Thou Shall Not Kill

Obama and his team watch the raid live

This week, Osama Bin Laden was killed in a raid ordered by US President Barack Obama. Lots of people were happy about it. Some were angered by it and a whole lot of people had mixed emotions about it.  I fell into the mixed emotions group.

The killing of Bin Laden represents what happens when our values come in conflict with one another. Humanists understand that all ethics and all moral value systems are situational. But that doesn't mean it's easy thinking through moral problems.  It's hard sometimes.

Here's the moral dilemma that the killing of Bin Laden brought up. Is it OK to kill one person in order to save the lives of thousands?  For Obama and his team, the answer is apparently yes because that's the decision that was made. Intellectually I agree, but killing is still killing and the thought of someone dying makes me sad. Even if that someone was Bin Laden. While I don't like feeling this way, I would rather feel sad about a death then ambivalent about it. People who aren't emotionally moved by death scare me.

Anyway, Bin Laden's death has also brought up those horrid emotions from Sept 11th and how I felt when I watched the towers collapse on television and saw people jumping to their deaths to avoid immolation. So even though a part of me is relieved that Bin Laden can't order peoples death's anymore. The other part of me is still mourning the tragedy of Sept 11, 2001 and wishing that the world didn't include such sorrow.

The Death of a Cat

One of our cats died this week. She was old. I wish I felt sadder then I do because, well, I didn’t really like her that much. She wasn’t very friendly, spent most of her time hiding under our bed and when she did venture forth, it was to pee on the floor and not in the litter box.  Needless to say, I am enjoying not having to clean up after a cat that wasn’t much of a pet.

My son, however, is quite sad.  Sally, was a very beautiful cat. She looked like a Russian Blue/Dilute Torti mix. She was seriously a beautiful cat. Too bad she rarely let anyone pet her. That is, up until the end. As she neared the end of her life she started to come out more and she even allowed my son to pet her and give her love. He was thrilled!!!

And then she died. And he cried. Which brings me to today’s topic of grief. Grief follows very similar processes regardless of who died. It is the same for a cat or for a human. The only difference is intensity.

So, to help our son, we obviously did not tell him he is going to see Sally again. The urge to ease his pain is strong but we resisted as we felt that would do more harm then good. We also refused to replace her with another pet as that would be cheating. She can’t be replaced and the sooner he came to terms with the reality of her death, the sooner he would be forced to experience his grief and eventually come to terms with it.

Like pretty much everyone who has lost a loved one, he at first tried to deny our cat’s death by hoping she would resurrect and then when that wasn’t an option, he hoped she could re-incarnate. He cried a lot and was sad.  We told him he would never forget her and that it was ok to be sad and to cry.  And now, three days later, he mentions that he misses her in passing but he has basically gotten on with the business of living his life.  He didn’t even cry himself to sleep tonight, as he preferred to discuss our plans for the weekend.

And that is grief in a nutshell.  Deny it, come to terms with it, feel bad about it and then get on with your life never forgetting the one you loved and lost.

Circumstances Beyond Your Control

Ok - I write about the Humanist Approach to happiness, but lets be honest. It’s impossible to be happy all the time. Sometimes bad stuff happens that’s beyond our control. Whether it is an insane gunman killing random people at a rally, or it’s a sudden loss of a child, which just happened to a friend of a friend. Stuff happens and when that stuff happens, it is normal and natural to be upset by it.

So, how do we as Humanists cope? How do we reclaim our sense of hope and wonder and joy when the news is so depressing? Well, it isn’t easy. And, it takes time. And that’s ok. Again, you are not going to be happy all the time. And unfortunately, there is no magic wand you can wave to make all the sorrows and sadness in your life go away.

While I hate to gratuitously pitch my book, it does have an entire chapter about coping with grief so if you want to learn more about coping with those emotions, please get yourself a copy. What I want to focus on here is that the way back to happiness requires you to regain control of a situation that you had no control over. And the way you do that is to consciously make a decision to do so.

And in the meantime, while you are working at regaining control, there are some tricks to helping you calm your mind enough to focus on the task ahead of you. Whether you repeat the Serenity Prayer as your mantra or meditate, doesn’t matter. As long as you find a way to focus your energy productively despite your