DUCKPOND

On Unleased at ABC Online, writer Bob Ellis considers the increasing number of male suicides in Australia:

Two of the greatest plays, Hamlet and Death of a Salesman, are about thoughts of suicide, and one of the greatest films, It’s A Wonderful Life, and one of the finer songs, Waltzing Matilda.

. . . One Australian dairy farmer suicides every four days, Bob Katter revealed in anguish in parliament last month, some of them friends of his. Each interest rate rise makes such men more desperate. Even selling the farm won’t get them out of it; the drought and the ARB have seen to that. A gun in the mouth, a pulled trigger, seems a better alternative. This may well be so.

Michael Nagler in his book, available on line with large chunks missing (which makes for disconcerting reading), The Search for a Nonviolent Future, says he has learned to see actions and events in there larger context. For example, he recounts how he was walking across the Berkeley Campus when he observed students handing out leaflets and holding hand-written signs that said: “Anti-Asian Hate Crimes on the Increase”. He writes:

Like letting myself down a chain into murky waters, hand over hand, I would have to cut down my thinking from:

to Asian hate crimes,

to hate crimes,

to hate.

. . . Once we have gotten down to the emotional cause, we can start to see a pragmatic measure that we will be able to apply, mutatis mutandis, to every form of violence: since the underlying cause of violence is hate, we could fix the problem if we could turn the problem into something else.

I personal experience with suicide is limited, although I do have some experience of people who were around me, not close to me, but for whom I feel guilt for not having done more, and because of my own insecurities turned away from them. There was a person in a boarding house, so I suppose we were strangers, but we had all met. Then there is the sad case of my sister in law’s son, but I did not know him, or his circumstances. Of course, I recognize the pressure of economic circumstances, and of life generally lived as an individuated experience, but I cannot help thinking that suicide is connected with violence, that of the suicide as much as those around him – since it is more often a he than a she.

I did make a comment at the ABC, in a burst of recklessness shown in the writing:

Male farmers in India are also committing suicide in record numbers. There it seems to have something to do with the increased costs of farm production, due in significant part to the new wonder seeds produced by the chemical companies, the precariousness of distant markets, and the need to assume unmanageable levels of debt. A favorite method is to drink fertilizer.

Other than the common capitalist system thatl distributes winners and losers, in which there always must be less of the former, who in turn desire, if not need, more of the fruits of their labors, there is the cultural habit, learned early, more by males than females, to turn away.Females share their burdens, since an inviolate institution of motherhood cannot be carried by one person despite the cultural Hobbesian male dream of ever-winning competitive, materialistic individualism.

Looking for references to David Korten’s book, The Great Turning, I came across the following poem, which expresses something of the cultural bias that some of us have:

You’ve asked me to tell you of The Great Turning, of how we saved the world from disaster.
The answer is both simple and complex.
We turned.

For hundreds of years we had turned away as life on earth grew more precarious.
We turned away from the homeless men on the streets, the stench from the river, the children orphaned in Iraq, the mothers dying of AIDS in Africa.

We turned away because that is what we had been taught.
To turn away, from our pain, from the hurt in another’s eyes, from the drunken father or the friend betrayed.

Always we were told, in actions louder than words, to turn away, turn away. And so we became a lonely people caught up in a world moving too quickly, too mindlessly towards its own demise.

Until it seemed as if there was no safe place to turn. No place, inside or out, that did not remind us of fear or terror, despair and loss, anger and grief.

Yet on one of those days someone did turn.

Turned to face the pain. Turned to face the stranger. Turned to look at the smoldering world and the hatred seething in too many eyes. Turned to face himself, herself.

And then another turned. And another. And another. And as they wept, they took each other’s hands.

Until whole groups of people were turning. Young and old, gay and straight. People of all colors, all nations, all religions. Turning not only to the pain and hurt hut to beauty, gratitude and love, Turning to one another with forgiveness and a longing for peace in their hearts…

— Christine Fry (October 19, 2004)

I don’t know who Christine Fry is, except she wrote the poem. Her poem is called “The Great Turning”. Maybe the poet is talking about the violence towards others that cut the moorings. I believe we can start by not be violent in thought, word and deed to ourselves and to all others. And then to be in a space to take the next steps.

Extreme economic distress may not be the proximate cause, but the occasion for self harm and suicide?How then do the common treads among Australian and Indian farmers be accounted for, since we suppose the prevailing culture, the seedbed for thoughts that shape actions, is apparently so different? I suspect that technology, expressed in the economic system, incorporates cultural assumptions?

After thought:

We might apply economic logic to this question of farmer suicides in Australia or India. Surely the optimal thing to do is not to go further into debt, even if it is incremental like the frog in boiling water, but to sell the asset, maximize the return and do something else? In Australia, depending on marketable skills and age, you become part of the marginal employed and in India part of the landless millions, in the process losing all the connections that have been built over a lifetime, even generations that give meaning and purpose. So, if we are serious, about this question of suicide, as I think that we should be, we got to be able to create meaningful options for people.

In doing that I am not supposing that people are helpless, while recognizing that other people, and by implication culture, like the natural environment, sustain life. If, intentionally or otherwise, and sometimes paradoxically and inadvertently for example education and employment, we systematically diminish people, we need to address those matters. The conventional answer that address this issue is in terms of empowerment. My sense is that respect and a sense of open possibility are important, and I am presuming, which is easy for me to say, that human beings are more important than economic returns, or even social structures of dominance, power and privilege.