Where Have All the Healers Gone?
“I am not foolish enough to believe that the world is healable, but I know what to do to make sure that there is one less child tortured, one less person in poverty.”
~Albert Camus
[What follows is a revised version of an article I wrote some time ago. It starts with a small preface I wrote in 2017. It still seems timely, so I have decided to leave it in for this posting.]
I am writing after news of (more) gun violence. On October 1st, three young people were killed and two injured in a street shooting in Lawrence, Kansas, where I lived for seventeen years. This would have caused national headlines but for the mass shooting in Las Vegas on the same day, in which twenty times that number were killed and over five hundred injured.
There is no justification, none, for gun laws that provide legal ways to empower a single individual to take lives on such a scale. But the issue is about more than the aspects of gun culture that we have fetishized in this country, the gun lobby, or even the lack of political will to create adequate gun control laws. The deeper issue is why so many of us are living our lives, in gun-speak, “locked and loaded.” This translates to the question of why so many of us are living in fear.
I don’t pretend to have a final answer, but I do know something from my hands-on…
