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“An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.”
-Mohandas Gandhi

Last week we examined how reactive dependence turns us all upside down. By looking at the U.S.’s “addictive” dependence on Middle East oil, we learn about our own faulty dependence on our kids. What is comes down to is this: no one respects or likes to listen to needy people. Think about it. You may have compassion upon a needy person, you may pity a needy person, but you don’t respect someone who is emotionally needy. You resent them. And that is what our kids feel toward us whenever we need them to supply our emotional “needs.” And that’s when we lose our authority with them—we lose it in their eyes.

This week our lessons from (and for) the Middle East continue. This week we learn that reactive reciprocity leaves us all dead. Now, reciprocity is a big word with a lot of syllables, but it just means “returning the favor,” or “right back atcha;” or “I’m going to do to you what you just did to me.” And it is purely reactive. Reciprocity is an almost automatic process of reacting to what was just done to you. It is a knee-jerk reflex.

Let’s look at the current turmoil surrounding the now infamous Mohammed cartoons originally published in a Danish newspaper back in September of last year. As of this writing, 11 have died in Afghanistan, two Danish embassies have been torched, and volatile demonstrations are continuing in countries around the world. There are extreme positions surrounding the issue, from those applauding the newspapers for running the cartoons and sending a message to the Muslim community, to all those militant Islamist protesters demanding that all Western societies obey the laws of Islam. At the risk of sounding very insensitive myself, we are talking about a series of cartoons.

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But what is striking about these protests is what is striking about our own relationships: reactivity is everywhere. There is no pause, there is no calculation of how today’s violence may lead to tomorrow’s pain—there is only reaction. Which leads to a reciprocal reaction from the other party, and so on. If we’re honest, this is not just a description of Middle East politics; this is a description of our own marriages (or any of our relationships). Think about it. Whenever your spouse makes a negative criticism, how able are you to hear that remark, evaluate it? If you’re like the rest of us, something gut-level takes over. Something purely reflexive. Whenever we feel attacked, even if the attack has some truth to it, we get defensive. And we retaliate. We reciprocate the very action we’re defending ourselves against.

Soon both parties get caught up in an escalating dance, and both forget that the original argument had something to do with laundry, or an insensitive comment from an in-law.

Reactivity is everywhere. And as long as anyone keeps reacting to it in return, it will continue. Some European papers are now creating more “blasphemic” cartoons in order to flaunt their freedom of speech. In that same spirit, a museum in Russia is now opening an exhibit of the original cartoons. So, in reaction, Iran is holding a contest in its State-run papers, calling for cartoons mocking the Holocaust. Does anyone see this moving away from violence and toward authentic debate?

Listen to Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss Muslim scholar in residence at Oxford University (as quoted in Time):

Both sides are exaggerating. While it’s true that the picture of the Prophet is strictly forbidden, Muslims have to understand that there is an old tradition in secular Western society to make fun of everything. To react emotionally is excessive. It is no longer a debate; it is a power struggle. We have to calm down. We don’t want laws preventing people from being free to speak. But we should also not forget wisdom and decency when we are dealing with people. Democracy isn’t just a legal framework. It is about respecting one another. (Italics added.)

Exactly.

But should people do nothing in return? Should I just let my spouse walk all over me? Should Denmark just pull all of its $400 million in export business from the Arab world, letting militant reactionaries dictate their foreign economic policy? Should all Western papers refuse, out of fear, to publish critiques of any religion, for fear of violent retaliations? Should Muslims silence all their critiques of the Western World? No. By all means, No. What this calls for is the ability to be responsive, rather than reactive. One of the world’s favorite words, for good reason, is the word responsibility. Whenever I ask parents in my seminars about the quality they want to see most in their kids, it’s responsibility. Taken at its base meaning, it is not about “doing what you should.” At its base level is one’s ability to make a response. “Responsability,” we could spell it. Making a response to a situation implies thought. It implies higher reasoning. It implies choosing an intentional course of action that both represents one’s self-interest and recognizes one’s social impact.

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Seen in this way, responsibility becomes one of our highest virtues. It can mean a son saying “no” to a bully picking a fight, and yet also saying “no” to his Mom when she begins to immaturely pick a fight as well. It can mean a daughter saying “no” to the pawing hands of a boyfriend, and yet confidently confronting her Dad when it appears he’s uncomfortable with her developing sexuality. It can mean a parent resisting the urge to reciprocate her child’s melodramatic screaming, and yet confidently (and calmly) informing that child that she will never, ever talk to her mother that way again.

And when it comes to the world’s current crisis, “responsability” can mean this: Western newspapers inviting more Arab-based columnists (and cartoonists!) to post their own views in the editorials section, and the highest ranking Arab clerics calling for an abrupt and final end to all violence in the name of Allah, period.

We all need to make a response. We all need to stay calm, cool, and connected as we scan the factors of our world, get honest about our desires for our relationships, and make a response.

So here comes mine (for today). I wrote the paragraphs below right after I saw the Steven Spielberg movie, “Munich.” In the film, Spielberg brilliantly displays the tragic confusion surrounding any and all efforts to “retaliate” against those Palestinians involved in the murder of eleven Israeli Olympic athletes in 1972. By the end of the film, we see very clearly that no one, no matter how seemingly justified, can reciprocate another’s action (in this case, murder) without becoming the very person he’s reacting against. Reactivity is everywhere. "Responsability" is needed.

Something has to be done. Someone has to step up. Or out. The “Middle” part of this world, where Western civilization began, is driving the rest of us. Certainly those of us in America. We are being driven by the explosive reactivity that defines ancient, middle-eastern tribal conflicts. And our own anxious reactivity to those conflicts, coupled with our lack of material self-restraint, has led us to where we our now. Where is this place we find ourselves? As the external focus of all the poverty-led, Islamist-fed internal Arab strife. As Thomas Friedman has put it so profoundly, the failed “modern” regimes like Egypt and Saudi Arabia have accepted our aid and our alliance, then secretly financed the most vitriolic Islamist clerics in order to appease their disaffected, unemployed youth, who have in turn, turned to terrorism as the outlet for an entire people’s pain. And rage.

From a family systems perspective, it is easy to see these young terrorists as stereotypical middle children. They perform the role the family needs them to perform (act out all the symptoms of the family’s illness and detract attention away from that real illness) and then receive the voiced disdain of their state leaders. The Arab family needs them to distract attention away from the failures of leaders to institute real, modern reform. Democratic reform that will bring the peaceful coexistence of tribal factions and the prosperous growth of its middle class. These failed efforts by the state never get addressed, however. That would take levels of fearless, integrity-driven leadership not seen in the Arab world. Instead, these failures get transmuted to the poorest, disaffected “middle” children, those who cannot afford to Visa their ways into Western schools. They instead beg their ways into the mosque-gangs, who spit out a hatred-base for Islam that simply feeds into the self-hatred of the poor, and then redirects it toward the prosperous infidels.

And there’s no pause. There’s rarely ever a pause. Bono tells a story of a female would-be suicide bomber who turned herself in at the last moment. Her story is like that of a US porn star. Abandoned by her father, raped repeatedly by all the males left in the family, she then gets pregnant. After needing to seek family assistance to feed the child, the child is then stripped from her grasp as a payment for debt. Alone, hurt beyond nerve, the inner rage finds its direction toward the haves of the West. And she joins a growing number of destitute Arab women seeking their “purpose-driven life” among the architects of terror. Status, even if for a brief moment, comes her way as she settles into to her bomb-vest. Thankfully, as Bono reports, integrity came over her. She simply could not go through with it. She somehow knew that hurting others, pure reactivity to her own pain, would never heal anyone.

That type of pause is what it means to be ScreamFree. That type of “rising above the fray” is the only way out of destructive patterns. The pause is that moment when our integrity, the alignment of our truest wishes and our actions, can actually begin to lead. But that pause is rare. That pause is rare in every human relationship, whether between Sunnis and Shiites, between Palestinians and Israelis, or between parent and child.