Presence of mind: Piercing the myth of redemptive violence

By Weekly Archive On Sep 4, 2007

By
Robert C. Koehler Read Spanish Version

"I
knew the situation was serious. I was shaking all over. But I was
amazed by the complexity of my mind — the most clear part was just
the speed and agility of my mind. I immediately began talking to him
in a calm voice and engaged in eye contact. But he was not in his
eyes. He was in his own world — pointing a gun at me."

Is
this a good time to address the big lie? You know, the lie about our
stark, raving helplessness in the face of armed danger and
malevolence? Fortress Gun Nut has the whole country hostage to the
big lie that a safe America is an armed America, and yet as our
stockpile of weaponry, domestic and otherwise, increases, so does our
fearfulness, and so does the danger.

And
the heroes are often indistinguishable from the perps. We’re all
heroes in our own minds. We all watch the movies and imbibe the whack
‘n’ win culture. We all learn that real justice must be delivered at
the point of a sword that’s terrible and swift.

Christian
theologian Walter Wink calls it the myth of redemptive violence, this
self-evident conviction — as old as Mesopotamia, as current as the
Saturday morning cartoons — that violence is effective and free of
unwanted consequences. Six millennia of evidence to the contrary
hasn’t changed anything because myth is impervious to empirical data.
It’s born anew with every war, every special-effects extravaganza
from Hollywood, every loner’s sad plot for revenge. And so many
people profit from it.

I
think our only hope is to pierce the myth — this smug,
self-satisfied myth that keeps luring us into foolish decisions.
Maybe it will never go away; the appeal of clean and easy vengeance
and the ultimate end run around obstacles is perennially appealing.
But if we challenge the myth with an even more appealing truth —
that we have extraordinary inner resources we can tap in a crisis —
perhaps we can push the myth out of cultural dominance and,
crucially, disarm it.

The
place to start is where we’re the most desperate. How do we defend
ourselves? Whether or not you’re armed, you need presence of mind,
and if you have that you may not need anything else.

"I
remember clearly continuing to talk to him and keeping eye contact,"
my friend Shelly, who is quoted above, told me. One night some years
ago, shortly after she had left her husband, he showed up at her
house and pulled a gun on her. Their 2-year-old son Seth was asleep
in the next room.

Shelly’s
is a story of courage and quick thinking, which are the basic tools
of self-defense. As soon as her vacant-eyed ex pulled out his
handgun, her mind went into high gear, evaluating possible actions.
She realized instantly that trying to run or grabbing for the phone
would lead to disaster. She simply maintained eye contact.

"I
had a very calm tone of voice. It wasn’t fearful," she said. "It
was very clear there was a narrow window here. That’s where it felt
almost like something else taking over me. I was aware I was shaking.
But I was fully present to the situation, totally alert.

"At
some point I said, if you shoot me you’ll wake up Seth. Then what
will happen? That’s when he came back. I saw him come back into his
eyes. He started swinging his gun around."

She
continued talking with hyper-calmness, as though addressing a child,
reminding him: "You don’t want to wake up Seth." Finally
she said, "’Well, I have to go to work tomorrow.’ I turned
around and walked into the bathroom and started brushing my teeth."

He
put his gun away. The crisis was over. He eventually left and got on
with his life.

"Most
assailants work from a definite set of expectations about how the
victim will respond, and they need the victim to act like a victim,"
writes Wink in "The Powers That Be." And the best way not
to "act like a victim" is to respond to a threat from
outside the expectations of the attacker — not with flailing fear or
paralyzed surrender but, sheerly, with presence of mind. In such a
state, your self-defense options multiply.

My
friend Leigh’s mother once confronted every woman’s worst nightmare.
"She woke up and heard the window slide open and someone prying
open the screen," he told me. "She looked up and saw a man
climbing in through the window. He announced he’d been looking
forward to this for a long time and described what he intended to do
to her.

"Mom
— I hate to say it — wore black plastic horn-rim glasses, like the
women in Far Side cartoons," Leigh went on. "She reached
under her nightstand, grabbed her glasses, let one arm fall down and
held it out as if it were a handgun. She yelled at the guy to get
back or she’d fire. And he left."

I
relay these stories in the hopes of getting more. The point is not
that horn-rimmed glasses are a reliable defense against rape but that
people who maintain their presence of mind under dire threat will
think of something
to do. I’d like to start a clearinghouse of such testimony. Please
e-mail me if you have yourself or know someone who has defused a
threat with unarmed presence of mind. Perhaps the sum total of a
thousand or a million unique stories is a myth-busting truth that
could transform a culture.

Robert
Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at
Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. You can
respond to this column at bkoehler@tribune.com or visit his Web site
at commonwonders.com.