#WOBWednesday: What is the difference between being resilient and being desensitized in the face of mass shootings?

This past weekend there were two mass shootings within 24 hours. 31 people were killed and at least 51 people were wounded.

There have now been more mass shootings in the USA in 2019 than there have been days in the year.

This got me thinking about being resilient and how important that Way of BEING (WOB) is for surviving, dealing with, and thriving after a tragedy or any significant life challenge. It also got me wondering, “What is the difference between being resilient and being desensitized in the face of mass shootings?”

Simply put, being resilient means, “able to spring back or rebound in the face of adversity.” And it is a critical differentiator between those of us who take life’s setbacks in stride and those who struggle to recover.

In contrast, being desensitized, according to Merriam-Webster’s, means “insensitive or nonreactive to a sensitizing agent (a mass shooting, for example); emotionally insensitive or callous.”

Are we as Americans being resilient in our ability to bounce back and not be overwhelmed by the almost daily reports of mass shootings and the fact that nowhere—not school, not work, not shopping at Walmart, not enjoying a concert, movie, or festival—is safe from the possibility of being gunned down by an enraged individual or are we being desensitized?

To answer this question, I decided to examine what it means to be resilient by learning what resilient people do.

My exploration led me to an article published in the May 2002 Harvard Business Review. According to former HBR senior editor Diane L. Coutu in “How Resilience Works”, people who are being resilient do three things:

1. Face Down Reality: They look honestly at the reality of their situation, however difficult it may be to do so.
2. Search for Meaning: They resist wallowing in “Why me?” and instead identify ways their present suffering could create value in the future.
3. Continually Improvise: They get creative, make do with what they have, and find solutions.

Using these distinctions, I next looked at how we the people of the United States respond when there is a mass shooting.

Do we face down reality?

Yes, I think to a large extent we do. After all, you can read countless articles and watch seemingly endless news reports on how many people were killed, how many people were wounded, and what happened in the shooter’s life leading up to him (and with very few exceptions shooters are "him") pulling the trigger. We talk about how many incidents have happened and how this does not happen with the same regularity in any other country on earth. That is facing reality.

Do we search for meaning?

I am not sure we do.

I see us looking for patterns and then making assumptions, inferences, and decisions based on those patterns, but are we making meaning?

In her article, Ms. Coutu observes that meaning is often linked to our values, so that those individuals and organizations with the strongest values are most likely to display this aspect of resilience.

Perhaps this insight points to why the Unites States seems unable to do anything to reduce or eliminate mass shootings. We the people do not share a common set of values from which to make meaning and then find solutions.

Some activists and lawmakers value the right to bear arms, and they make these mass shooting mean we need more guns in the hands of more people who are ready and willing to use them.

Other activists and lawmakers value the right to live and go to school and shop or go to the movies without the fear of being gunned down by an angry almost certainly white, 20- to 30-something man on a rampage. These people think the shootings mean we should limit access to certain types of fire arms, enforce waiting periods, and implement other forms of gun control.

Because we are not making the same meaning based on the same values, we don’t collectively take action to stop or at least radically reduce the number of mass shootings, which everyone seems to agree are a problem that needs to be solved.

Last, do we continually improvise and make do with what we have?

In “How Resilience Works”, I learned the word bricoleur, which means “bouncing back” and the ability to do this Claude Levi-Strauss called bricolage. According to Ms Coutu, “Bricolage in the modern sense can be defined as a kind of inventiveness, an ability to improvise a solution to a problem without proper or obvious tools or materials.”

It is in this aspect of doing the work of being resilient that I think we the people of the United States fall down.

To date, we have not improvised a solution to the problem of mass shootings.

Mostly, we report on the criminals and casualties, cry out about what these heinous acts mean about America, and then throw our hands up in frustration and wait for the next mass shooting to occur.

This weekend the wait was not long.

To me, our collective response seems more like we are being desensitized and resigned than resilient.

Where are the bricoleurs?

Who are the bricoleurs?

How can we improvise a solution and find our way back to a time when mass shootings were shocking and not something to simply shrug at?

And what does our reaction here show us about our resilience in other aspects of our lives both individually and collectively? We seem to have a similar response to instances of racism and sexism as well as climate change and a laundry list of other issues of the day.

Reflecting on these questions has lead me to join Women Against Gun Violence and to volunteer my time and expertise help deliver leadership training offered through my local LGBTQ political association.

What will you do to be resilient or are you just going to be desensitized and resigned? The choice is yours.