Urgency part 4
“Better learn balance. Balance is key. Balance good, karate good. Everything good. Balance bad, better pack up, go home. Understand?” — Mr. Miyagi
As I write this my city has experienced several shootings involving school age youth and nationally there is a lot of coverage about shooting in Michigan and the parents of the shooter being charged as well. The American Public Health Association (APHA) declared gun violence as a public health crisis. None of this is new news. You can look at the Gun Violence Archive to see charts and maps of gun violence over the past 8 years. All of this is an ongoing urgent and important topic and yet we have seen a profound lack of action around doing things to prevent these tragedies.
We will see people talk about gun control as one of the first things that we should do. However, while that may help, it does not address why someone is going towards a gun in the first place. Like the patterns of the white supremacy characteristic of urgency, we get a narrow run of conversations about the issue and a push around decisions that rely on shame, guilt, and self-righteousness. This isn’t to say gun control laws and push around limiting access is the wrong thing to do. This is to say that we need to broaden the conversation and ensure we look at the antidote to urgency that can support us to solutions that will stick. In particular I’m thinking about these antidotes,
- realistic workplans based on the lived experience of the people and organization involved;
- leadership who understands that everything takes longer than anyone expects;
- a commitment to equity, including a commitment to discuss and plan for what it means to embed equity practices into the workplan;
- an understanding that rushing decisions takes more time in the long run because inevitably people who didn’t get a chance to voice their thoughts and feelings will at best resent and at worst undermine a decision where they were left unheard;
Imagine what it would be like to have an issues like gun violence be address at every level of the socio ecological model. We could address attitudes at the individual level. We could honor how families and friends interacted around the topic. We could examine how social institutions reinforce gun violence. We could talk about how our community and organizations can come together to address the issue. We could pass laws and regulations that address all of what we discovered through the other examinations of the issues at each of the layers. We may be able to fully address the issue beyond thinking that just addressing one level of the model is a cure to the entire system.
