Violence, Violation, and Those That Help

Again I turn to writing as I grapple with the news from Boston today. I have been thinking about gun safety so much over the last few months, and the events today remind me that although I do want legislative changes passed--and I think they are vitally important--that what I want even more deeply is for the culture of violence to shift. I want that not just for America, where in many ways we have less violence than in other places (and in other ways we have more). I want it for the whole world, for humanity, for us to begin to wake up to the violence we do to ourselves when we live caught in the cycles of so many kinds of violence: physical, mental, emotional, inflicted on those we know and those all the way across the world. When I was growing up, my minister at the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Albany took a non-violence pledge and encouraged the congregation to do the same. She vowed to try to eliminate all conscious acts of violence from her life, including thinking violent thoughts--thoughts of negativity or harm or even ill wishes toward others. I was a middle schooler at the time, so I'm not entirely sure how it went over, but I remember the congregation resisting the pledge. It was too unrealistic, they thought, and they didn't want to vow to something they could never really do. I understand the sense of integrity they might have been holding onto, but I wonder whether we can't do better, whether aspiration isn't more important than the likelihood of success. So many of us find, I think, that with all the violence in our culture we end up feeling numb when yet another report comes through the news. I admit to feeling that way sometimes. And then I read about the first-responders, the police who run toward danger instead of away, the parents who shield their children, the citizens who try to save each other. Mr. Rogers called these people the helpers, and he reminded us that they were always there, in every terrible story and every terrible image. I can't feel numb at all when I hear those stories, when I am confronted with this wonderful, awesome reminder of our shared humanity. We have a natural instinct to care for each other, to save each other. That's what gives me hope in times of violence, what makes me think that not only could we take that vow...we might even be able to fulfill it one day.