Looking at the news online Wednesday night, I had that sinking feeling again: It’s all so hopeless. You know the feeling, I bet — we all get clobbered again and again by bad news, but this one story, well, it seemed about as bad as it gets: A sheriff in L.A. was caught on video on a bus, punching a woman with special needs in the face. (You can see the video here if you wish, but I assure you, you’ll wish you could un-see it.)
I shared the story with online friends, and I wasn’t the only one; the story went viral quickly. But so many of the reactions, while suitably outraged, were distressingly resigned, along the lines of: What else would you expect? The system needs a complete overhaul, and that’s not gonna happen. It’s hopeless.
Viral or not, that story was nothing compared to the one that took hold of the media on Thursday night. Here’s how NATO described it, in part:
“A video recently posted on a public Web site appears to show U.S. military personnel committing an inappropriate act with enemy corpses.”
The act in question? Urinating on them. And laughing and joking about it. (This is fact may amount to an actual war crime.)
So: how are any of us to feel hopeful when stories like these happen, happen, and just keep happening? When people in what we think of as “the services,” people with authority and power, can so willingly act with disregard to the humanity of the rest of us, isn’t the idea of a truly better life, of a more mindful society, a lost cause? A pipe dream?
You wouldn’t be blamed for thinking so. But the thing is that there is hope, and that’s something to celebrate. That’s because lots of other people — many of them with far more “ultimate” authority and power than the loose cannons we hear about in stories like these — are serving with a truly inspired idea of what service is.
They may be armed and facing conflict — whether in Afghanistan or in our cities’ streets — but the idea of honor and duty and serving others is as essential to them as having a well-oiled weapon. For these folks, the notion of warriorship is considered a highly dignified human ideal, a version of enlightenment. Service, to them, is about putting forward the best of human caring and compassion, even in the midst of very challenging circumstances.
Mindfulness can be key to their success, as it is in the MMFT program. What’s MMFT? Well, it stands for “Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training.” There may be no better way to get to understand MMFT than to watch Dr. Elizabeth Stanley’s presentation about it from our “Creating a Mindful Society” conference this past fall in New York. (Click here to register to watch her talk, “Bringing Mindfulness to the Military to Enhance Performance and Build Resilience” online for free.) But in a nutshell, MMFT is designed to, as its website says, “help individuals and organizations maintain peak functioning despite the stress and uncertainty of challenging operational environments.”
Does it work? The testimonials from various members of the Marine, Army, and Navy services that appear on the MMFT website sure seem to say so. And then there’s the research.
These warriors, it appears, are better able to regulate their physical, emotional, and psychological reactions than those who haven’t had such training. That means greater resilience and less impulse- or fear-driven decision making, which can result in less destruction and suffering both in the field and for the service members themselves.
Just think of the implications of MMFT gaining wider acceptance in the military, and among police and other first responders.
And those implications go way beyond such realms: once our mindful warriors have served and re-enter the civilian world, by the tens of thousands each year, they’ll bring mindfulness and its benefits to their lives and work, as mindful dads and moms, mindful teachers, mindful doctors and nurses, mindful cops… maybe even mindful L.A. sheriffs.
That sounds more like a complete overhaul than a pipe dream, doesn’t it?
And if you’re here now, reading this, you’re already a part of it.
Do you really feel hopeless?
