by Acacia Dietz
The lessons we are fast reaffirming as a culture — between the Buffalo NY shooting just a week ago and the Uvalde Texas elementary school shooting — is this: It starts at home and it starts with our youth. This isn’t just a ‘white supremacy’ problem — if it was then the shooting on Tuesday in Uvalde would not have occurred because the 18-year-old kid wasn’t a white supremacist…
In a post-crisis scenario, we also need words that respond, not react. Cultivating behaviors such as learning to stop and think then RESPOND versus whiplash reactions is what today’s society is missing (especially in America). While Zoom and online learning replaced most of our children’s in-person education these few years; electronics, video games and television have become a babysitter raising our children on a culture consumed with violence. Positive social skills, such as relational dialogue and civil discourse, are not inherent human abilities. Interpersonal skills are taught and passed down from generation to generation — it isn’t found on some YouTube channel.
In order to learn positive social skills, you have to interact with other human beings. We are witnessing the impact failure to dialogue has in the worst-case scenarios. On a radicalization level, that failure can be found at any minute of the day all over the internet in places like 4chan, 8chan/8kun, Reddit, Telegram, etcetera. We desperately need civil discourse and we need to be practicing it every day, showing up every day; because the alternative is the nightmare currently playing before our eyes.
© 2022 Acacia Dietz
