The roots of violence

If we know that the roots of violence are fertilized by childhood abuse, can we make a long-term commitment to reduce violence by focusing on our children rather than our criminals? What if we set a goal of reducing the cases of childhood abuse and neglect by 50 percent a year? What if we monitored statistics on childhood abuse as avidly as we track housing starts, inflation, or baseball scores? We would have to commit ourselves, seriously, to improving access to quality day care and after-school programs. We might need to educate and support parents so they could know how to nurture their children more effectively. We certainly would need to foster better relationships among peers and siblings.

Copyright 2008 The Dana Foundation All Rights Reserved danainfo@dana.org

Lifelong beneficial changes

Fifty years ago, Seymour Levine and Victor Denenberg showed that small alterations in their environment led to lasting changes in rats’ development, behavior, and response to stress. Something as seemingly inconsequential as five minutes of human handling during a rat’s infancy produced lifelong beneficial changes. We now understand through the research efforts of Michael Meany and Paul Plotsky that the effects of brief handling were highly beneficial and were due to increased maternal attention. Those pups whose mothers spontaneously lick and groom them the most (about one-third in a laboratory setting) display the same benefits as the rats with the human handling. By contrast, long isolation produces stress that has a deleterious effect on brain and behavior development.

Copyright 2008 The Dana Foundation All Rights Reserved danainfo@dana.org

Freedom

Rushdie: We will be able to triumph over terrorism not by waging war on it, but through a conscious, fearless way of life. If there is a choice between absolute safety and freedom, then freedom must always prevail.

"Terror Is Glamour", Spiegel interview with Salman Rushdie

Rushdie: In my opinion the word “spiritual” ought to be put on an index and banned from being used for say 50 years. The things that are put about as being “spiritual” -- it’s unbelievable. It even goes as far as a spiritual lap dog and a spiritual shampoo.

SPIEGEL: You yourself once wrote: “We need answers to the unanswerable. Is this life all there is? The soul needs explanations, not rational ones but ones for the heart.”

Rushdie: Of course there are things beyond material needs, we all sense that. For me the answers are simply not in the religious, heavenly realm. But I don’t dictate to anyone what to believe and what not to. And I don’t want that to be dictated to me either.

Interview conducted by Erich Follath, August 28, 2006,© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2006
All Rights Reserved, Reproduction only allowed with the permission of SPIEGELnet GmbH

“Spirituality” Cements Childhood Blindness

When Tibetan Buddhism is celebrated today as the peaceful and calming practice of meditation, people overlook the reality of a brutal religion with bizarre traditions that has used meditation as a tyrannizing tool to quash the power of feelings and free, critical thinking. Not only one hell as in Christianity, but sixteen hells doom the believer in Tibetan Buddhism with terrifying horror scenarios! It is a tradition of this controlling religion to force children into becoming monks, remove them from their families, cut them off from contact with women and brainwash them with religious studies that must be learned and recited by heart. In the context of this inhuman religion, the word “compassion,” no matter how often it is conjured, has no real meaning because compassion is not extended to these abused and neglected children. In order to become “spiritually enlightened,” they are betrayed of their human right to a healthy, dignified development, their freedom and their lives.

http://www.alice-miller.com © Barbara Rogers, September 2007