Hugh Hollowell

Creating a compelling vision of a better world.

They make money off your fear

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I listen to people. I guess that is a good characteristic to have, doing what I do and all. And as a writer who is fascinated with people, I love listening to the cadence and rhythm of voices and stories. Additionally, one side effect to having ADHD is that I often end up being confronted with conversations I am not involved in. When I walk into a room, I hear all the conversations happening, and they all fight for priority.

And much of what I have heard people say lately was about being afraid.

“We can’t let kids play in the neighborhood like we did when we were kids. It’s just not safe.”

“Anyplace I can carry a gun, I do. It just isn’t safe to do otherwise.”

“I get nervous in any large crowd of people. I am constantly scanning for exits, in case there is an active shooter.”

“Every time my phone rings and it’s my kid’s school, my first thought is that a shooting happened there.”

Those are all pretty much verbatim quotes I have heard this week. We are convinced the world is getting worse instead of better, and we are afraid.

But the objective reality is, the world is not getting worse instead of better. This is one of the safest times to be alive in human history, relative to violence. Compared to 30 years ago, murder and all violent crime is way down. In the US, both violent crimes and crimes against property are down by around 50% since the early 1990’s. The murder rate (murders per capita) in 2014 was almost exactly the same as it was in 1960 – you know, the good old days when we could let our children free range in the streets.

We are safer from personal violence than ever before, and are more afraid than ever before.

Not all fear is bad. Historically, it made sense to be alert for dangers to you or your offspring, and to protect yourself and the people you love. The world we evolved in was violent and “red in tooth and claw”, and whether the threat was a neighboring tribesman or a large tiger hiding in the savanna grass, it made sense to be alert, lest we perish as a species. Fear can also tell you when a situation is unsafe, when you need to run rather than fight and can still help you survive in 2017.

But fear that is ungrounded in reality can paralyze and overwhelm you. The primary source of safety for humans has always been our community – the people around us who protect us and who watch out for us.  We are small pack animals, like chimpanzees, lions and dolphins. Our safety is found in the collective.

However, the sort of fear we have nowadays serves not to protect us, but to make us suspicious of those in our community. We are being inundated with news of atrocity and disaster on a 24 hour basis, in ways that our ancestors could never dream of. Our species is some 200,000 years old, and yet the ability to know the immediate details of an act of violence that happens on the other side of the world is less than 100 years old. In fact, for most of the evolutionary history of our species, we were completely unaware there was another side of the world, let alone what happened there.

And because of our strong tribal safety programming, we hear of violence on the other side of the world, or the other side of the country or even the other side of the state, and our brain processes it as the same sort of threat as if it were happening on your block. But a school shooting in California does not make your child in Virginia less safe. It just doesn’t.

So why, if we are safer from personal violence than ever before, are we more afraid than ever before?

Because people make money when we are afraid.

Our biological programming is not equipped to handle the scale of information we now not only have access to, but have thrown at us. The media profits on our fear, and the nature of the Internet economy is that every time we click on a headline, someone makes money. Sensational headlines get more clicks, and headlines that confirm our fears get even more than that.

Every sensational news story of violence drives gun sales, despite the fact that most people killed by guns are the gun owner – usually in an act of suicide. The alarm industry, the gun industry, the security industry, the NRA – all of them profit from your being afraid.

People and corporations are using your fear for profit, and meanwhile we become less safe, not because of actual threat, but because of our increased disconnection from each other.

The only solution I know is to limit your consumption of media. Focus on, and give priority to, the local. Search for things you have in common with people you meet, instead of differences. Be aware of your surroundings, and ask yourself critical questions about fears you have, especially if the fear comes from a non-local source.

And remember that our safety is truly only found in our ability to take care of each other. That is as true now as it was when we were sleeping in trees in the African savanna.

Rewriting Forgiveness

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A rare guest post today, from my friend Alyssa Vine-Hodge. She and I were talking a few weeks ago about how hard it is to forgive people who have hurt you, and how she, as a survivor, had come to terms with forgiveness. Later she sent me this, and I asked her if I could share it with y’all.

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Does anyone else out there cringe, or feel your blood pressure raise, when you hear the word forgiveness? Do you wish that the definition could be changed, or that the word could be stricken from our vocabulary altogether? If so, I wrote this for you.

Ironically, growing up saturated in Christianity gave me a warped understanding of the word forgiveness. Being a victim of sexual abuse at a young age, though not at the hands of a church or family member, made sitting in church and listening to sermons about forgiveness complicated to say the least.

I heard many sermons about Matthew 5:38-40. “…But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other also…” This passage was very often linked with the concept of forgiveness, topping it off with many sermons about our Lord and Savior, who himself died by abuse.

Often I would hear, “Jesus was God, he could have chosen to take himself down off the cross, but he didn’t. He died, a torturous death, so that we might all receive forgiveness”. I don’t recall ever hearing a sermon about what to do if you are in an abusive relationship, how to stand up for others and come to the aid of those who may be experiencing abuse, or how to stop being an abusive person yourself. What does this say to a child or even to many adults? Well frankly, it says “Take it. That’s what God wants.”

And turning to the secular definition of forgiveness doesn’t make it any easier.

To Forgive: To stop feeling angry or resentful toward someone for an offense, flaw, or mistake.
Synonyms: pardon, excuse, exonerate, absolve

The current definition and synonyms we use can be tolerable, and even useful, for soft situations. But we all know it gets harder and harder as the intensity of an offense increases. How do we stop feeling angry after something like abuse, rape, or murder? Should we stop feeling anger? And inserting the available synonyms just makes it more complicated. To excuse and absolve things like that just seems plain wrong.

It’s been a long process, but I’ll admit that I’ve gotten to a place where I have forgiven my perpetrator. It took time. I was locked up in the crazy house. I take medication now. I do yoga. I still pray to Jesus. But what helped me arrive at forgiveness was writing my own definition:

To not allow another person’s evil to dictate who you want to be

Notice this definition still allows room for a person to experience anger or pain. And there is no way any of the replacement synonyms would work here like “absolve” or “excuse.” Writing this definition liberated me. I was able to no longer have to think of forgiveness in terms of having to tell an evil person, “Hey, rape is excusable. I’m fine now. I’ve forgiven you.” I instead am able to think, “Hey, What you did was totally evil and inexcusable. You caused the symptoms I live with. But I don’t have to be evil like you. I have the power to embrace love.” And to
me, that’s forgiveness.

Today as I was writing this, I decided to be a studious Christian and look up the Hebrew word for forgive. What I found was the same list of synonyms above. However, one translation had an additional word at the end of that list:
to renounce! How can renounce be in the same list with absolve? Well, I think it means that God is bigger than our respective languages and vocabularies. And perhaps God smiles when we write definitions and set ourselves free.

So I hope that today you feel empowered. You have the power to choose what you absolve and what you renounce. And that makes the word forgiveness a little easier to say.

And what about Jesus, then? Well, I’m still on a long road of grappling with many questions. But I’m pretty sure the message isn’t that abuse is okay. I think it means that things like truth, love, and being yourself are often things that others want to destroy. And sometimes they succeed.

 

The storm is still there

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As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I made the decision to go on medication for my depression – depression that was crippling me and threatening my ability to keep it together. This past weekend I was at a wedding, and several of the people there are readers of my blog. So, a natural question they asked was, “How is the medication working out?”

That is the question, isn’t it? Generally, it’s good. I am some five weeks in, and should now be fully dosed. And I have some very good days, some OK days, and some bad days – I imagine just like you do.

Drugs don’t stop depression, as much as I wish they did. I am still the sort of person who gets depressed, and always will be. Hell, I always have been.

What the drugs do, however, is give me some space away from the depression. Instead of being immersed in it, I am able to sit back and observe it. Here is the way I described it to a friend the other day:

Imagine you are on a patio, and it has come a thunderstorm. You are getting drenched, and are unable to move to shelter. That is what depression feels like for me. Now imagine you are inside the house, looking at that same storm, and at that same patio through the sliding glass doors. The storm is still there, the patio is still there, and you are still there. That is what depression on meds feels like for me.

The storm is still there. But now I can observe it, instead of drowning in it.

80/20 Relationships

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I had a person the other day, hand to God, who got upset at me because I don’t “like” enough of their Facebook posts, even though they “like” all of mine.

There is a theory that in any given situation, 80% of the outcomes come from 20% of the inputs. It has been called the 80/20 rule, or the Pareto Principle, after the Italian economist who first noticed it. While it isn’t exact, the ratios work nearly everywhere.

If you own a store, 20% of your inventory make up 80% of your sales. In a church, 20% of the congregants give 80% of the money. Of the things you own, 20% of them give you 80% of your enjoyment. On Facebook, 80% of your enjoyment comes from 20% of your contacts. (When I dropped over 2000 Facebook friends a while back, I barely noticed a change at all.)

And of your relationships, 20% of them give you 80% of the value.

We tend to know this instinctively. We talk about how this person is your best friend, or we are close friends, or so-and-so is a new friend, or how we want to be better friends. We recognize there are degrees of friendship and relationship.

And we tend to act accordingly. If we get asked to do something for our closest friends – those who are in our 20% – we usually don’t hesitate. I have three or four people in my life that could ask literally anything in the world of me, and I would try to figure out how to do it. Once you get outside that circle, however, I start doing equations, asking myself things like do I really want to do the thing? Is it convenient to do the thing? How much will it cost to do the thing? And so on.

And by and large, I think we tend to be OK with this. In theory, anyway. We understand we can’t all be as close to each other as we are to some people. We don’t have the time or the emotional energy to maintain those levels of relationships. I don’t think people really get upset that we treat them differently than we treat other people. I think what gets people upset – what got this person upset – is when you are in their 20%, but they are not in yours.

This is when they think they have a right to more of you than you are willing to give. This is when they can’t hear that “No” is a complete sentence. This is where you begin to offend folks.

And I don’t really know what to do about that.