I loved the concept when I came across it in my early 20’s. Finding my bearings in the grown-up world while making my own decisions about right and wrong in all kinds of situations and scenarios for the first time was frightening. Anchoring myself in this single thought helped.

Albert Schweitzer im Urwaldhospital Lambarene (Quelle: schweitzerfellowship.wordpress.com)

Reverence for life grows out of the idea that every living thing wants to stay alive and every living thing wants to and is here to thrive and live its best life. From this idea comes the philosophy that living as a good human being means to respect and protect the lives of all other people and all other living beings – including the lives of plants and creatures – as well as to help other living beings to thrive.

When we work on living as an equal among equals, we find ourselves developing more and more reverence for all lives. The depth of our conviction that we are all equals grows as we act out of reverence for one another’s lives.

Think of what the opposite means: anything that harms or seeks to obstruct life for a person or for other living beings is evil. We have many, many evils in our society, from the state of our incarceration facilities and policies, to the rampant killing of people by police; from environmental destruction to racial injustice; from the blame game we play with homelessness to the do-nothing approach to gun violence.

Younger adults searching for an ethical path for living life can find in the concept of reverence for life a worthy match for their longing to be so thoroughly grounded in being a good person that all their choices and decisions will be right and good. Of course, it doesn’t exactly happen that way.

The learning curve for having a personal ethic is usually steep, and comes as a result of trying to apply an idea to real-life circumstances. Albert Schweitzer worked hard to apply this thought to everything from surgical decisions in his medical hut in the jungle to the global threat of nuclear war. To make it our own, we have to work on it as diligently as he did.

Notes:

Reverence for Life: The Words of Albert Schweitzer, compiled by Harold E. Robles

James Brabazon, author of Albert Schweitzer: A Biography, defined Reverence for Life as follows: Reverence for Life says that the only thing we are absolutely sure of is that we live and want to go on living. This is something that we share with everything else that lives, from elephants to blades of grass—and, of course, every human being. So we are brothers and sisters to all living things, and owe to all of them the same care and respect, that we wish for ourselves

AMA Journal of Ethics, December 2006, Albert Schweitzer: His Experience and Example, byJennifer Kasten, MSc

When they integrated available transportation options into the map, it illustrated where people of the region have inadequate services and little or no access to the necessities. The lack of connectivity between large centers of activity that operate day and night – colleges, hospitals, supermarkets, and industries – and transportation options that run night and day also became clear.

The mapping project raises deeper questions about the quality of life available to all of us. Who has a nearby convenience shop if they run out of milk or bread? Who can get to a library? A restaurant? A movie? A church? Is it safe to go for a walk – in daylight and at night? What support is available for teens, elders, caregivers? The map can include as many interrelated questions as the planners want to consider.

This is a clear example of how to work on equality in our own backyards. Building a caring community starts with people who are familiar with all of our homes and neighborhoods, not just the centers of activity, and who understand the inequalities that location can create. Access is one of the foundation stones in replacing systemic advantages with systemic caring.

Can everyone in your community navigate the essentials: get to work, do grocery shopping, get to medical care facilities and appointments, shop at stores, get to classes? For those who are without a car, does the community have bike paths, bike share programs, bike lanes on the roadways, sidewalks, micro-transit options and public transportation options for everyone?

These questions reflect a mindset of caring for everyone in the community. Mapping access gives our municipal leaders a way to imagine what good can come from the work they do.

Note: The mapping project was reported on by Scott Merzbach for the Greenfield (MA) Recorder, 2/24/24. (“Can You Get There From Here?”)

I have been through a few transformations in my life. In the Biblical sense and in the way the word is commonly used, a transformation means that a person or a situation has improved in a significant way. When we want to convey that something has changed in a negative way, words like degrade or deteriorate are commonly used. This newspaper used the following headline from an AP article: “Supreme Court Rejects Arguments in North Carolina Case That Could Have Transformed US Elections.” The article was not about how the court turned down a desirable change in the election process. It was not about a case that had the potential to delight everyone and change our lives for the better. It was about the court denying a state’s request to exert total control over how much our voices matter at the voting booth. I can’t stress enough how important it is that headlines accurately reflect a situation. And because the word choice in a headline influences our understanding of the news, we readers need to read beyond the headline to make sure we grasp the article’s meaning. In the case of this Supreme Court ruling, a headline indicating that the case had the potential and the intent to demolish our democracy would have conveyed the truth of the matter.

During the pandemic I attended an online workshop on writing op-ed pieces. Studies have shown that op-ed pieces are effective: they do change people’s minds. Maybe not everyone is drawn in by the ringing clarity of your argument, but some people are. That’s a definite motivator to make your voice heard among your local newspaper readers.

Most people either vaguely tune into a news source or skim through different papers and media reports. Paying attention to the news headlines and chyrons at the bottom of the screen is an important role for us to play in educating the public. It is especially important to speak up when the words used are misleading, to detect bias and call it out, and to be the voice of representation on sides of an issue that are being ignored.

Unable to face the reality that a female child is pregnant, they try to legislate away any shame associated with the behaviors of males, including rape and incest. The old-fashioned ones and the ones closely bound to religious dogma that bears no resemblance to the teachings in their holy books seem to carry a sense of shame about sex in general, as if their own upbringing constrains them to keep their own sexuality inside a tiny little box.

A United Nations study showed that 90% of people, male and female, are biased against women (The Guardian, 3.5.2020). Male-dominated legislatures, including those with anti-democracy women who accept a male dominant culture, are never going to question the role of males in sexual activity, never going to assign consequences to male behaviors. They will legislate consequences for females ‘til the cows come home, making laws that create overt cruelty towards women, laws that dig deeper and deeper into male domination of women, rather than facing their shameful self-protection.

The more visible minorities and the LGBTQ+ community are, the more anti-democracy lawmakers work to excise those people from public life. “Out of sight, out of mind” is their go-to philosophy. They are banning books and events and discussions of any marginalized population instead of facing their own shame of White supremacy and not being able to live in a diverse society. While more and more people are at ease in today’s world of multiculturalism and sexual diversity, anti-democracy elected leaders try to legislate it back to the rigid, inappropriate box they live in.

Whenever a school shooting occurs, instead of facing the shame of allowing so many children to die from guns, or the shame of seeing so many parents burying the bullet-riddled bodies of their school-aged children, anti-democracy lawmakers focus on greater armed presence in schools, guns for teachers, and raising children to be part of the gun culture. They have been pushed into ever more extreme measures on behalf of gun owners rather than understanding or admitting the folly and the cruelty of perpetuating that point of view.

The statistical evidence is clear: the gun culture is having a terrible effect on everything from the safety of our school children to our collective mental health to our life expectancy rates. Rather than face the shame of knowing how much they are contributing to making the world less safe than they found it, and of knowing that they should be making it safer, members of the gun culture make proposals to increase the number of guns in society.

Shame hurts. It can cause a person such distress they try to get rid of it any way they can. Few who espouse anti-democracy measures have learned to process their shame internally, working to understand the pain and learn from it. Instead, they deflect their shame pain by shaming others and causing pain to others. The more they enact laws and make speeches that cause others pain, the more we are all hurting.

In the last few years, the number of times a 311 call resulted in the death of a person having a mental health crisis would shock you. A father or mother calls 311 to report a situation in which a child (of any age) is off their medicine, creating a dangerous disturbance, and threatening others. Since many municipalities have not funded trained personnel to respond to 311 calls, the calls are forwarded directly to the police. The police show up and within minutes, sometimes seconds, the person who is mentally ill has been shot dead.

In Kansas City, Atlanta, Boston, San Francisco, Raleigh, and the Bronx the same story has been repeated. In Detroit, when a father called 311 to request a mental health check for a son having a mental health crisis and holding a knife, the police arrived and shot the young man 38 times in 3 seconds. One study showed that nearly 40% of North Carolina civilians shot by police were people experiencing a mental health crisis (abc11.com/10534981). The more militarized our police forces become, the less human the targets of their “assistance” become.

When the police arrive at a mental health situation in riot gear, bullet-proof helmets and vests, with assault rifles, billy clubs, guns and bullets of assorted sizes and shapes studding their belts, you have to wonder who is more mentally disturbed. Clothing yourself in armaments is the behavior of someone in extreme distress from an extreme situation such as war. A mental health crisis does not call for such extreme measures of self-defense. A person has to be ill-trained, frightened to the core of people outside their “norm,” and suffering from mental health abnormalities of their own to choose to go through hours of practice in using these weapons instead of hours of practice diffusing complex human situations. It is not normal to enter any situation with tools of destruction rather than with the confidence of someone who generally likes and understands people.

This is why 311 services are so important. They are intended to be a compassionate response to citizens who need help. It is the middle, humanitarian ground between creating community mental health services that have to be molded to regulations and standards and end up looking and feeling like places many mentally ill people are not capable of choosing on their own as well as places they would not want to be, and the other extreme of policing mental health crises as if we are at war with the mentally ill. Take away the intended purpose of the 311 line, and you remove the compassion from the process of helping a mentally ill person in crisis.

Without 311 services, we have police squads with their own obvious mental distortions and imbalances – to the point of needing to respond to a family request with an arsenal of lethal force instruments –  policing human beings who need mental health intervention. The police are making the crisis about their own safety when the real crisis is happening to the individual who needs help. Not only are the police not trained to handle the situation, they are not intellectually, mentally, or emotionally equipped to be the grown up in the room.

The same day that I had been reading and thinking about that incident, our local paper reported that a man threatened another man with a gun in a grocery store parking lot. It happened to be the grocery store where we and many of our friends shop every week. The man with the gun was waving it around and pointing it at the other man. He was angry the man had passed him on a back road because he was going too slow.  The man with this particular slow-going vehicle sped up and followed the other driver all the way to the store.

Because it could have been me or any of my loved ones threatened by that gun, this story made me anxious and afraid. Then I became angry about having my intellectual and emotional immersion in Black history hijacked by this incident of gun violence and all the others that are reported day after day. Gun violence and Black history are not equally deserving of my attention. Gun violence is a story about attention-seeking people, most of them White males with a king-sized psychic illness that has gone undiagnosed and untreated because we are unwilling to see the madness behind the need to have a million guns and to carry those guns around. Those individuals should be getting help rather than occupying so much media attention and civic oxygen that we cannot attend with heart and soul to human concerns that are of greater value – poverty, hunger, the deteriorating mental health of this society and our awful mental health system, Black history, Native American history, public education, and the special needs of our adolescents.

This, too, is a valid reason for gun control. The daily onslaught of news about gun violence is always hijacking our attention ways from what matters. It robs us of the human experience of putting our anger and civic motivation where it properly belongs.

The idea of such a program sparked a division of opinions among the townspeople. On one side are those who feel that making graffiti on public and private property is illegal, and requires punishment from the legal system. For a young person, this carries such ominous weight as jail time, charges of misdemeanors, fines, and a juvenile detention record. Offering a graffiti workshop is seen as using taxpayer money to coddle and reward the offenders rather than punishing them for breaking the law. (No mention of what using the legal system would cost taxpayers.)

On the other side are parents who are still heavily involved in the task of raising these children. They would like to feel that the community at large will support and respectfully guide the youths in their midst. About a dozen middle schoolers expressed an interest in the workshops, which is a lot in a small town. The police want the program. They have a mission to close the generational gaps in the community. They see the workshop as one way for the youths and the police to get to know one another.

As a society, we have a long history of casting people out who don’t follow the rules or expectations. That is particularly true for the young, the poor, and people of color. The White and the wealthy have loopholes and lawyers and the benefit of gratuitous positive images when they run afoul of the law. As ivy commented on my last post, we need to think about who and what is responsible for throwing people into the abyss, and which people typically end up there.

The police chief thought about that and educated her Select Board on the importance of offering young people guidance and meaningful activities in areas of interest to them. She wrote a grant to cover the costs. She wants to expand the idea to involve many other artists in her town, the creators of many forms of art, and make the program available to all middle school students in town.

The chief is creating a local illustration of how to build a more humane society. We could all learn from her example.

What the police saw was a familiar street person, an addict who chose to live her life in a tent in the woods, a known criminal who had just committed the crimes of child endangerment and falsifying physical evidence. They saw someone who had previously refused available outreach services and was forcing her way of life on a helpless baby. After the woman was treated by medical staff, police arrested her and put her in jail.

Social workers had developed a relationship with this woman as an individual and were devastated by the story. They saw the event as another example of society’s indifference to poverty and to the number of street people living with bipolar disorder, anxiety, and depression. They saw her potential to be a good mother if she could receive the support services she needs. They spoke to reporters about how quickly we demonize those who have untreated mental health issues, addictions, and lack of housing.

If we took a poll of the general population, asking thousands of people to give us their reactions to this event, I suspect the results would fall into these same two camps: fault the woman or fault society. Some would think her failure to pull herself up by her bootstraps and become a contributing member of their community was no one’s doing but her own. Others would think society is forever punishing the poor and the addicted.

This is the great divide in our country. Issues that are polarizing us – race relations, immigration, poverty, gun control, health care – are pulling in opposite directions at the fabric of decency and concern for one another as human beings. People lost in the chasm between the two ways of perceiving our human community are in hell. Can I tell you? Shelters and group homes, even soup kitchens and job training programs have become as much of an abomination to street people as jail time and public toilets. Warehousing people into facilities that not one of us would want to inhabit, grouped with other people who are equally in need of services, has been a formula for failure. Individuals feel like they are always on guard, supervised like children, following strict rules like criminals, fearing for their safety, and defending themselves against people who are strung out and mentally unbalanced. Living in a tent in the woods is a last resort, but a better option than the alternatives society is providing.

Instead of finding ways to further label and marginalize people, we ought to begin by helping them to recover their humanity. Community agencies and services can do that by focusing on human rights: life, liberty, personal safety; the right to a standard of living including food, clothing, housing, and medical care.  These are not things to be granted by either the cops or society. They are not items to be stripped away from the unworthy, like privileges or perks. They need to be understood as inherent to our existence as human beings.

Read the document drafted by and supported by nations around the globe (https://www.civicsandcitizenship.edu.au/verve/_resources/FQ2_Simplified_Version_Dec.pdf). Every year since the Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by all members of the United Nations (1948), the United States has gone backward instead of forwards, falling deeper and deeper into a pit of dehumanizing one another, to the point where the UN felt compelled in 2015 to issue a scathing assessment of our human rights record.

The woman in the woods had been living inside a drug-addicted bubble and did not know that she was pregnant. She was confused and frightened by what was happening to her body, the bleeding, and the pain. After the baby was born, she walked away from the scene to call 911 because she was afraid the police would break up her encampment and take her tent, her only means of shelter. Her anxiety level kept rising as she tried to figure out what to do. She was in no state to make a rational decision about any of it.

This story features two babes in the woods. One was born prematurely and left alone and naked in a tent on a frigid winter night. That one would receive top-notch medical attention at a neonatal intensive care unit. The other was tossed in jail. She will probably be brought before a judge and given the choice of either returning to jail or entering a drug rehab program while living in a group home for 3 to 6 months, a situation she has faced many times before.

If we are not capable of seeing each person’s humanity, if we cannot or will not create an ecosystem in which each human life is respected, we are barbaric. To think this one deserves a house and that one does not – unless they first live in highly regulated facilities and jump through hoops to show they’ve reformed – is more backward than hunter-gatherer societies that considered every member of the clan to be family and made sure everyone had food, clothing, and shelter.

Within our communities, we have enough of everything to make that happen. No one needs to live on the margins when we have ample means of ensuring shelter, clothing, food, personal safety, and medical expertise. If we can stop seeing these as items to be doled out to those who conform to a certain mold, or to those who have enough money, and begin to see them as human rights and necessities for living a human life, it would go a long way towards repairing the broken and inhumane systems we’ve created.

I am excited to be thinking about my Living As Equals blog once again. When you open the site now, it brings you to the “About” page first. I have rewritten that page to reflect the direction new articles will take. The best way for me to show you what I mean is to write an article. Time for me to get to work!

Take care,

Susan