What Are We To Do?

Trauma, Transformation and Punk Rock (Part VIII)

Coniunctionis.12
Originally published in Mental Contagion
2000-2001

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“The escalating cycle of violence is typically welcomed by the harshest and most brutal elements on both sides,” (Noam Chomsky, "Interviewing Chomsky," Radio B92, Belgrade, from Z Magazine).

“Certain experiences resist language.  States of love, union, illness, terror, and loss can be so flooded with feeling and sensation that they overwhelm language's structuring and delimiting work...Such events hold both the possibility of expansion and the threat of destruction, as they move or push us beyond our usual containing mental and emotional patterns,” (Diane Buczek, “Language in Extremis” The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, Vol. 20, No. 2, 2001).

“A person is a person through other persons. You can't be a solitary human being. It's all linked. We have this communal sense, and because of this deep sense of community, the harmony of the group is the prime attribute. And so you realize that in this world-view, anything that undermines the harmony is to be avoided a much as possible. And anger, jealousy and revenge are particularly corrosive. So you try and do everything to enhance the humanity of the other, because you are bound up with each other,” (Desmond Tutu, “Interview with Bishop Desmond Tutu” by Zia Jaffrey, Boulder Daily Camera, 3/1/98).

“The specific experience I'm talking about has given me one certainty: consciousness precedes being and not the other way around as the Marxist's claim.  For this reason, the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else that in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness, and in human responsibility. Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our beings as humans,” (Vaclav Havel, in his speech to the U.S. Congress, 1990).