Ramos, Hamilton, and Toxic Shame
Revealing the Monster Within
"That which we despise
may never be healed
That which we deny
will always escape
That against which
we protest
will always return
until we are ready to see
that the worst neighbour
lives within our own home"
~Monster Most FearedDear Reader;
Two days before the tragedy at Robb Elementary School, a mob of youth overtook a local park in the east end of Toronto, a beach where not so long ago we used to take our young children to sit on picnic blankets and watch city-run fireworks sparkling over the water.
This year, the night before the scheduled public display, a heavy energy permeated our neighbourhood, combustable and angry. Large numbers of people, following a TikTok invitation, had flocked to the park intent upon creating a party of their own.
My son and I drove along Queen Street East in the early evening and passed an SUV flipped up on its side on the sidewalk, the windows smashed to gain access. Yellow tape everywhere. This was only the beginning.
By the end of the night the crowd in the park had created chaos, throwing and aiming fireworks everywhere. There were robberies, stabbings, shootings, two more car accidents including a truck driving into a house, and many incidents of individuals aiming lit fireworks at passersby, dogs, horses and police. Fourteen people were arrested. Seven police officers were taken to hospital. One of them had been hit in the face.
We stayed inside, listening to the constant sirens, a painful serenade. TikTok celebrated. “Firework” becomes “work”.
How Canada has changed.
And then, only 48 hours later, a shooter in Texas would aim guns, not fireworks, at children in a classroom.
We need to understand why.
Dunblane.
On March 13, 1996, Thomas Hamilton, aged 43, entered the Dunblane Primary School near Stirling, Scotland where he murdered sixteen children and one teacher (Gwen Mayor), injured fifteen others and then killed himself. It remains the deadliest mass shooting in British history.
“Public debate about the killings centred on gun control laws, including public petitions for a ban on private ownership of handguns and an official inquiry, which produced the 1996 Cullen Report. In response to this debate, two new Firearms Acts were passed which outlawed the private ownership of most handguns within the United Kingdom.” ~ Wikipedia
Significantly, there have been no school shootings since.
Today, in the aftermath of the Texas tragedy, it seems profoundly overdue to look at all aspects of the phenomenon; guns, and the cultural, societal and spiritual roots of what drives an individual to commit such acts.
Ramos.
Little is known about 18 year old Salvador Ramos, the shooter in Texas. He had no father in his life and it has been said that he was bullied for a lifelong speech impediment, his poverty and his clothes. To some he simply was the bully.
It was reported that Salvador’s recent behaviour was disturbed and he had begun cutting himself. He had been kicked out of his mother’s house and dropped out of school. He was angry and aggressive toward his mother, grandmother, sister and an ex-girlfriend. He purchased his weapons on his eighteenth birthday.
He was, after all, now a man.
Every one of these markers points to an adolescent completely disconnected from healthy masculinity. We do not know him as a sexual offender, but blinding hate toward women and children was written clearly within his actions. If we understand that our purest desires are rooted in a remembering of connection with Creator, and that respect for the fellow children of the Great Mother is learned in her arms, then we can be sure Ramos knew little of these comforts.
If Salvador Ramos had understood that joy and pain are both essential to the human experience, and that great meaning may be found in their alchemical transformation, there are many different choices he could have made. He could have sought help, but that would have required the capacity to be vulnerable. He could have turned to an older man for guidance, but there were none. He could have chosen to write, to paint, to make music about his pain in order to heal it, but he was surrounded by the glorification of weapons and assault, rather than art. He was born into a culture where guns represent such an embedded part of the masculine identity, they seem to provide the only answer to a young man’s unconscious deconstruction.
Hamilton.
"Thomas Watt Hamilton was born on 10 May 1952 in Glasgow. As the head of several youth clubs, Hamilton had been subject to several complaints to police regarding inappropriate behaviour towards young boys, including claims of his having taken photographs of semi-naked boys without parental consent.
He had briefly been a Scout leader – initially, in July 1973, he was appointed assistant leader with the 4th/6th Stirling of the Scout Association. Later that year, he was seconded as leader to the 24th Stirlingshire troop, which was being revived. Several complaints were made about Hamilton's leadership, including Scouts being forced to sleep in close proximity with him inside his van during hill-walking expeditions. Within months, on 13 May 1974, Hamilton's Scout Warrant was withdrawn, with the County Commissioner stating that he was "suspicious of his moral intentions towards boys". He was blacklisted by the Association and thwarted in a later attempt he made to become a Scout leader in Clackmannanshire.
Hamilton claimed in letters that local rumours regarding his behaviour towards young boys had led to the failure of his business in 1993, and that, in the last months of his life, he had complained that his attempts to organize a boys' club were subjected to persecution by local police and the scout movement. Among those he complained to were Queen Elizabeth II and his local Member of Parliament (MP), Michael Forsyth (Conservative). In the 1980s, another MP, George Robertson (Labour), who lived in Dunblane, had complained to Forsyth about Hamilton's local boys' club, which his son had attended. On the day following the massacre, Robertson spoke of having previously argued with Hamilton "in my own home".
On 19 March 1996, six days after the massacre, Hamilton's body was cremated. According to a police spokesman, this service was conducted "far away from Dunblane".
“The children in their beauty have become their own danger both as they are vulnerable to the theft of the beauty that is rightly theirs and as they are themselves crushed and demonized in their own expressions of beauty made dangerous precisely because they remind others of the wound.." ~ Monster Most Feared
It’s a Shame.
Pedophilia is a vast and hugely triggering subject, precisely because of the shame it engenders. Once we gather all the toxic religious, cultural and personal associations we may hold regarding sexual expression, and then juxtapose them with the rare innocence of children, we create a perfect storm of possibilities for unconscious projection and unbearable shame.
The shame we feel about our own unspoken and dark sexual desires and histories. The shame we righteously give to perpetrators who are revealed. The shame we feel when we remember our own lost innocence, for every adult knows such a loss. The core shame we hold as one who may feel unworthy of love, respect, or acceptance in our family and community.
Most often we would rather create a monster, than look within the monstrous worlds we create.
When we witness an intersection of horrors such as those which took place at Robb Elementary and Dunblane Primary, the quicksands of despair and rage easily call us. For those whose children were murdered, there is no loss greater because there is no love larger, yet for even these souls, the value of turning toward meaning is so great.
Let us consider.
1) Shame is the most toxic emotion one can feel, and it drives people to amoral, destructive and self-destructive behaviours.
2) Every perpetrator was once a victim. If we are willing to look at this on a soul level we can understand this plays out over lifetimes.
3) Sexual wounding always spills out into other arenas of life, as the drive for the connection is so powerful.
4) Those carrying intense psychic loads of toxic shame will self harm, and also harm others who are reflections of the self-loathing they feel.
5) The only way to break the cycle is to look to the darkest corners of the consciousness and heal what has been hidden for so long.
6) The polarity to sexual wounding is blissful connection to divine joy. Every human being alive is programmed to seek this, even through the lens of our broken hearts and souls.
7) Guns have no purpose other than to kill and maim, and as such, have no place as private possessions in a peaceful culture, however a desperate individual will find another way to cause harm, if their suffering is not witnessed, acknowledged and addressed.
8) A penal system rooted in punishment and vengeance will never provide long term solutions to these complex issues.
9) The first step is to bring the most difficult subjects of conversation out into public discourse without righteousness, judgement or shaming.
10) A world without blame is a world without shame. It is time to recognize the interconnectedness of all beings, even those who appear the darkest in our eyes, Even the darkness within our own hearts.
I deeply believe and hope that we are ready as a species to embrace new ways of dealing with our pain. Every soul who has been wounded deserves to be heard and held, until rage and vengeance melt. What we want, truly want, is for meaning to be found in our suffering, as this alone releases our desire to make others suffer in turn. It doesn’t matter where we begin, just that we do begin.
Such a choice in itself, slows the karmic wheel to a halt. Our willing hearts are always more powerful than our fear.
“Cleanse shame
from one heart
and a thousand children
will follow in its radiant wake
This collective healing will embrace us
as swiftly
as we dare to cease
our search for other monsters
to blame
What hides in plain sight
is how afraid
we have all been
to tell the truth
to ourselves..”
~ Monster Most Feared
much love,
Adi
BROKEN KIDS, NOT GUNS
https://ttfuture.org/blog/michael/broken-kids-not-guns
"On Tuesday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released a report titled “Active Shooter Incidents in the United States in 2021,” which logged sixty-one mass shootings last year.
The violence we see all around us, personal and global, is a failure of development. Period. The seed is not the cause, or to be blamed for being planted in poor soil, not being watered, isolated, shoved in a dark closet, screamed at, compared, humiliated, ignored, beaten, or illuminated by a screen instead of nature’s sunlight. Then, when these stunted plants grow sharp tangled thorns, we blame them for moral failure, punish them, chastise, incarcerate, and kill them, self-righteously.
To blame guns, TV, video games, Twinkies, the bully next door, bad genes, and all the rest, for the pervasive violence, self-mutilation, self-medication, suicide, and similar unbelievable acts on others, is simply a misguided defense, empowering our justifications to continue to fail at our most basic challenge and responsibility; modeling what it means to be a whole, connected, available, awake, sensitive, empathically-entangled human beings. After all, that is what every child needs and is desperately screaming about, real and inspiring models.
We are responsible for the society we co-create by our willing acceptance and participation, not guns or any other tool. We are responsible for the behaviors we model and allow at home. We are responsible for everything that happens at school, the form, structure, comparisons, curriculum, rewards, and punishments. We are responsible for everything our children experience with screen technologies. All the barbed wire around our schools, police, and metal detectors, won’t fix a thing. Rather, more of the same will only intensify the loneliness, hopelessness, despair, and inner rage our broken children feel."
"And in fact, more damage occurs with the sensory deprivation of pleasure than the actual experiencing physical painful trauma, which can be handled quite well in individuals who were brought up with a great deal of physical affectional bonding and pleasure which carries with it emotional trust and security. We really have to look at the trauma of sensory deprivation of physical pleasure and that translates into the separation experiences, the isolation experiences of the infant from the mother. [Basic trust.] That’s the beginning."
"Failed nurturing, broken bonds, abuse, and betrayals of intimacy of young boys, who are far more vulnerable biologically and therefore psychologically than females. These are the predator males that grow up drawn to positions of power; heads of corporations, finance, the military, police, and politicians. What goes around, comes around.
What is not apparent to most is that early sensory deprivation of affection, abuse, and neglect lead to play deprivation in children and adults. Play being nature’s design for optimum growth and development. No basic trust, no play, no real development, rather, defensive conditioning."
"Our children become what we are, not what we tell them to be. The greatest gift of being a parent is the realization that the love we experience for our children is the most powerful wake-up call to be the best human being we can be because our kids are watching, every moment, from the inside out. Holding on to our kids implies modeling our very best, and simultaneously this holding and modeling creates the strongest and most resilient shield to protect our children from the predators who are less fortunate.
As every pregnant mother knows, eating and breathing for two changes the care and attention she gives to every bite and every breath. Mindfulness on steroids. For the connected parent, that mindfulness never stops. Realizing how we act, the way we speak, the care, attention, presence, and empathy we model every day is what our children are becoming, in their own way, of course, becomes the greatest incentive to uplift ourselves, and therefore the world. Something cell phones, surveillance cameras, police, and metal detectors can never do."