Violence

It afflicts our bodies, our souls, the young, the old. It's done by so many different types of people for so many different reason.  It's all around us, affecting so many people in different ways. Whether directly or indirectly, we have all been affected by violence in our lives in some way. With the recent Boston Marathon massacre and the apprehending of the suspect, this has hit home more for me. With the Day of Silence noted and passed, I have been forced to think of another kind of violence: the violence of the soul, the type that crushes its victim slowly but can oftentimes be fatal too. And it's sick and it makes my blood boil and my heart hurt.

Sometimes, when looking at all of this violence and all of the sickness in the universe, I get so, so angry. I get even angrier when the victims are innocent and often defenseless. I want to yell and ask what kind of pathetic  man or woman would ever beat up on those who are weaker than them. Who would ever gather enjoyment from their screams and cries. I want the perpetrators to suffer. I don't understand how someone could be so horrible as to deliberately hurt another creature especially in the masses. It's hard for me to see any sort of goodness within humanity when something so horrible exists in the first place and how so many other "good" people let it happen.

But then I always gather my wits afterwards. I realize that violence only begets violence; anger only begets anger. It only perpetuates the cycle of negativity that has been set in place. I am not much better than those who inflicted such violence in the first place. Why? Because the reason why those perpetrators committed violence in the first place was because someone committed some sort of violence against them. They took the easy way out and continued the cycle. By retaliating viciously against them, we are, in a way, continuing that cycle even if not by direct violence. If violence is to be stopped, it must be stopped with love and not anger. Anger is a healthy emotion to feel for a while, of course, but at the end of the day, we have to let go of anger in order to heal. Forgiveness is not to say that perpetrators of violence should be given excuses for their actions or that makes their actions any less wrong.

Committing violence is the coward's way out. People who do so are too afraid to deal with their own hurt and so they deal with it in the easiest way they can: by committing it against others. But just because it is easy doesn't make it right. It's harder to pick up the broken shards of yourself and put them back together and harder still to use that experience to help others. However, when you do, you start a cycle of good to replace the bad. By no means is this as easy as continuing the already-present cycle of bad, of course, but it is better. It is necessary, absolutely necessary.

Violence must end. It must. We must fight it together; it is the only way. There's so, so much violence in the world and I'm not sure it can ever fully be fixed. But we can try, though.