Social Ties Need Strengthening

We get response right, but social ties need strengthening

Reprinted with permission from the St. Paul Pioneer Press

Suicide and terror. Even as America fights their conjunction on foreign shores, it struggles with a cult of alienated killers on its own soil. Whether the perpetrators of shootings and bombings in American schools, workplaces and public spaces are Americans with purely American grudges, like Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph, Americans who have sympathies with foreign enemies, like John Muhammad, or American residents from abroad, like Cho Seung-Hui, the collective American psyche always takes another hit.

In the Virginia Tech assault, an assault on both the direct victims and the nation’s consciousness, America receives yet another opportunity to strengthen itself by improving its psychological defenses.

America is being bullied, and the bully is the content of the news. How will Americans come to grips with a bully who hangs around the street corner, waiting to jump out and hit again with notice of the latest mass violence in America?

At least America gets the response right.

Ravaged communities, from Columbine to Oklahoma City to Blacksburg, Va., come together to heal by sharing grief, bonding and celebrating their strength as a group. They capitalize on their collective identity to help heal individual wounds.

If only America were more skilled at making and using its collective identity up front, moving out of the reactive role of psychological first responder and into the preventative role of surrounding the bully every day with strong social ties.

In order to achieve this shift, American individualism will need some rethinking. We need to begin to understand and apply the principle that our individual well-being derives in part from the common good, and that we can enhance our own well-being by serving that common good.

What would that move look like?

American campuses will now without question attend to enhancing security. At the same time, they need to pay equal attention to providing a tight-knit and nurturing social environment in campus communities. Unless they do, campus cultures will become more militarized in tone, a tone to which troubled students may well respond. A culture that remains steeped in extremes of individualism, where the concept of “leaving people alone” is much too liberally applied, will be hard put to fully believe in the authenticity of its own social connections.

Social cooperation is not just for bad days. It is for every day, and for defense against the bad days.

The renaissance of social bonding that Americans created and experienced immediately after 9/11 has been squandered instead of becoming an ongoing national resource. This wastefulness has left the national identity weakened and the national psyche open to repeated victimization.

But with each national crisis, the opportunity to get the lesson right is renewed. America’s collective identities – community and national – and not just its security, need to be strong in order to get ahead of the bully’s curve. Raising our group self-esteem is part of the fight. Crisis-based community is only a start.

Karen Larson is a professor of anthropology and interdisciplinary studies at Gustavus Adolphus College. She has been studying violence and terrorism and American culture for 15 years, and is the author of “Culture and Terror: The Jackal and the Phoenix in America” (Xlibris).