Mental health crisis or gun crisis? Neither.
Yet another political debate misses the point regarding the state of humanity
Voters tuned in Tuesday night to watch candidates for political office give their ideas for helping cure societal ills. And naturally, because it’s what corporate legacy media types are prone to do, the debate moderators asked the candidates for vice president on live TV what they’re going to do about gun violence in America.
Because isn’t it politicians’ job to do something?
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said he wants to regulate guns, while U.S. Sen. JD Vance, of Ohio, said he wants to make schools more secure.
Walz would label the current environment as a gun crisis, and Vance would label it a mental health crisis. Neither is exactly correct, although Vance comes closer to what’s going on as anyone on the national stage.
Guns are used to commit acts of violence, but so are cars, trucks, knives, rocks, acid, and fists. The people who commit atrocities against their fellow human beings would do so even if guns were banned or strictly controlled.
The people who can’t pick up a firearm would just as soon throw a punch or dump acid on their victims. They don’t suddenly lack for mental health problems because of the lack of access to a gun.
Banning guns or locking down schools don’t make the problems magically go away.
A recognition that there’s a mental health crisis in America and elsewhere in the world is certainly a step in the right direction. But that doesn’t tell the whole story and doesn’t begin to change anything.
Finding the solution is found in asking “why” is there a mental health crisis, and that’s the topic that doesn’t get fully addressed.
Now, what I’d tell you from here, once again, comes from spending years listening to the lessons of various plants, who have a lot to say about the human condition.
What they teach is that we are in a spiritual crisis, an endemic disconnect with our higher selves. You may call it a detachment from God, source, nature, the universe, spirit, or whatever. The disconnect might stem from too much exposure to social media, discordant music, video games, and violence in movies and TV. There’s a very high probability that all of that is coupled with poor nutrition, lack of exercise, lack of exposure to sunlight and nature, and the breakdown of the family and community support systems.
As these societal forces take hold and becomes more profound, it lowers the vibrational frequency of a person, a home, a town, a city, a country, or the planet as a whole.
In the Shipibo tradition of the Amazon, the lowering of vibration and frequency becomes a vector for espiritos malos, evil spirits, to take hold. In the jungle, it is believed these entities attach themselves to a person, which fosters negativity within the corporal body. That may manifest as physical aliments such as cancer, heart conditions, fibromyalgia, to name just a few. But it can also take root in the mind, in ways subtle or profound. It can form as depression, anxiety, PTSD, or even inability to concentrate or focus (often labeled ADHD).
Hate, anger, sadness, fear, envy, and so on are the lower vibration and frequencies that attract nefarious entities and their negative energies and the resulting damage.
Whether you believe in evil spirits, or demonic influences, or any other kind of interference on the human condition not doesn’t really matter. But even scientists have, for years, studied the complex connection between vibration and frequency and find there is some kind of impact on the human psyche. What we allow into our senses from stimuli naturally or unnaturally occurring is part of the equation. The resulting thoughts and feelings create our energetic field, having an impact on ourselves and those around us.
Again I say, whether you believe that or dismiss it as new age babble or bunk not is not really important. What is important is the recognition that no politician or government agency is going to respond in any meaningful or effective way to the problem of random acts of violence in places that should be safe for everyone. It’s only in the hopes of securing peoples’ votes that they offer the promise of legislation or more funding. Bans on certain weapons. Restrictions on access to social media. Fortified school buildings. More resource officers in and near classrooms.
Some of the solutions politicians offer end up contributing to the problem. Public policies incentive broken households where parents spend increasingly less time with children in their formative years. When mental health problems arise, government agencies step in with programs offering an assortment of medications that numb emotions but don’t solve underlying trauma. Problems persist. New programs are created. Money is devalued causing parents to have to work harder, spend less time with their children, repeating the cycle, prompting voters to pray to politicians for more relief.
What the establishment political class and the media don’t want you to realize is that the solutions have always been with us all along. How we exist and move in the world rests on our shoulders. It always has.
What I’d give for a politician, just once, to give this answer to a question regarding gun violence: “The solutions to the problems lie in how much joy and love and compassion we show to others — even small day to day interactions. This has a profound impact on each person, which in turn benefits each household, which in turn raises the collective consciousness of a neighborhood, a community, a state, a country, and the planet. This leads to less violence and a safer world. To the degree that the government agencies I oversee get in the way of you being able to do that, that’s where I can help. Not by restricting access to things that might be weapons. Not by promising to fortify buildings. Not by hiring more resource officers to patrol schools. Because we know that’s only going to do so much. The real answers are found in the capacity of humans to care for one another, not in the promises of politicians like me.”