Threat Assessment
A young man decides to take an assault weapon into a scene of urban rioting and lives are lost. A father and son on vigilante patrol go looking for trouble, and get far more than they expected. A small army of protesters expresses their dissatisfaction over an election, overwhelming the Capitol while a national audience looks on in disbelief. Holiday shoppers forego their annual trip downtown upon hearing that another smash and grab mob has pillaged some high-end stores. And each day we digest this litany of news while sipping our morning coffee, wondering if this is the new normal in the long and turbulent history of the human race.
However we slice and analyze it, we all find ourselves living in a time when danger and threat, “wars and rumors of war,” drive and color so much of our shared existence. Perhaps it has always been this way. So forgive me if I don’t rail against the way things have always seemed, or declare we are now in a new and unprecedented moment of danger in human history.
My interest lies rather in what the soundtrack of troubling news does to us who hear it in such unrelenting cadence from morning to night. We may choose to adopt a Leary-esque approach by turning off, tuning out and dropping out, but that seems as impractical and irresponsible today as it was in the drug-enamored 60s. We may let each new story of doom and despair drive us to rage, or reduce us to helpless and hopeless inertia. Or we may try to weigh the merits of everything we see and hear, basing our credence and our skepticism on evidence, experience and common sense, however daunting this approach may be. I’d like to be counted among those who opt for the latter alternative, confessing in advance my uncertainty that any of us who do so are ever equal to the task.
My take on the news of late, particularly its most angry and violent episodes, has reminded me of a short quote attributed to former presidential aspirant Adlai Stevenson:
“You can tell the size of a man by the size of the thing that makes him mad.”
For me these words have been a shoe that has fit on more occasions than I wish were true. And they have aptly described a number of folks I’ve known, both personally and through reputation. People getting mad, being consumed by anger, and expressing their pent-up feelings in fusillades of profanity or torrents of violence have been part of the landscape of my life, and yours, since our childhood. I find it disconcerting, however, in the way we regard those who give vent to such emotions. Are they really as tough and admirable as their take-no-crap-from-anyone pose tries to convey? Or does their show of bravado betray something else, something less than noble about their character? If Stevenson was correct, then our words and actions when angry actually say more about who we are than our reputation, credentials or name may ever reveal or conceal.
None of us is above getting mad at someone or something. Each of us feels insecure at some time or other. And that is because all of us, at some level, know what it is to feel threatened. We come equipped with keenly-tuned threat sensors that are part of the biological toolkit our species depends up to survive. Our remarkable array of sensory inputs feeds our mind with data that we use to coordinate our fight-or-flight response to any perceived danger. It all happens so quickly, so automatically, that we can, with some justification, claim to have little control over ourselves when we get mad or act impulsively. Perhaps that is why crimes of passion, self-defense and battlefield desertion remain credible justifications in our courts. But being human makes us more than creatures governed by our stimulus-response systems. We have the ability, indeed the responsibility, to exert thoughtful control over everything we say and do. And that means, barring intellectual incapacity, we are ultimately in charge of how we conduct ourselves, no matter the real or perceived provocation.
As I ponder the cacophony of anger and violence perpetrated by people wired like me, I’m inclined to change Stevenson’s famous quote in this way: You can tell the size of a person by the size of what threatens him. It seems to me that the genesis of what makes us mad and what elevates our frustration level to the point of rage is often, if not always, triggered by what we believe to be threatening us in some way. Granted we are never totally removed from or totally in control of the neuro-muscular-circulatory-endocrine “call to arms” that can transform any of us from a composed Jekyll to an aggressive Hyde. But we nonetheless hold the key to assessing what is a real and serious threat to our well being, and what is an inconsequential or imaginary one. And in doing so we can either execute an impulsive and aggressive response or one that is reasoned and controlled.
If that is true, then the crux of our day-to-day, moment-to-moment demeanor lies in how well we assess what threatens us. Even on the best of days, we traverse paths through minefields in which obvious and covert dangers are hidden. For kids this journey exposes them to hurtful comments, giggled whispers and snide looks from peers and siblings. Each time we sit behind the wheel we enter an arcade of speeding cars, some with drivers whose glares or unwelcomed finger signs intimidate, and some who will cut us off or call us out with horns a-blaring. Even the holidays can be threatening, as when gifts are unappreciated or underwhelm, or when expected cards and invitations fail to come our way. Since most of feel connected in the global cyber-neighbor, what happens in places we’ll never venture and to people we’ll never know can make us feel vulnerable or under imminent attack. Viral contamination, politicians and their ideologies, porous national borders, hypersonic weapons, changing standards in our schools, weather patterns we’ve never seen before—all have a way of convincing us that we live in a world more threatening than ever.
Not everything that threatens one person scares or intimidates another. Not everything that once set us to trembling when we were kids frightens us today. Threats lie as much in the eye of the beholder as they do in and of themselves, or to apply Eleonor Roosevelt’s oft-quoted wisdom: “No one can make you feel threatened without your permission.” I have no doubts that she was right, making it all the more important that we give careful and considered attention to assessing what we should or shouldn’t judge to be threatening.
A genuine threat assessment may convince us that the danger we fear is of no consequence, permitting us to dismiss it as irrelevant. If the threat emanates from a particular circumstance, person, or group of people, we can decide to remove ourselves from that place or their company. If what threatens us is, in fact, certain to hurt us or to deny us some freedom, we may choose to face it head on in an effort to de-fuse it, work around it, or even manage it. In that moment of discovery we may even realize that our best recourse is to coexist with it. There may, however, be situations that force us to oppose the threat with all we have in order to overpower or destroy it. The experience of many years has shown me that this should always be our last resort—and never our first response.
Admittedly I sometimes find myself thinking that I am now living in times that are more dangerous than I’ve ever witnessed or even heard of. But when I get into one of these fell moods, I catch myself repeating two sayings from long before my ancestors began leaving footprints for me to follow: *“He who longs for the good old days is a fool,” and “there is nothing new under the sun.” I may not like what this current era keeps bringing to my attention, or always find the winds of cultural change in line with my tastes. But I’d be naïve to think this isn’t the way life has always proceeded, human nature being such a constant. It makes me smile, in fact, to recall how my elders looked with disapproving eyes at the music, language, hairstyles and values we Boomers inflicted on them, not that long ago. I can only guess how threatened they must have been.
As I ponder the dangers of these times, and the threats—real and imagined—that I need to assess, I hope I may never turn a deaf ear to the wise words of Stevenson, Roosevelt and Qoheleth. And I pray, for myself and others, that we may never let that which threatens us to diminish the spark of perspective, reason and goodness that flickers within each of us. For it is upon these marks of character and civility—and not on our rage and mad-ness--that our future, and that of our world, ultimately depends.
*Courtly wisdom by the self-titled Qoheleth from Ecclesiastes in the Bible.
