The Heart Political Party
News/Entertainment Media Interface
This chapter provides an interface between the Heart Party and the news/entertainment media.
Here we present our policy with regard to the news/entertainment media and our official response to specific news/entertainment media inquiries/statements.
Policy
At the present time, we choose not to be interviewed by the media regarding any topic. "We" includes the paid staff of the Heart Party at all levels of our organization. All others associated in any way with the Heart Party may allow media interviews at their personal discretion. We ask the news/entertainment media to respect our policy and to respect our people with regard to their peace and personal space.
We are opposed to "using" the media as a form of advertising. We prefer instead to use our web site, one-on-one personal "word of mouth" contact, and our own organized activities to share our party with individual human beings. Sufficient, accurate information will be shared in this manner so that the media will not be needed for this purpose.
We will respond officially, via this chapter, to specific media inquiries/statements when we deem it in our best interest to do so.
Official Response To Current Media Inquiries
- What is your position regarding the war on terrorism?
Our answer is the following essay:
ANATOMY OF A TERRORIST
By Chip Stinnett, Founder of the Heart Political Party
October 28, 2001
She was just a wee, small girl, trembling on the morning of 9/11, a frightened little child, scrunched into a ball in her seat aboard the plane, clutching her mother’s arm for dear life. With panic in her voice she cried, "Mommy, I’m scared!! What’s going to happen?! I want to go home!! I don’t want to be here! I want to go home, Mommy, I want to go h…" An instant of unspeakable horror engulfed her as she was suddenly obliterated, scattered into a thousand burning pieces of excruciating agony, an agony far greater than any pain we can ever begin to imagine. And then, she was gone; her life abruptly over, prematurely ended as her unfinished words, forever banished from the face of existence. She will never laugh and play again. She will not grow, thrill to her first kiss, fall madly in love, marry the man of her dreams, thrive at her chosen career, raise her precious children, or feel all of the wonders of life that was her birthright. She is now prematurely DEAD, and death is forever. Those who crashed the plane and killed this little girl, and all who support and encourage these killers, are terrorists. In the name of the little girl whose life they took, I will now expose the terrorists for who they are.
A terrorist is a human being, who is damaged beyond his ability to cherish both his life and the lives of others. The damage is to his brain. The damage is neuropsychological. The damage leaves dead spots in the terrorist’s psyche, creating a psychological disconnection between parts of his brain, and therefore his experience of life is only partial. Psychic integration found in a healthy person is lacking in the terrorist, and the terrorist thus experiences an imbalance within him that throws his experiential focus off-center. This is manifest, metaphorically, in a mentally centered experience of life, and much that is outside the terrorist can therefore overwhelm him. To continue the metaphor, his mind is the false ruler of his life, and his heart, the rightful ruler of his life, is imprisoned by his overactive and therefore dominant mind. And his soul – where one feels -- is considerably detached from his experience of life, as if it was an otherworldly entity, because its primary experience is unbearable pain.
The terrorist was not always this way. Once upon a time, he was a child, conceived and born pure and neuropsychologically healthy. Then, he was damaged. The damage began early when he was a baby, and continued through childhood without abatement. The instruments of damage were his parents primarily, along with other authority figures, siblings, peers, etc., who subtly and brutally, intentionally and unintentionally, verbally and physically, abused and therefore damaged him. They abused him because they were damaged, and damaged people cannot help but replicate damage. Their impetus to damage came from the dominant system in their life, their economic system of excessive fear and shame, which has taught generations for eons what damage is and how to inflict it on others. The damage arrested the terrorist’s growth, such that when he became an adult, he was emotionally arrested in child states of unresolved damage, with pain and rage from the damage blocking his ability to integrate a healthy child into a healthy adult. Though everyone’s damage is personally unique, it’s this adult-child syndrome that is the terrorist’s psychological trademark, and his prerequisite for killing.
A terrorist is easy to recognize by his symptoms. Because his child is separated from his adult by this chasm of damage, he experiences his life as hopelessly lost. At best he has only a partial experience of life, so he lives in pain and in fear of dying before he can truly live. Thus he is preoccupied with death. Though this experience is mostly unconscious, his psyche’s "solution" to this problem is a conscious and visible focus on the fantasy of afterlife, a place where he goes after he dies and his "suffering will end", and such a delusional focus is a primary, antibody-like symptom of his damage. Another symptom is extreme emotional reaction that is inappropriate to the circumstance. The painful, enraged child within the terrorist blows life’s conflicts out of proportion. The terrorist then transfers images of those in his childhood onto others involved in his present conflicts, and displaces on them the emotion due those of his past. Thus, the terrorist does not see clearly what is happening around him, to the extent that his religious metaphors reveal his inability to differentiate God and present people from the overpowering people in his childhood. Osama bin Laden, for example, is obsessed with enacting "Allah’s revenge" against "distant powers with money". Saudi Arabia, the Soviets, and now America, are the displacement stand-ins for the rage he would otherwise give to the rightful recipient: his father. But, like other adult-children, he cannot see what is going on within himself. He can only ally with others of like deluded mindset and common cause, displacing idealization or resentment on everyone in his path.
However, the most relevant and dangerous symptom of the terrorist is that he is a potential and often kinetic killer. This is caused by the mostly unconscious rage in his child within, stemming from unrepaired damage, in conjunction with his damaged psyche’s penchant for transference and displacement. Also, because he does not experience heart-centered life, he does not comprehend it, and he does not value it. Thus he sees in terms of black and white, right and wrong, good and evil people, "us" versus "them", transgression and punishment, an eye for an eye … and he will not hesitate to take the life of anyone "for the sufficient cause". He constantly rationalizes his behavior, and thus not only might he sacrifice his own life, but also the lives of those in his charge "for the sufficient cause", as well as take the lives of his adversaries and anyone associated with them. He is a killer. Such deadly behavior is ironically motivated from his unconscious compelling drive to experience the life he’s missing, a drive that is, however, sadly distorted in his goal of achieving his delusional fantasy of "afterlife" -- a "gift" which he also "gladly gives" to others.
The terrorist’s adult-child syndrome is curable with therapy. Healing can occur. No one is beyond hope. The child and adult can integrate into a healthy person in the here and now, who loves and cherishes life, who is not obsessed with death, who does not see life through religious metaphors, who accepts that the reality of his mortality is in God’s best interest and therefore in his best interest too, and who works to improve the living conditions in this world for himself and others. We know that just one person now can obtain the power to destroy the entire world. War, which only creates horrendous damage and extreme resentment, is therefore not only useless against terrorism, but naturally serves to exacerbate it. The only "weapon" that will work against a terrorist is therapy to achieve neuropsychological health. Truly, our battle cry must be "Mental health for all!" if we are ever to defeat terrorism and the evil economic system that fosters it. And we had better ready ourselves for "battle" very soon, for truly the terrorists are in our midst!
Indeed, it was only a few weeks ago, that a little boy lay in bed shivering with fear, the covers pulled up over his head to escape the deafening sounds, holding on to his father for dear life. "What’s happening, Daddy?! I’m scared!! Why are they bombing us, Daddy?! What did we do to them? I’m afraid!! I don’t want to die, Daddy, I don’t want t…" An instant of unspeakable horror engulfed the little boy as he was suddenly obliterated, blown into a number of writhing pieces of excruciating agony, an agony far greater than any pain we can ever begin to imagine. And then, he was gone; his life abruptly over, prematurely ended as his unfinished words, forever banished from the face of existence. He will never laugh and play again. He will not grow, thrill to his first kiss, fall madly in love, marry the woman of his dreams, thrive at his chosen career, raise his precious children, or feel all of the wonders of life that was his birthright. He is now prematurely DEAD, and death is forever. Those in the planes who dropped the bombs that killed this little boy, and all who support and encourage these killers, are terrorists … and in the name of the little boy whose life they took, I have exposed the terrorists for who they are.