Changing our response to a violent world
We live in a violent world. Always have. And if I were a betting man, I’d say we always will. If humans excel — truly excel — at anything, it is coming up with new, exciting ways to kill each other. This will always be the case, as long as we exist in a broken, sinful world.
At the May 22 Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, a terrorist attack killed 23 people and injured 116. Days later, on a cross-town train in my town of Portland, Oregon, a white supremacist knifed three protectors trying to stop his hate speech toward two minority women. The women escaped, but two of their protectors died.
Acts like these obliterate the idea that this world can somehow overcome violence and achieve peace. We can preach platitudes, but does anyone really think Katy Perry can change the heart of ISIS by begging them to “coexist”? We can pass laws, but does anyone truly believe determined terrorists can’t circumvent them? And if we ask our governments to respond, virtually their only tools are sanctions (not always effective) or brute force (more violence).
Bottom line: We should do our best to avert violence, but people will still kill one another. I realize this is not an ideal reality, but it is one with which we are stuck.
Perhaps as a result of the information age, in which acts of violence from around the world are streamed daily onto our TVs and computers, we have lost our ability to process and to grieve.
On social media, images of terrorism mix with funny memes, vacation pictures, and kitten videos. If the latest horror doesn’t involve us, we scroll past. Only when it touches our personal values do we get angry and demand justice, and then usually only through hashtag activism which costs us nothing. We act as if some deaths matter, while others do not. We pick and choose which violence offends us.
Humanity has always been violent; that doesn’t change. So what must change is how we respond.
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