Guns for Peace?

Some of our best moments in life are when we catch up with our long lost friends over a coffee, a phone call or even over FB chat. We share all our varied experiences from that lost time with each other with great excitement- where we traveled, what we saw, whom we met, etc. But only some experiences are as interesting yet disturbing as the one I recently had. I caught up with an old friend over Skype who has been based in the US for about 7 years. Settled in New York with an exceptionally good job and apartment, it was nice to see him so happy about living the ‘American dream’, until he mentioned his recent visit to a gun show. Something about the very idea of a “gun show” made me twitch in my seat and it left me increasingly unsettled as he continued talking about it with a vigor that I was absolutely struggling to grasp and process.

The Gun control issue in the US is one that has seen heavy participation, debate and political see-saws in the last few years. Popular and eminent news channels, journals, blogs, newspapers and TV shows have covered this theme to no end and each time I heard or read the two opposing views towards the issue, I couldn’t help be amused by the astounding irony embedded in these arguments, mostly coming from the pro-gun ownership camp. Take for example this argument- “Legal Gun Ownership is required to protect family and property against those that use illegal Guns”. The very basis of this argument rests on the fact that there are several Americans who own illegal guns. While this may be a perfectly logical reason to support gun ownership, it fails to question the very motivation behind the want and/or need to actually own a gun. A large population of the US roots for gun ownership out of their need for protection- from the government, from illegal gun owners, from criminals, or anyone with half the spine to actually act on their evil intentions. And let’s make no mistake, the biggest anchor to the pro gun ownership counsel is the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution. It reads "A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a Free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Complete objectivity has provided this camp with a variety of further such reasoning to support their cause. For instance, evil doesn’t lie in the gun itself, but in the doer and his motives. Otherwise knives and matchsticks are no different to guns and should be seen as equally harmful ‘weapons’. Interesting. Could we take the help of other events in world history to agree with this reasoning? The Rwandan genocide involved slaughtering with spears and knives, the ISIS and Taliban have adopted the same weapons for inflicting unspeakable horrors. Riots in various parts of the world stemming from civil disobedience and protests have used other such mundane items for destruction such as hockey sticks, glass bottles or even plain simple stones. Granted that the social demographics and political landscape of such events have been completely different in these countries to that of the US today, but it still goes to prove that destruction, hate and madness, all really exist at an intentional level more than anything else. If the intention is strong enough, it doesn’t matter what tool is available to the human hand. The output is going to be inevitably horrendous. 

That said, the peculiarity of mass shootings in the US cannot be ignored and it warrants political action. Incidents of children accidently shooting each other by mistaking the gun for a toy are reason enough to bring the social proliferation of guns under examination. Social institutions like family and schools are under serious threat and reports of teachers in Utah, Idaho and other parts of the US being given ‘free gun training’ have made my stomach turn each time. I cannot imagine a scenario in which I would have to think a 100 times before sending my kid to a neighbor’s house to play or worse still, conduct background checks on my neighbors before socializing with them. As a teacher myself, I can’t even fathom a learning environment in which guns co-exist with children, especially when anything even remotely sharp or fire-inducing is watched out for in the interest of children’s safety. What guarantee can a teacher give to the parents that a weapon provided for defending the children and herself will not be misused by her itself in some weak moment? Especially when psychological studies behind the need for owning firearms have revealed evidence suggesting that gun ownership correlates with tendencies towards anger and impulsivity. Is it not a risk to assume that a teacher’s manifestation of anger, frustration and impulsivity cannot be in the form of firing a gun?

Over time, a host of other reasons have presented themselves for the support of gun-ownership such as recreational hobbies like hunting or guns being status symbols. The fact that people own a variety of high-end guns besides just the basic sort needed for protection, goes to show that gun ownership has surpassed the need for protection alone. A lucrative industry has been built around guns, employing double the amount of people than General Motors, which Obama called “a pillar of our economy” in 2009. This is a complex socio-political issue that the US must resolve at a policy level, the proceedings of which are going to be far too interesting given the upcoming elections of this year. They will play a big role in the fate of this dilemma. The bottom line is that the US needs to dig deep into its social psyche and the factors that shaped it, so as to understand the human motivations behind this very disconcerting phenomenon and nip it in the bud. Because clearly, scapegoating mental illnesses and political posturing hasn’t been helping the situation in any way. I wonder if the ‘audacity of hope’ will be audacious enough to bring about such a massive social transformation of American society. Only time can tell.

The Devil lies in the details…

                              

We humans are too familiar with the many predicaments of social, political and economic life- poverty alleviation, fighting terrorism, inclusive growth, nuclear wars, alternative energy models, you name it. Much energy is spent in trying to get to the bottom of these problems and resolving them. Swept under the rug of such a vast body of dilemmas though lie some deeply embedded, almost invisible, core issues. Issues that revolve around our identities, our psyche and our motivations. We cannot avert our eyes from the inescapable fact that the world around us is changing and fast. The questions we seek to answer today are not the questions of the last decade, let alone the last century. And how are we to even know if we are asking the right questions to begin with? Unless they are “serious” enough they aren’t deemed to be necessary, or essential enough, because they apparently lack profundity. I wish to question such a seemingly unimportant social phenomenon, albeit one that has contributed to a very curious complex. I like to call it the post-colonial hangover in my own head.  

At 16, I was exposed to a very remarkable pattern of learning and an extremely sustainable teacher-student relationship at the Goethe Institute. Fresh out of the archaic Indian schooling system, I was taken aback when we were told not to refer to the teacher as ‘Sir’ or a ‘ma’am’ but just call them by their first name instead. Little did I know that this seemingly small classroom etiquette would be so largely connected to identity formation and learning outcomes. As the youngest in class I initially struggled with it a lot owing to the strong conditioning from schooling. “But he is so much older than I am”, “Gosh that’s just disrespectful”, or a simple “It’s just weird” are the kind of mental responses that cropped up instantly. Over the first few days my teacher noticed my uneasiness about this. One day in the coffee break, he playfully asked me to construct a sentence that required me to address him and I was right back in the spot I had been avoiding. I thought hard-should I start with “Sir...”or just use his name? He noticed my evident discomfiture at the question and said “Calm down. It’s not that complicated”. What he spoke to me about next is something I have never forgotten and which strongly contributed to my understanding of educational practices in the years to come. 

We Indians we are so habituated to calling someone Sir or ma’am as our teacher or perhaps even boss. If older than us, a relational tag is attached to them-like kaka, chacha, maasi, aunty, etc. Pushing me to ask myself why I felt uncomfortable calling my teacher by his name was like opening up Pandora’s Box. So many belief systems were suddenly put under interrogation all at the same time - I should respect my elders, but why should I respect them? What IS respect actually? Is it something that comes with a position and hence is something to be demanded or is it something that is to be earned? How is demanded respect different from earned respect? What changes inside me when I call him by his first name? How does respect even matter in my process of learning? This was probably my first conscious encounter with critical thinking & I am so glad today for that push he gave me. Over the years I have observed a range of social and psychological constructs that are connected to this trend and they seem to exist in a cyclic, mutually reinforcing pattern.

As of today all our educational institutions and even some of our workplaces follow the norm of calling someone Sir or ma’am. It’s true that to run any organization systems and processes are of the essence. Designations and titles are designed for vertical power structures and they enable smoother processes through definition of roles. They however forgo the capacity to be creative and original which often comes from free and genuine human interaction, independent of barricades. Addressing a teacher by their first name questions the student’s identity by bringing him into the equation to begin with. The power structure here instantly becomes a horizontal one as opposed to a vertical one, allowing more breadth to the learning and it seems to trigger responsibility in the student. How? Well, it is simply difficult to treat yourself like a child, when the other person considers you an adult. Respect for oneself and for the teacher then becomes automatic and mutual. One respects the teacher not because he “has to” but because he “wants to”. Of course, an inevitable prerequisite for a teacher’s respect is his/her knowledge of the subject, authenticity as a person and pedagogic skills, but it is important to note here that the teacher has earned respect by investing it in the student and through his/her own performance, instead of demanding it. This amalgamation of self-responsibility and mutual respect helps the student transition into a conducive state of mind for knowledge-seeking, creativity and originality. Gradually and comprehensively all this contributes to both, the formation of student and individual identity.  Education systems abroad (especially the higher education systems) are structured in a way that support such finer aspects of human behavior. Interestingly, democratic schools around the world do not follow the Sir and ma’am practice either. Kids refer to their teachers by name. This is exceptionally good for the development of what Psychologist Eric Berne called the ‘adult ego state’ in his theory of Transactional Analysis. Children learn to think of respect as an investment and a well-developed adult ego state is the foundation for harmony and success in many areas of our real adult life.

My philosophy professor from college once shared a remarkable observation with me before I left for my Masters to the UK in 2007. He said “you will realize what academic integrity means”, referring to the pattern of education abroad. It was striking to see that the same country that had subjected us to slavery through their breakdown of our social backbone via education no longer follows such autocratic social constructs within their academic world. ‘Sir’ remains an honorary title bestowed upon someone for extraordinary contributions to a field of knowledge and hence in fact associates with merit and not demanded respect. Why then do we still continue to conform to such norms mindlessly? Why have we gotten so used to giving out respect for free to everyone but ourselves? It is no wonder then that we have been failing at original thinking for a long time.  Our blind emulation of the west in the social sphere and our copy-paste mindset in the academic world are testimonies to that. 

Generally speaking, such behavioral practices appear to be trivial. But in a world of over-stimulation, it is the smaller and finer details of human interaction that we need to increasingly pay more focused attention to because they shape our motivations and social framework through a nexus of influencing factors. The purpose of the academic world is to be a vanguard for innovative, original and ground breaking ideas and arguably so, collaboration is the mantra for the times to come. Discriminatory human interaction based on vertical power structures within the academic world will lead us nowhere. What will it take for us to unravel the many layers of borrowed and redundant social fabric we have wrapped around ourselves, even though they serve no purpose? Are we ready to act in our own favor yet?