Hi all,

Morning meditation, 6/7/22:

"Resting. Motion. Inertia. Trajectory. Trajectory of bullets aimed at children’s faces. How to change. How to change. This killing machine of America, callous and cruel, numbed, uncaring, careless, reveling in unrestrained power. Bodies, casually dropped on the streets, casual-ties of causality. Historical rampages played out on new victims, every day new victims. New tears. From Newtown to Buffalo, Kings and Kennedys, X’s and Arbery’s, veins and arteries, Buffalo to Uvalde, buffalo of plains to unvalued vales of youth, New York City Subways to New Orleans Avenues, American Indians to George Floyd, murdered two years ago. This is year three, After Floyd. We must change the trajectory of time. Our time is now. We must let go of our hateful past. Know it, and let go. Mourn, and move towards love, and life. We must do what has to be done. Affirm our humanity and human dignity, in the face of all that erodes, elides, and erases, our tender human faces. The eyes and faces of our children are upon us, pleading, hoping. May we not fail them, again, as we were failed. We were failed, but we are good enough to make a change. Change the trajectory of American time, stuck too often - always? -on cruel o’clock. Clockwork. Glocks. Locked-up. Struggling to be free. We must change, grow. Unlock the trajectory of free.

Will America be remembered as a hate crime?

Change the trajectory of time."

I published a mini-book on gun psychology and gun identity in March, 2018, a month after Parkland. Scroll to the bottom of this email to find quotes from the book, which you can get for just 99 cents. I link to 80 research articles and news analyses. I think it's worth your time. If you click the link, you can get to the 15 minute interview I did with Don Lacy of KPOO on May 31, 2022, as well as an hourlong podcast from 2019 with Mimi Chan of CultureChat. Take a listen on your walk or way. All of that is free, but I thank you for your time and conscience.

The vast majority of all Americans, gun-owners and non-gun-owners, Democrats, Republicans and Independents favor (by Quinnipiac 2021 polling):

1. Universal Background Checks (some 90%)
2. Red Flag laws (74%)
3. A ban on assault rifles (which I recognize are supposedly difficult to define) 54%

My 2018 book on gun psychology is available as a 99 cent ebook or $6.95 for a physical copy. I would also recommend you read historian Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz's Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, also published in 2018, which goes into more detail about the origins of the 2A in the land-grabbing, genocidal settler-colonialist origins of the 2A, which also led to armed slave patrols to guard against slave rebellions and catch runaway slaves. Modern day police departments had their origins in slave patrols. I don't think it's possible to really get to a safer country without looking at the historical roots of violence, which lead to the current gun-craze about 'defending property rights', a 'belief in a dangerous world' (BDW) - e.g. the demographic change embodied by BIPOC people and immigrants - and the paranoid idea that the government is going to overrun all freedoms if gun rights are regulated. The settler-colonialist myth of the rugged individualist or faction is still a toxin to the interdependent reality we live in.

And to catch you up on my writing of the last 6 weeks:

Laid Bare and Ripening: A Report from American Psychiatric Association Meeting | Psychology Today, June 6, 2022 

“The APA’s thirteen-member 2021-2022 Presidential Task Force on Social Determinants of Mental Health, a direct outgrowth of the push for racial justice that was amplified after Floyd’s murder, made its report. The organization gamely took up the challenge of turning its giant ship in the wake of enormous cultural demands, brought to the table by Black, BIPOC, and other psychiatrists representing marginalized communities...(In this country) Our identities have become politicized, instead of being offered safety, understanding, and dignity, all vital to our well-being."

And over at East Wind:

MOSF 17.6: Orna Guralnick, Showtime’s “Couples Therapy”, and the White Savior Complex May 4, 2022

I followed a rabbit-hole of therapists in the media, as reported in my last newsletter, and published this essay about Showtime's Couples Therapy (season 1) - which I felt embodied a hierarchical and racialized power dynamic that made me deeply uncomfortable. I also took issue with psychoanalysis, which even here placed the therapist at a distance from her own vulnerability and the vulnerability in the room. Disempowerment, disconnection and marginalization are primary causative factors in mental and social illness. Orna Guralnick highlights how psychoanalysis can worsen the problem. Anyway, my trademark humor and insights have gotten this essay some attention.

"I cannot recall an essay where I have had more hoots, whoops, laughs and head nodding," wrote one reader.

MOSF 17.7: CAAMFest40 Shorts – Boundless Questions for Women’s Rights, Mental Health, and our Journeys in Time May 9, 2022

Meaning, relationship and wellness have dominated my concerns as I’ve previewed shorts programs for CAAMFest40, which are all available on-demand May 12-20th, worldwide without geoblocking. Here, I talk first-and-foremost about women’s rights anticipating the release of the Dobb’s opinion.

MOSF 17.8: From Bad Axe to Chinatown to Hong Kong, Let Freedom Ring! May 16, 2022

Three films at CAAMFest this weekend brought home the central conflict of our times: social dominance orientation vs. what I call relational-cultural-contextual orientation. The latter is central to Asian and Asian American psychology, as well as other non-individualistic Black and Brown societies, feminine consciousness, and on a deeper level, our common humanity and compassion itself. To my knowledge, this way of viewing our times has not been discussed in this way, particularly in the Asian American community, and is potentially a paradigm shift that could fuel growth and change on our journeys of identity, belonging, wellness and meaning. In the end, we do have to fight for and affirm our human dignity, as well as affirm the human dignity of others.

Thanks for reading and staying with me on the journey!

Warmly,

Ravi

Quotes from Guns Are Not Our God: The NRA is Not Our Church (2018)

“(Shapiro et al) found that self-reported gun owners rated 1.5 standard deviations higher on four factors: aggressive response to shame, comfort with aggression, excitement and power/safety. These are all favorable attitudes towards violence; without them, one is unlikely to want to own a gun. They note that “the desire to own a gun does not seem to occur as a discrete, separate attitude but instead seems largely a function of general attitudes concerning interpersonal conflict and aggression.”

“We need more research, clearly, but there is at least a suggestion that owning and using guns changes one’s personality. What you do, what you own, and whom you know changes you. Gun owners may be changing in all of these ways.”

“Subjects who were primed with images of Blacks from the Implicit Association Test were more opposed to gun control than a control group.68” O’Brien et al studied a large sample in the American National Election Study.69 They found that symbolic racism (implicit bias and racial resentment) was related to having a gun in the home and opposition to gun control policies. This relationship was maintained even controlling for “conservative ideologies, political affiliation, opposition to government control, and being from a southern state, which are otherwise strong predictors of gun ownership and opposition to gun reform.” These authors note that it’s possible that gun ownership leads to more racist attitudes, rising alongside other indicators of aggression, like salivary cortisol. Either way, it’s not a good look on you, America.”

“Individualistic White male identity has historically been exemplified by gun ownership, but now LaPierre would have us believe that it is all individual freedom that’s at stake. It’s not culturally acceptable to talk directly to White male identity (although this has changed during Trump’s tenure) – but apparently a gun can be used as a dog whistle. Who knew? (If guns could be reclassified as dog whistles, perhaps they would no longer be protected under the Second Amendment….hmmm. But then we’d have to agree racism is not in our national DNA anymore. Still working on that.)”

“We don’t need teachers armed with guns. We need citizens armed with questions. We don’t need an NRA encouraging gun sales by arming us with fear of our fellow man. We need legislators armed with concern for the public good, and policies to turn concern into action. We don’t need narcissism to rule us. We need benevolence, trust, humility and common humanity. We don’t need the LaPierre’s and Trump’s fixing blame on others. We need people of all races, ethnicities and regions taking responsibility for creating a safer nation. We don’t need more “good guys with guns.” We need fewer guns. We need to disarm our gun-crazed American identity.”

     “The steel of a gun is the coldest thing in the world. Even when silent it shouts a threat. But it has never been silent, never in the history of the United States.
     But there are other voices. There are the screams of millions dead. More have died by gunshot than in all our country’s wars combined. Are these millions louder than the gun?
     Only if we join their cry. We must speak for the dead. We must speak for the living. We must speak, or be silenced by death itself, seeping out of the barrels of our guns, 350 million and counting.”

Ravi Chandra, M.D.
March 1, 2018
San Francisco, California”