#328: Free Country

In the 1980s and 1990s, decades before school shootings became commonplace (there have been 96 since 2018), young survivors received little mental health treatment. Most suppressed their feelings, soothed with drugs, formed informal therapy groups, and felt guilty to seek therapy, because they suffered less than their friends. Now in their 30s and 40s, they’re coming to terms with their PTSD and deciding what to tell their own children about their experiences, if anything at all. (22 min)

Our problem as humans, Melanie Challenger argues in this thoughtful essay, is that we deperately want to avoid death. She reminds us, “Everything that we have cherished, each hope or triumph, however small or glorious, will be gone. And so, too, will the unique form of our bodies. Our smiles and the cut of our buttocks, our hips and the hue of our eyes—all will one day be swallowed back into the immensity of the cosmos.” If we accept death and spend less time convincing ourselves that we are exceptional, somehow superior to animals, then we’ll love ourselves and each other more, offering us a better chance to construct a healthier world for future generations. (16 min)

Even if you’re not a distance runner, you’ll appreciate this profile of the Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3,100 Mile Race, in which participants run around a half-mile block in Jamaica, Queens, over and over, for 52 days. In this beautifully written piece, Devin Kelly starts with running and extrapolates to the philosophical and existential: What is beauty and what is joy in our pandemic world? He writes, “I think we often chase epiphany, despite the fact that, at all times, the possibility of epiphany is right here, exactly where we are. The word itself has nothing to do with how it is commonly portrayed, which is that epiphany occurs out of nowhere, as if what is surprising someone didn’t exist before the moment of their surprise. In reality, the idea of epiphany has to do with seeing things exactly as they are.” (33 min)