There's a fear down here we can't forget, hasn't got a name just yet

KUMBAYAH MOMENT II

Violence is not merely killing another. It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person, when we obey because there is fear. So violence isn't merely organized butchery in the name of God, in the name of society or country. Violence is much more subtle, much deeper, and we are inquiring into the very depths of violence.... When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.

---Jiddu Krishnamurti

Car bombs, snipers, drone missiles, death penalty. Parents screaming at children, children being cruel to each other. Layoffs, drive-bys, planes crashing into buildings, being rude in public. Cruelty to animals, hate groups, gang wars, death camps. Neglect, indifference, torture, exploitation.

We are taught to use all types of violence -- emotional, economic, psychological, physical -- as tools with which to manage our way in the world. Every cold word, every implied threat, every refusal to consider the outstretched hand or needs of another, every dismissal of an overture, are all violent abuses, and worse they coarsen the world and teach others that violence is the ordinary, natural, given way. We are taught, falsely, that the proper use of this or that technique of violence will allow us to dominate, or manipulate, or exploit circumstances to our advantage. In many ways that is the very heart of our civilization All brutality, all acts of violence, all efforts to intimidate and bully, are in essence the same. To destroy another human being with a gun, coldly and wantonly, is more heinous and a greater crime than a harsh word, but in intent and character they are the same. And they are both what keeps the world locked in its accelerating descent into the abyss of hell. Sometimes one act of violence is preferable to another -- for instance in the case of a just war, or to protect a helpless person. But this is very unusual. And to take part in violence reinforces, in our minds, one of the greatest illusions of all: that we are using violence, instead of the violence using us.Ordinarily, if we are are at all awake, we realize -- almost always too late -- that the violence we have thought of as a tool for our use is, more often than not, making us do its bidding. The violence uses us; we are its tools. We either inflict it or suffer it, or both. We can be mean, or miserable, or we can be both. But it goes on, growing and refining itself into ever more cruel and lethal permutations. From slings to bows and arrows to catapults to muskets to grenades to V-2 rockets to H-bombs to God knows what is next. And whether in a given instance we are inflicting the violence or suffering it, the violence itself, regardless of what side we are on, isolates us and utterly impoverishes out inner world. Violence is dehumanizing, degrading, and crippling to everyone it touches. And we are all implicated. What is more important than confronting this problem?

Unforgiven.is one of the finest American films ever made, and it is self-consciously a meditation on the nature and consequences of violence. A Clint Eastwood Western, the film begins with a banal but painful insult: a saloon prostitute makes fun of a cowboy's genitalia. Enraged and humiliated, he retaliates by cutting her face. That altercation begins a furious cycle of retaliation and escalation, braggadocio and opportunism, power grabs and score settling, tall tales and yellow journalism, that ends in an orgy of murder so devastating and final that it is possible to imagine the whole world dead or dying. The climactic moment of the film is the final murder. Clint Eastwood has arrived in the classic saloon, and confronts the man he came for. "I'm William Munny," he says. "I've killed women and children. I've killed everything that walks or crawls at one time or another. And now I'm here to kill you, LIttle Bill." Moments later, most of the men in the saloon are dead, and Little Bill lays on the floor, looking up the barrell of Eastwood's rifle. Little Bill pleads for his life: "I don't deserve this. I was building a house."

"Deserve's got nothing to do with it," Eastwood says. And he pulls the trigger.

And that is the largest truth. Trying to use violence is like trying to use a tornado or an earthquake. Violence goes through the human race like an electric current spitting out from a fallen power line, hissing and twisting this way and that until it decides, for its own reasons, to stop. And it maims and destroys people without regard to what they deserve, or do, or have, or are. It just gets the people who are there, because they are there. Once violence is truly loose, we are helpless, faceless, and nameless...lost and broken people adrift in a lost and broken world.

But are we also hopeless?. History is full of leaders, saviors, teachers, all of whom have tried to lead humanity out of its violence from the top down. It has not worked; our violence and our potential for violence have only increased. Perhaps the answer lies in the other direction, in the direction of bottom up, from the individual hearts and minds of each individual resisting the impulse to use any kind of violence at all. I don't know. Do you?