August 4, 2010

A funny (or not so funny) thing happened on
the way, not to the forum, but to Starbucks. (My favorite haunt, the Barn Shops
Café, was closed.) Well, a forum of sorts about contemporary culture. You see I
looked at a spot right by the door, then mused that perhaps it was a
handicapped spot; then mused that if it weren’t, maybe backing up out of it so
close to the parking lot entry some fast talking woman on a cell phone might
hit me backing out. Fortunately, at long moments of my musing, no other cars
were in sight. Ah, so I decide, I can do a pull through beyond this entry
parking space. A wee walk, no backing up needed, perchance the parking lot
fills with toddlers in runaway mode.

As per usual, I apparently take longer than
any woman alive to extricate myself from said car. I ruminate about what
Garrison Keillor is saying on Prairie Home Companion; I talk back to the NPR
radio show host who asks a dumb question. I look for my wallet and phone and
make sure I have my keys in tow.

Hardly leaping out of the car, I see that a
woman has pulled up into the close space I left behind. I think, good grief, am
I so slow that she’s going to get that Starbuck door open before I do? I, who
anonymously donated that space to her? She, unlike I, gets out of the car at
what I consider a clip. Ah, but I walk fast and get to the door first only to
be met by her remark about my having raced to the door to get in ahead of her. Well,
she was right about that, but that was hardly the whole story of my internal
dialog of why “I needed to get there first.” I was in competition with my slow
self that decided to take on the outer world. So surely she felt righteous
about her observation. I tried to communicate a piece of my story to no avail.
I was bad. I who usually make it to the short grocery line just as the lady
with the overload skids in front of me. I don’t fight for parking spaces
either, but darn I just thought how unfair (that’s a dumb thought) that I
should get my expensive drink that I don’t need after this lady gets served.
After all, she came to that parking lot way after me. Blah. Blah.

Nobody was right or wrong in this scenario. I
wasn’t right to think “I should be first, I got here first.” And the other customer
wasn’t right in making any assumptions about my motives, let alone my actions.

Point being we are quick to judge ourselves;
we are quicker even, to judge everybody else for whatever actions we or they
take.

A friend recently shared a story she had read
in OMagazine (while sweating on the
treadmill at the Y). The article recounted how a young man in a very rigid
fundamentalist church community had murdered his mother. It was his maternal
grandmother that supported and defended him at the trial. It was she who
reported how demeaning and horribly judgmental the mother (and this “religious”
community) had been to her grandson. The mother constantly derided her son for
his high-pitched voice and “effeminate” ways. She tried through various efforts
and exercises to change his voice to make him “more of a man.” His father, a
fireman, had been more accepting of him, but unfortunately had died fighting a
fire when his son was a youngster. Perhaps this young man was then and is now
gay. Perhaps this young man was (and is) questioning his gender, feeling
dysmorphic in a man’s body. Murdering his mother was not the moral high road
out of his dilemma, but given the psychological prison he encountered with her
verbal annihilation of his essence, he may be finding more “freedom” in
physical prison. (Then again I fear for his physical safety there.)

At first glance, we may be quick to judge:
how could a son be so terrible as to kill his own mother? Re-spect (i.e.,
meaning to look again) for his story shows a deeper meaning to his unacceptable
act.

Or consider the recent story of the
caretaker/driver who left his/her autistic patient in the van, found later to
have died of hyperthermia (or the grandparent who leaves the toddler sleeping,
only to die the same way).

We may at first start throwing stones. (We
really threw stones at the young kid who years ago threw an ice ball from an
overpass and killed the young mother who was driving—was his action wrong? Yes.
But was his intention murder? Absolutely not. His frontal lobe at preteen age
was way underdeveloped for clear headed thinking about the consequences of his
actions.)

But we need to remember the glass houses we
all live in (and around here, they can be mighty fancy).

I do not mean that adults need not be
responsible for their actions. However, I would want to go deeper into the
story before I jumped to any conclusions. I would wonder some about what would
make an ordinarily responsible person forget? How old are they? Are they
themselves experiencing some sort of cognitive decline, memory loss? Are there
job stressors not being attended to?

Also I would wonder when an institution is
involved, what are the failsafe protocols that were or were not in place—the
signing in and out of the patients, for example.

Yes, there needs to be accountability and
individual responsibility but there needs also to be regard for restorative
justice—that nothing happens in a vacuum; the family, the group, the community,
the system are the contexts from which arise the tragic stories.

Restorative justice is a concept to which
many indigenous cultures have prescribed. This notion allows that if an
individual is not behaving morally, righteously, the community not only
disciplines the individual but also asks of each other as a group what dis-ease
they have created in their milieu to have precipitated the misdeed. In other
words, the question is asked how is the community responsible for and to the
individual? What needs to change not only in the individual but in the
community?

This is not to be confused with a rigid,
judgmental-ness or harsh condescension. Ironically, it is just the opposite. In
the language and culture of the Aboriginal communities of Canada, statements
are used constantly without blame or judgment of the other.

In Returning
to the Teachings: Exploring Aboriginal Justice, Rupert Ross notes (page
104):

“Once I
started listening for that nonjudgmental and nonargumentative way of talking
about things in the Aboriginal community, it seemed to be everywhere. People
said, for instance: ‘Oh, I laughed so hard I hurt!’ They did not say, ‘Oh, he was so funny!, which would invite
someone else to say, ‘No, he wasn’t!’ They said, ‘I was so interested to hear
those things,’ not ‘Oh, those things
were so interesting!’

“… great
care seems to be taken not to label things, people or events in terms of
personal responses to them or to argue against anyone else’s views about them.
Instead, the emphasis is on continually stating the opposite, that your reaction
is nothing more than a personal
reaction, one which may or may not be shared by others.”

Interesting that this “I-view,” world view is
what undergirds a restorative justice in which we cannot really “label”
another.

One Canadian Aboriginal Nation, Hollow Water
writes:

“People who
offend against another … are to be viewed and related to as people who are out
of balance—with themselves, their family, their community, and their Creator. A
return to balance can best be accomplished through a process of accountability
that includes support from the community through teaching and healing. The use
of judgment and punishment actually works against the healing process. An already unbalanced person is moved
further out of balance.”

Does anyone get the feeling that perhaps we
in the U.S. might reap some benefit from listening to this Aboriginal wisdom?

* Kayta Curzie
Gajdos holds a doctorate in counseling psychology and is in private practice in
Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. She welcomes comments atMindMatters@DrGajdos.com or 610-388-2888. Past columns are posted towww.drgajdos.com.