Once again, I feel compelled to write in a cold fury about more violence in our country, now in Orlando. It is a terrible irony that a city that shuttles people to the Shangri La of Disney’s manufactured carefree world is hit with such a horror. After one of our strings of shootings in our fair land, I wrote a gun control column that an editor thought needed some weakening about the idolatry of guns in our country.Fair enough, I suppose. In the intervening time, we have had many more lives taken with firearms.The enormity of the killings in Orlando hit folks hard all over the country. Locally, Bubby and Sissy’s had an immediate vigil the day of the calamity.Oasis just had a most successful trivia fundraiser. Their clients are victims of violence.In the AMH l courtyard, a memorial service for victims of domestic violence is held in our community.
I have not changed my position on gun control, but I am more willing to examine violence across the board. We continue to remain quite casual about violence. It seems to me that we had a greater outpouring of grief for the gorilla in the Cincinnati zoo than we do for the constant drumbeat of homicides.The romantic left despises violence in the hands of the powerful, but excuses it in the hands of the underclass. The increasingly crazed right wing uses increasingly violent rhetoric in its calls for increased violence.
.“Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.” (Martin Luther King, Jr.) As I age, I call for us to consider the path of non-violence in a country swimming in blood year after year.
This includes church bodies of course. Few Christians pursue pursue a pacifist agenda, notwithstanding the clear words of the New Testament, such as the Sermon on the Mount, the parentic closing of Romans 12.. In St Louis, according to the police statistics when I was working on this piece, we have suffered 79 homicides. I do not know of many churches tolling the bells and reading the names of the victims, one by one. Churches and church members post sweet slogans about love overcoming hate. We do not embrace peacemaking nearly enough.
We show far too little concern for the victims of violence. Yes, families get to make victim impact statements at sentencing hearings. Just as we send people off to war and then refuse to care for their physical and mental wounds when they return home, we do little to help victims reassemble their lives and deal with the trauma of violence.
I am beyond sick and tired of the bloodshed in this country. I abhor our recourse to violence as a means of expression or a solution to conflicts. Few things make someone an object, instead of a person due respect, than violence. For all of our preening about technical progress, too much of it is lethal. Churches will talk about a change of heart at the individual level. It reflects the standard American religious approach that “revival” will change society. In the New Testament repentance is better put as a change in mind-set, in values. If one wishes to extend the old phrase, we need a cultural shift in how we view violence.
Yes, small steps toward peace are made all the time in schools and peer mediation, in conflict programs such as the Mennonite Center in Lombard, in the U.S. Institute for Peace. “I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.”
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