Confronting Violence with Nonviolence

I cut across the edge of my next-door neighbor’s newly seeded front lawn, on my way to cross the street to see a friend.  I was about nine years old.  About twenty feet into my trespass, the father of the family charged out of his house:  “If you don’t get off my lawn, I will beat the hell out of you”, he yelled.  Twice.

I got off his lawn.  I could tell he meant what he said. I was more surprised than scared; and I made sure I didn’t venture onto his property again.

About four years later, after a move to another neighborhood in another state, we trick-or- treaters on Halloween carefully avoided approaching the house at the end of the block on top of the hill.  The elderly owner of the house, who nobody knew except by reputation, kept vigil on his front steps with a high-powered flashlight, which he pointed into the face of every ghost, goblin, princess and cowboy who walked by, to make sure no one would try and toilet paper, egg or shaving cream his house.

I am brought back to those two rather innocent but threatening memories as we all continue to react to the shootings in Kansas City and upstate New York, which wounded one and killed another.  The incidents happened within days of each other; and in each case the victims innocently ventured onto someone’s private property.  A key difference between my childhood memories and these two recent events is that the latter both occurred around ten pm, and each homeowner had a gun.

My childhood neighbors didn’t have guns, as far as I know.  But what if they did?  One neighbor was angry enough, and the other was scared enough, to use a  firearm.  I don’t want to imagine what might have happened if I had crossed (or nearly crossed, in the second case) their property later at night two weeks ago. 

America is awash in guns.  And as restrictions on gun ownership and gun use ease up in certain states, the law of averages suggest that more incidents like what happened in Kansas City and upstate New York will take place.

The shooters have been arrested and will be prosecuted.  At the very least, we can presume that they each will have their weapons taken away.  But prior to their literal outbursts they each had the right to keep a firearm in their home.  No doubt they were safely stored, properly registered – and each shooter knew their way around guns.  No red flag law, background check, semi-automatic weapons ban – all of which we need, would change the circumstances of what happened.

That said, guns are a convenient vehicle for violence.  And the impulse to commit violence lies closer to the surface these days.  We live in a country that has a long and deep history of violence.  From slavery to the Trail of Tears to vicious video games to nasty neighbors who threaten to beat the hell out of us if we step on their lawn, we remember, depict –and have come to expect, a certain level of violence.  There are forces and voices in the public arena who wantonly – and shamelessly, commit verbal violence, which results in rising emotional temperatures and quicker triggers.

Yes, we need to do all we can to restrict the manufacture, ownership and use of guns.  AND we also need to confront the human impulse to violence, which has the lowest threshold of any time I can remember.  A commitment to non-violence, so brilliantly and powerfully demonstrated by the life and work of Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandi, and Desmond Tutu are examples we would do well to follow.

One way to embrace nonviolence is to challenge the growing number of attempts to edit America’s story, particularly our country’s story of violence.  To my mind, taking aim at critical race theory, which is happening in so many jurisdictions (and which has been incorrectly ascribed to nearly any and every effort to explore America’s racial history) is a way to truncate, if not erase, the violence that is foundational to our history of racial oppression.  Denying the violence ends up promoting it.  That which we resist, persists.

Commitments to and practices of nonviolence can have an impact.  It won’t necessarily reduce the number of guns stored in our homes.  But it will limit the impulse to use them.

 

 

 

The Bombings We Are Not Paying Attention To

In the last few days the country, if not the world, has had a crash course in bunker buster bombs, ever since three of them literally crashed down on a nuclear weapons development facility in Fordow, Iran.  Delivered by a stealth B2 bomber, the pretext, subtext and...

No Permanent Allies? No Permanent Enemies?

No permanent allies. No permanent enemies. That was a foundational mantra of a ten day community organizing training that I received nearly 40 years ago.  It was a new idea for me, and I struggled with it. Growing up during the height of the cold war, I had been...

Love More. Resist More

  I have recently engaged my mind in a paradox that both strengthens my resolve and soothes my soul.  Love more.  Resist more.  Normally it is thought that loving and resisting need to be kept separate from one another:  you can’t love someone or something you...

A Spiritual Antidote to Fear

In 2008, toward the end of a three-day retreat in Canterbury Cathedral for about 700 Episcopal and Anglican bishops from around the world, Archbishop Rowan Williams finished his brilliant presentation on love and grace, and then asked us to reach out to another. Find...

Preferential Option for the Poor: A Needed Edit

“A preferential option for the poor” became a foundational component of Catholic Social teaching when the term was first issued by Latin American Catholic leaders and theologians in the mid-1960s. The phrase echoed the many admonitions from Jesus as recorded in the...

Emerging Moral Obscenity

It is a moral obscenity.  It is said by some that white Afrikaners in South Africa are the victims of genocide, but there is no data to support the claim. It is said that the cohort of Afrikaners coming to America are refugees, but there are indications that they are...

The Ordering of Love: a New Debate in the Culture Wars

Several decades ago, a national debate raged over a question that helped launch America’s ongoing culture war:  who can you love? One side was insistent that love – which would involve intimate sexual expression – should be confined to a man and a woman. A popular...

Make America Great Again: A Clamping Down on Paradigm Shift

In April of 1970 the United States decided to invade Cambodia, thus expanding the Vietnam War. I was nearing the end of my freshman year in college. Campuses around the country rose up in angry indignation. Protests were planned, strikes were proposed, marches were...

Teach Us to Care and Not to Care: T.S. Eliot

It is becoming harder and harder to achieve emotional, spiritual and in some cases physical distance from what is happening in this country.  I hear more and more people saying that they are reluctant to buy, sell or make changes to their home because the economy is...

Ep 22 – “The Greatest Unifier” with Rick Joyner

In this episode, I welcome Rick Joyner, a prominent Evangelical leader, author, public speaker, and founder of Morningstar Ministries. We explore how to respectfully build mutual understanding and work together across differences. Rick shares about his life-changing conversion, his strong support for President Trump, his belief in God as the greatest unifier, and the challenges and hopes that he sees for the country. We also discuss finding unity in diversity and the ongoing pursuit of liberty and justice for all.

Subscribe To Our Newsletter

Subscribe To Our Newsletter

Join my mailing list to receive the latest blog updates.

You have Successfully Subscribed!