, laughing and talking together, which reminded me of a suburban cul-de-sac, but there were other ways I had never known in which their traditions enhanced their lives. 

When I moved into the neighborhood, I didn’t speak a word of Spanish and most of the grownups spoke little if any English. The kids did, though, and they became my pals. I was brought into the community and enveloped in the kind of love I had never experienced before. I felt like I lived under the cover of safety and security, openness and acceptance, such as I had only ever felt with my immediate family. My life was interwoven with my neighbors in ways I had never felt within any other community.

My neighbors worried about me if I came home late. The children brought me dinner their mothers had cooked and if they had cooked one of my favorites, I was invited to their homes.

I took the children on ride bikes, played ball, walked to the ocean with them and swam with them in the rivers and ocean.

My four cats spent their days sitting at the large picture window where children and adults always stopped by to say hello to them. One man brought his new puppy over to show the cats. Another man passed by each morning with his chihuahua dressed in a bathing suit. (That’s California for you. :-)

On Tuesdays, the tamale lady knocked on my door and I always bought a few. Several nights a week, weather permitting, everyone chipped in to buy meat for a barbecue. For many, it was the only way they could afford meat.

They ate outside together, and they’d invite me, too. On Friday nights, a man raised money by selling tacos from his backyard. Another refinished furniture in his truck and another made exquisite ice cream, sold within the neighborhood.

Once, when a young man passed away, the whole community made food and sold food to raise money for the funeral. Hundreds of people participated and they all gathered in the street and ate together.

I hated to leave for work in the mornings and whenever I entered the mainstream, it almost always included a stressful experience. Traffic. Rudeness. A sense of being solitary and far from home.

Competitive drivers cut me off for a good parking spot. Once, a man’s car blocked the pedestrian ramp at the curb as I was trying to cross the street with a baby in a stroller. He refused to move for me because he had paid taxes for that sidewalk.

In five years in my little hispanic community, I was never greeted gruffly, angrily, rudely, with judgement or privilege.  People there just didn’t treat each other that way. They weren’t perfect but their kindness towards each other was deeply refreshing. I wished the whole world was like that.

In a different situation, a Lakota woman who’d just had a baby told me she was leaving her California suburban home and returning to her reservation. 

In South Dakota, a newspaper stated, “A fire burned down a house, killing the ten people who lived there,” and the judgement in Rapid City spread like the flames themselves. “Ten people living in such a small house!”

The young mother told me that the American Dream of a home with two parents and their children was too hard for her. “When I lived on the reservation, ten people in the home was normal. We have always lived like that. I never had to leave my baby with strangers. My mother, my sisters, my aunties, were all nearby or in the home. Life was so much easier when I didn’t have to do everything myself.”

In my Hispanic neighborhood, everyone counted on each other. Together they cooked, they fixed cars, they watched each other’s children, they planted vegetable and fruit gardens. I was never lonely and I never lacked purpose. As I approach retirement age, being an integral part of my community gave me purpose and constant company.

In America, we have neighbors, friends, and family. In my California community, neighbors and friends called each other “primo.” Cousin. From a variety of countries, unrelated by blood, they had brought together traditions of love, generosity, purpose, and connection with each other. This was the way of life they had all known.

In America, we are so individualistic that being intensely connected with neighbors doesn’t occur to us. We don’t need it. We may not even imagine we want it. Being so separate, so focused on our own lives, we may even see each other as competitors rather than as relatives.

Life is busy from the start. We go to school, get married, have kids, buy a home, get a job, raise the kids, send them to college — and when we finally have time to breathe, we look around and wonder, Now What? 

My mother was too busy to help me with the kids and in her old age, my family sent her to a nice nursing home, where she is very happy and doesn't seem to miss her family. 

As I get older, I look around a Connecticut community where people talk about feeling isolated but make little effort to remove themselves from that. I think possibly because people cannot envision the kind of a neighborhood where everyone acts more as family than individuals. 

If we strengthen our connections, if we keep grandma close, if we raise the kids to value neighbors as family, we will find staying connected makes us happy and gives us purpose. Not through our individuality, but through our connections. A strong vision of individuality can result in being rich or poor, but alone.

Don’t take this as a personal attack, America. Everyone has strong connections to someone and values them. But in looking further, beyond the obvious people we love in our life, by welcoming everyone we meet into a circle of loved ones, as cousins, we can change the hardness of the world.

How? There is so much already being done in other places. Connection and purpose effects justice, disassembles discrimination, levels all of the playing fields, and can help America reach its promise for equality for all. Next week, I’ll share some ways that create a safer environment for the youth, the disenfranchised, people of color and any one else who slips through the fingers of the mainstream. 

See you next Saturday, right after dinner.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thanks to Lisa Lund Leach, who allowed me to interview her right then and there in the middle of a tea date. I asked her the question above, “Why are Americans so unhappy?” She said, “We live in a Culture of Misery.” That got me thinking, and while it was a profound thought, you might not read such a sad sounding blog. 

“We live in a Culture of Misery.”

Think about it though. It’s a powerful thought.