DENIAL, EVASION, BLOCKING

Considering how to design meaningful ceremonies that hope to invite the Sacred is not so much a matter of knowing things as admitting that there is so much we — you and I — don’t know, and —even more worrying — don’t know that we don’t know.  Our body does much unconsciously, edits the incoming sensory code drastically, organizes the brain in selective ways chosen in infancy, and supplies cover stories that keep us from access to raw code.  

Much of learning art is figuring out how to get at whatever the body is not picking up on, actively hiding.  Art’s work is revelation.  But if everything that comes to the senses had to be considered, we’d soon be paralyzed — overwhelmed.  And indeed people who have damage to their internal editing process are living demonstrations.  Stunned.

Institutions, hegemonies, families and society in general are also invested in keeping each of us focused on their interests.  I’m always a little startled when I make some kind of generalization, maybe tentatively, that is immediately seized upon and used for institutional evidence and endorsement.  If I write an indictment of Christianity, some Christian is bound to read it as endorsement. 

It means that much of what I call “running the writing through the wringer” is an attempt to prevent misinterpretation.  Families are particularly prone to looking at their members through stereotypes, either those of the bad seed — the assigned villain — or those of the little genius who is not and doesn’t want to be.  If one’s own family doesn’t think one is real, who can?

Harlow's monkey experiment

Bowlby studied children who were hospitalized without their mothers or whose mothers simply abandoned them for a period of time.  At first the little ones roared with protest, made their displeasure known any way they could.  Then they despaired and sank into depression for a while.  The third stage was that they seemed never to have had any problem.  They were just indifferent and went on with life.  But if, after a while, the mother came back, the child did not welcome her, didn’t seem to recognize her.  In fact, rejection was total and deep.  To the mother it felt like punishment.  To the child it felt like preventing anything so painful happening again.

This same sequence can happen with society.  We’re in the roaring smashing stage in parts of the cities right now.  Clearly some politicians are in denial, simply making declarations of the truth of what they wish really WERE true.  Across suburbia and in small towns, the people go right on mowing the lawn and loading the dishwasher as though nothing has changed.  If the daughter is pregnant or the son is gay, throw them out.  Declare they don’t exist.

Sadly, if a child blocks affection, interaction, encouragement and comforting for fear of pain and more rejection, that child’s development can be severely distorted, close to the point of psychosis or at least sociopathy.  The hope is that contact with the Sacred can break through that shell, re-associate the dissociation, and lend the courage to trust or at least test.  But that’s another of the grandiose narcissisms so typical of humans.

The problem is fatal when the dissociation is so severe and seductive that the only safe place is death.  If the cause is “only” neglect or severe discipline, that doesn’t come close to the catastrophic damage of torture, atrocious bodily invasion, culture collapse.  We do not like to think the worst happens to the least deserving.

What many people think is safety is simply conformity.  There are ceremonies and in conventional society — if you don’t think about them or challenge them, they mostly work — if the society is not too confused or dangerous.  But forming little gated bubbles is a great temptation for pockets of like-minded people and doing that both corrodes larger alliances for economic and defensive institutions and limits the evolution of the people in those guarded places.  By pushing out anyone who seems dangerously different, they make themselves targets and psychologically justify the predatory behavior of the outsiders.

Conformity for the sake of safety is a kind of blindness, a paralysis, and it is “fractal” in the sense that guarded anxious people create the same pattern in their family dynamics and those add up to whole communities that are “stuck” and xenophobic, not to say racist.  What was patriotism becomes jingoism, reducing icons of unity like flags and statues to focal points for resentment.  The Sacred evaporates.

It is replaced by greed and profit.  Damaged kids make great little money-makers, either directly (errand runners for drug and gambling criminals) or indirectly through the funding in the institutional response to disorder (prisons and policing).  Of course, they are natural commodities for trafficking.  

HIV, hepatitis, and tuberculosis — plus violence — keep the kids enervated and powerless, so they plug the pharma industry into the system and die before they can form alliances.  Media machines are divided between flogging fear because it sells and converting real virtue into Disneyland ride tickets.

In the face of all that, imprinting and attachment still happen, still make entrance points for change and caring right in the middle of thieves and rapists, racketeers and bribed politicians.  Mutation and evolution happen right in the middle of war and tragedy.  Survival happens.

Not every person is corrupt and selfish.  Many social groups and individuals still manage to raise healthy children and to reach out to the suffering.  Empathy educates us all.  Our mammal hearts are warm.  It has been the secret of the persistence of our kind for aeons.  

The fall of the Roman Empire has been on our minds for quite a while and Jared Diamond has explained vividly how some civilizations thrive and others collapse — mostly a matter of resources rather than virtue.  But now we have the fossils of two hundred rough drafts of hominins and near-humans, mostly their teeth and brain-cases.  They bite.  We should not deny and reject them.  

When I saw that an academic paper was entitled “F**k Jared Diamond,” and by now has followers and even a YouTube video, I laughed.  Now I suppose I’m going to have to sort through it all to see what it means.  It won’t be anything Sacred.   But who knows.  Maybe it will be real.

As a shortcut, I watched the YouTube rant.  It seems a Native American wants to indict Europe for its atrocities in America and uses China as contrast -- blocking out the Black Plague from Asia that decimated Europe and ignoring Genghis Khan.  The irony is that Diamond's main occupation has been focussed on songbirds in New Guinea, not even Chinese bird flu which occasionally sweeps the world.

EVOLUTION THAT CREATES MASS SHOOTERS

That little word “fit” keeps gumming up the thinking about evolution.  “Fitness” is in most minds the goal of a gymnastic or diet regime that will cause robustness and personal longevity.  But the kind of fitness that allows human survival can only be seen in the retrospect of evolution because evolution IS always retrospective.  It’s simply a matter of who survives which depends upon the environment and learning, just as much as muscle development or good digestion.

You can be Arnold Schwartzenegger and not survive a plane crash or a virus.  You can be handsome and intelligent and still destroyed when an avalanche buries your house.  The characteristics that will guarantee survival do not exist in advance — they are situational and no one knows what situation might arise.  What will save a person in one situation might doom them in another.

Many of the characteristics that are likely to provide survival in a majority of situations are not about fitness at all.  The evolutionary advantage of humans is that they can work together to increase both the accuracy of their perceptions and the effectiveness of their actions.  But, ironically, the most resourceful groups may include people who are only useful to the group but will destroy them as individuals.  But one MUST fit the group or the group will destroy the one.

When I was working at Multnomah County Animal Control with Mike Burgwin, trying to address what sort of person to hire to be an officer, at first we thought in terms of the one perfect person.  Then we began to realize that different problems required different kinds of people.  It was sometimes a matter of strength and daring, but also at other times a matter of strategy or gentle persuasion.  A few people had a wider range of skills and abilities, which meant they were “better.”  People who had no skills or who had actively damaging characteristics (cruelty) weren’t always obvious until the damage was done.  

Mike’s management skills were sort of like the character played by Mark Harmon on NCIS.  That is, he was often covert and unexpected, showing up at the shelter in the middle of the night or using an undercover car to observe in the field.  Being so unexpected revealed the truth of the officer’s abilities.  Sometimes merely assigning that person to a different part of town with different demographics made all the difference.  Once or twice a problematic officer was found a new job by Mike himself.  Like the bad-tempered guy he found a candy machine route. It was a better fit.

These days much is controlled by data and standardization, which lead straight into that box of homogenization.  The perfect teacher, the perfect minister, the perfect judge, and the ideal citizen.  The pressure comes from the commodifiers who cannot think in terms of the market except as flocks of sheep eager to pretend to be something more grand by buying a t-shirt with a wolf on it.

We have created a world in which one way to succeed is to allow brutality and rule-breaking.  This neither eliminates nor restrains people who are brutal, but they can find jobs in controlling difficult people.  Nurse Ratched comes to mind. We tolerate them by “not knowing” what they are doing, denying that they are us — basically contracting some people to be what we are unwilling to be ourselves: torturers, thieves, arms dealers, killers of the innocent.  

Schools always have a person designated to be the disciplinarian who might be only an explainer in some schools, but who can be violent and punishing in others.  In Winnemucca being interviewed for a teaching job, I sat in an almond-green velvet wing-chair in the superintendent’s office, gazing at his collection of paddles mounted proudly on the wall.  Several had holes bored in them, thought to raise blisters.  We were not a match.

How are we to understand athletic programs that damage students because they are based on violent confrontations that cause concussions and destroy joints?  There are those who feel that football is merely a kind of chess and that naked boys full of either the testosterone of success or whatever chemical it is that accompanies defeat can go into a group shower room and be perfect gentlemen (which is not to say neuter).  We’ve come to realize that even the coach may not be a gentleman.  What’s the use of a football scholarship if it renders the student too mindless to learn?

from "Splendor in the Grass"

Humans have the ability to alter their environment to make it survivable.  Air-conditioning comes to mind.  We have not been attentive to some of the changes we could make in our social environment for the betterment of everyone.  The individual, by forming a sub-group with power, can create environments that in turn create certain kinds of people:  unemployed, illiterate, angry, traumatized, and unable to attach to anything.

It is attachment that causes us to want to fit, whether it is to an environment, a job, or another person.  Fitting almost always means a certain amount of compromise and change as we self-adjust, sometimes not even consciously.  Growing up in a family means being guided into some way that fits the family.  Tragically what fits the family may be a scapegoat or the designated enforcer or a parent who is not fit [sic] to be a parent and so leaves a void.  These things happen even in a natural genetically created family, and then it is up to the larger group to put pressure on them.

But any small consistent (this characteristic is important because it can take time to change) group with a place for each member and some mechanism for keeping fitting [sic] people together (which is emotional attachment) will work — actively WORK — on behalf of both the individuals and the group.  Then that “family” will need a larger environment that allows them to stay together and grow, form ties and understandings.  Effective soldiers need skills but they also need cooks, paymasters, transportation —  in short, every group is an ecology and everyone in that ecology either fits or falls out.  When they DO fit, then emerges the dedication and love for each other that is so effective in a common cause.

I’ve already said that I value the cop series “Flashpoint” because it always bores into the situation to find out WHY a person is having a “fit” that destroys others and what pressure point of talk will save him from the necessity of the team destroying him (or her) to protect the group.  They Macgyver the situation: what can change the terms? 

What if someone saw what was happening in The Pulse on that ghastly occasion and simply turned on the fire sprinklers?  Surely they were required by code to have them.  One of the problems of such situations is figuring out what’s happening and who the shooter is — which is the problem of a dancer whipping out a concealed gun or the bartender pulling his shotgun out from under the counter, like the movies.  (Do they really do that?)  What if there were bear spray in someone’s pack?

Twice I was with Bob Scriver out hunting on horseback and someone shot at us.  (Probably both by mistake.)  Bob simply shot back at them.  Not to hit them, but near enough to impress them.  Both times it worked.  But this was only a few sane people in a vast space and Bob was a good shot.  Better than the people who shot at us or I wouldn’t be here.  I’m not anti-gun.  I’m situational about it.

The situation was a lot of people with loud music and semi-darkness.  It had nothing to do with whether they were gay or any other category.  They were vulnerable.  The symbolism that gets pushed onto them like a kidnapper’s hood is ancient and no longer fits.  What life would fit Omar Mateen?  What life circumstance turned him into what I call a “Jaguar Man,” one who preys? 

Omar Mateen

I have a prime suspect:  G4S, the private security firm that employed Mateen.  The ideal job for a person who needs control through force, a private army of no nation but private incorporation for profit.  NYPD inside out.  Such jobs reinforce and justify the kind of person who will use force.  Will the National Guard someday have to confront the mercenary armies now in our own country?

A LINE OF THOUGHT ABOUT MEANINGFUL CEREMONY (The Bone Chalice)

My approach to the function of minister was through ceremony.  It was NOT about being saintly, theologically correct, politically dynamic, reassuringly therapeutic or running an efficient House of God, or at least congregation.  I did not want to be confessional; that is, staying within allegiance to one tradition.  Nor emotional, that is, escaping into ecstasy.  Therefore, I collected ceremonies that simply struck a nerve in me, then set about trying to figure out what that “zap” was about.  Instead of letting the categories that already existed dictate what I would explore, I explored first and classified later, inventing new categories if necessary.  It was "necessary" to realize whole new realms of information, particularly since many others seemed to be having the same experience.  (In the preface to "Metaphors We Live By" by Lakoff and Johnson, they say, ". . .we discovered that certain assumptions of contemporary philosophy and linguistics that have been taken for granted within the Western tradition since the Greeks precluded from even raising the kind of issues we wanted to address."

Because I was in a UU seminary (whose MDiv included the U of Chicago Div School MA at that point in history), the major symbol was a chalice with a fire in it.  There are historical reasons, but I liked the symbolism: Dionysius contained by Apollo.  Or the major part of the brain “burning” (emotion, passion) contained by the bone skull.  But I wanted theory that could include ALL “religions.” 

I was already moving away from binary systems that were thinly disguised “us” versus “them.”  I was remembering Dean Barnlund's "Language and Thought" classes (1957) as an undergrad, where we struggled to move from debate to discussion, very much like the Lakoff and Johnson thinking that produced "Metaphors We Live By."(1980)

For a while I thought about continuums, but even they couldn’t encompass the whole.  The cross, in the abstract meant something like four-part graphs or Tillich's horizontal v. vertical, but it was still two-dimensional.  So I ended up with a globe that had a core (home) but also extended in rays out into space towards the strange and the unknown.

The Core of Ceremony: Confirmation of Survival

Homeostasis as the terms of survival.

Ecologies as a source of homeostasis.

Individual vs. group survival vs. planetary survival.

The abyss: lost.

This was a sacred mountain in Papua, New Guinea.

Now it is a mined-out pit like Butte, Montana

These were the ceremonies:

The Abrahamic series of burnt sacrifice on an altar, the production of written text which is studied in a group, and prescribed prayer — leading to the Roman Catholic mass as explicated by Dom Gregory Dix.   This discussion is meant to extend from the hunter-gatherer shift to farming (Cain and Abel) up to some of the traditional concepts that are broken now. 

The 20th century “post-Christian” succession of Unitarian Universalist theorists and some experimental ceremonies.

The defense of cannibalism through the symbol of Christian communion.  (The soccer team crashed in the Andes.)

An adaptation of traditional marriage on the occasion of the groom killed on the way to the ceremony.

A minimalist artist's "proof of life" with chilled glass and warm breath.

The Umeda ceremonial cycle in New Guinea about cassowaries as a trope of men’s lives.

A Blackfeet ceremony called “Bundle Opening” which is the local tribal version of all prairie tribes' practice with a calumet which led to ideas of a "peace pipe."

Bob Scriver's depiction of a Beaver Bundle Opening Ceremony.

The women are holding beaver skins and pretending to "be beavers."

Sorting inquiries that developed:

Some are culturally mainstream worship services, some are anthropological, some are therapeutic, and some are artistic.  

I considered these factors:

Whether the participants are in the “believers” circle.

Whether this is a familiar and often repeated ceremony or an
  annual festival or an individually devised experience.

Whether this was text-based, ecologically based, or
  aesthetic.

Whether this was a long-standing community with shared
   values.

Whether this was individual or congregational.

Whether introspection, observation, or participation (meaning
   experience was the basis).

Whether the culture will accept the erotic or insist on the
    ascetic.

Hominin skulls

Evolution of everything

   Hominins:  chimp ceremonies

   Neanderthal/Cro Magnon:  evolution of the brain

   Evolution of the landscape

   Evolving culture that is entangled with ecological metaphor 

   Entangled with government

   

These elements (and more) are relevant:

Story

Image

History

Goal

Brain evolution

   Animal subliminal 

   “Consciousness” 

   Empathy

   Emotion vs. reason

Entheogens and auto-theogens

Orthodox

How you do it:

The sequence of liminality

   gathering

   sharing

   dispersing

The use of the sensorium 

   safety

   focus

   movement

   restoration

   in-skin v. out-skin

   boundaries and nodes

_______________________________

Culture has also evolved.  As sketchy indicators, consider the following. The ecstatic Seventies were iconoclastic, boundary-crossing, and full of every kind of movement and music -- in the EuroAmerican world.  Because of the ebbing of the old colonial order without replacement, the Eighties in the Third World paid a high price in epidemic, famine, and genocide.  The Nineties were technical, extending our understanding out into the universe to the verge of black holes and the echo of the Big Bang, down into the ocean to the lair of the giant squid and lifeforms that never see light, and tracing through the human neurons, genomes, molecules.

The Twenty-zeros were another return to order and consciousness: writing out mission-statements and best practices.  Now the Zero-tens are packed with fear and confusion.  What the heck are we doing?  Shifting into universals, connecting with handheld devices.  Looking at ourselves from space.  

We do seem to swing through periods of grouping and then separating into individuals, through wanting freedom and then clear lines.  Ceremonies can clarify what’s happening, justify it, or push back against it.  Probably best to know which is in play.

Temple frieze in India

I’m reading: list servs, websites, organizational statements, research studies, and books.  I look up all the neologisms, definitions, examples.  If they mention a film, I try to get access to it.  If they talk about a book — well, you can’t buy ALL the books, but you can usually find a talk about it on YouTube or a review about it, or — curse wikipedia — someone's anonymous take on it.  

When the focus changes, power falls away from those who had the attention earlier.  This makes them scared and angry, so that the times are usually marked by argument and emotion.  This makes them a little easier to find.  But the newly empowered don’t always realize that they’re drowning in two inches of water, so they could save themselves by simply sitting up.  That is, they are often merciless and therefore must be approached with caution.  Caution means examining oneself, playing your convictions backwards.

Jane Goodahl

Anthropology is a useful portmanteau sort of discipline which, like the new studies of neuro-function, show up as hyphenated and cross-disciplinary categories all the time, helping to keep us from being trapped in pigeon-holes.  It has evolved quite a lot, since it responds to culture, and at some points is more helpful than at others.  “Useful” and “helpful” are dependable criteria, much better than “correct”, which is only a version of “dominant.”

Over and over again I ask myself: who am I missing?  The assumption of ninety per cent of what I read is that everyone is just like the writer.  This doesn’t mean that if I read minority writers that it will depart from “received wisdom” because the publishers control the rhetoric.  Truly divergent and unique people will never see print.  When we have minority and specialized publishers, we can escape the mainstream.  But that means we also escape the profit.  Any kind of meaning-ceremony that gets entangled in money is doomed.

ATTACHMENT IN THE FACE OF TRAUMA

My accumulations of paper — which persist in spite of computers or maybe because of computers because it’s so easy to print — include much on the theme of development in humans.  The theories come and go, the names of the same phenomena change, and the pendulum swings from focusing on individuals to groups and back again.

I’m looking at this tempting bit of a larger document.  I can’t make it copy and paste so I’ll summarize a bit.

  

traumacenter.org

http://www.traumacenter.org/clients/Intertwining_Nature_of_Attachment_and_Trauma.pdf

“The attachment system provides the safe container.”

Since today is Saturday and I’m composing my post for Sunday, it occurred to me that it was worth looking at these concepts in terms of congregations.  Some words are so worn and abused (traumatized, you might say) that they have lost their meaning or have been seized by people who use them as weapons:  I’m thinking of the words “church,” religion,” “community,” “family,” and so on.  They become triggers.  The fists come up ready to fight.  So we say “congregation”, “spirituality”, or whatever but don’t really examine the phenomena.

Here’s the assertion:  “Within the safety of that attachment system, children are able to explore their worlds, and develop a range of skills, including the ability to regulate their body and emotions, build an early understanding of self and others, and over time, develop an array of increasingly sophisticated developmental competencies.”  We are all lifelong children.

What makes a congregation “attachable”?  Safety is the consequence of being attached, but what safety is there during the process of approaching, testing, awareness of exits, identifying what dangers there might be?

This little bit of an essay asserts that there are two kinds of trauma with quite different developmental consequences.  One is the catastrophic overwhelming kind of trauma and the other is the constant erosion of smaller insults, losses, deficits, and uncontrollable change.  To be frank, life in general is a sequence of traumas.

The newer material about surviving life itself, both as an individual human and as a human group, is quite different in tone.  Conformity has been removed.  There is little talk about morality.  Not only is the discussion quite secular, but it begins to sound like learning to play the piano:

Making order from chaos.  OR in the name of re-organizing, creating chaos.  (Tolerating temporary chaos is a competency, but persistent chaos is a malfunction.  Temporary chaos as a self-protecting strategy can work either way.)

The ability to self-regulate emotions and experience.   (I suppose you might have not considered how important emotion is as a music principle.)

Openness to new strategies if the old ones don’t work or are outgrown or maybe even were imposed by clumsy helpers.

Willingness to address and resist destruction from outside the sphere of attachment.

Small attachments among individuals within the larger community and competency in managing them.  (Truly sophisticated musicians consider and internalize the micro-relationships between notes.)

The point of this discussion is to support caregivers, not to directly address the traumatized.  So I suppose one could say this is for professional and natural caregivers in the group.  The authors sketch what they call a “theoretical framework” rather than a “manualized protocol.”  

Right there — in the beginning — is what I’m seeing as a major and possibly hindering prerequisite: the failure of our modern systems to produce leaders who can think at the level of theory and abstract principles.  Particularly in conventional churches, the idea is to prevent change, and we can get frustrated about that, but what I’m finding in this small prairie town is that brains have not been encouraged to take the last step of development which happens after high school, in the early twenties.  High school is considered completion, the rules learned then persist through life.  Sometimes that’s not helpful.  They think only in terms of learned "boxes."

http://www.projectlearnet.org/tutorials/concrete_vs_abstract_thinking.html

Maybe there's an adult in every child.
https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/scaffolding-critical-thinking

Backing up, “within the Attachment domain, 4 key building blocks for the caregivers”:

1.  Getting the caregiver to maturity in self-management.

2.  Attunement: “the capacity to accurately read each other’s cues and respond effectively.”

3.  A collection of strategies for meeting melt-downs or roll-ups or outright flight.

4.  Consistency and predictability.

The Competency Domain isn’t about pathology, but what about what every person needs to know in a tough world.  Three basics are:

1.  Problem solving:  personal agency, ability to generate options, reaching out.

2.  Knowing one’s own identity, finding coherence, feeling valuable.

3.  Ability to accept what developmental tasks are limiting and confidence that there are ways to learn them.

There’s a lot more than this.  For instance, the interference of the criminalizing forces (both criminals and law enforcers), the constant manipulative barrages from media, and awareness of suffering around the planet —coming your way in vivid technicolor.  A UU minister observed that our congregations seem not to be as intensely centered as they once were.  This particular movement seems to have moved to social action or personal development, depending on the extrovert/introvert aptitudes of the group.  The social action part has different allegiances depending on their outside affiliations.  The personal development interests vary all over the place — art to yoga.  Conventional churches are still arguing about the various theisms, which we've left behind.

I think there are not enough well-defined challenges.  In a middle-class group things can get worrisome and lately we realize that any of us can be thrown out on the street overnight because of some policy change or renovation project.  This class arose as shop-keepers and salarymen, but now the world is dominated by franchises and corporations — coupon-clippers in a capital-dependent world.  

Under all those economic arrangements (everything is economic when you’re talking survival and I’m talking biology here —you MUST have enough food, water, shelter to survive and that’s economic) is the planet itself.  Tsunamis, droughts, earthquakes, firestorms, hurricanes — you wanna talk trauma?  Lately I’ve been thinking about the catastrophic/economic/corporate consequences of grain crop failure, since I’m living right in the fields.  

The ebbing of the middle-class on the prairie (the closing of shops, the disappearance of wage labor) means that the middle-class religious groups who depend on dressing up and using good manners on Sunday morning have also shrunk.  They still love to sponsor community feeds in a place where diabetes and gluten-allergies are real.  Their ministers are all part-time.  Alcohol is still the favorite medication, as it has been for most of their ancestors since Medieval European times, and they still watch network TV.  Their dependence on cell phones is only limited by the lack of infrastructure.   “Rough sleepers” are few around here: they would die.  We’re not so modern.

Most seriously, they know nothing about the larger world, not even the layer of culture where their kids live, nor the layer of highly intellectualized thought where I live.  So much of the world is confusing and distressing that they cocoon.

Ben is the near-ninety-year-old man who with his wife operates the Cut Bank laundromat where I spent most of the morning yesterday.  He was in the military in Nuremburg during the post WWII trials.  http://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/nuremberg-trials   He is sharply aware of the importance of such events, not in terms of who got which penalty, but in terms of order-keeping.  Larry Reevis, whom some will know from his “letters to the editor” in the Glacier Reporter, lives nearby.  He’s working on the politics of the Blackfeet Rez.   The “History.com” website referred to above is the source of the “Vikings” series that Harry Barnes likes to watch.

Maybe the three of us very different people represent caregivers in a broad sense.  We are all rather intensely attached to our lives and people, maybe more consciously than most.  With that comes awareness of the pain of many humans and a need for safe containers while we figure out ourselves and others.  I keep thinking, “What on EARTH sort of childhood traumas could have created the US politicians?  Where are the ones who grew up happy and learned to be competent?”  I think this is an essential religious question.  Because “religion” is about survival.