Violence: A Meditation

In a somewhat appropriate turn of events, I find myself reading the book, Rose: Love in Violent Times by Inga Muscio at about the same time as I have joined and increased my involvement in Western Men Against Violence (WMAV), a group for but not limited to male-identified campus community members to discuss violence and masculinity and any variety of related subjects.

This past week has also been a tribute to Truth with both the Naked Truth on Stereotypes (NT) and Vagina Memoirs performances rocked stage on campus.

Rarely do I find such influences coincide haphazardly.

Resoundingly, or so it seemed to me, one of the themes that this Truth seems to tackle is the fact that Silence is a violent form of non-action.

Silence wounds. Silence kills. Either directly or indirectly, silence represents a removal of autonomy and power, from the self or from others.

Violence isn't always active. It isn't always physical. It can be mental, physical, social, spiritual, pretty much any of the dimensions of health often cited in textbooks for being sources of pathalogical stress when something is wrong. Sometimes violence is absence of things like safety as Muscio so vividly describes in Chapter 3. Sometimes violence is the boxes we get put in by society the way the NT cast broke out of. And sometimes violence is healthy. Or rather, properly channeled aggression can be a viable outlet of all these violent energies we experience the way some of the guys in WMAV talk about sports.

But breaking silence isn't just shattering it with noise. Even the most beautiful music can be ignored and misinterpreted, and unfortunately the incoherency of noise tends to fare much worse.

So how do we counter all this violence? Extending by metaphor Newton's Second Law of Motion, for every force there is an equal force working in the inverse direction.

To quote the oft cited Audre Lord, “The master's house shall not dismantle the master's house.” So we can't combat violence with violence.

On the flip side, pacifism seems to me borderline to apathy the way most people describe it. The absence of fighting back contributes to violence as much as fighting violence with violence. Silence merely creates more space for the violent cacophony surrounding us.

Inaction is not a viable solution. Return fire only perpetuates violence.

The popular answer proclaims love as the answer to violence, but often I feel as if this answer leaves us lacking because few can describe what a praxis of love looks like. Even I'm left with vague but noble descriptions of choosing the higher good.

And if love is the answer to violence, it's not an easy answer. It's not an easy process. How long does it take a survivor to forgive their rapist? How many generations does it take two nations at war to truly find peace and prosperity in each other? Extreme examples though they may be, I think they are justified and speak to a deeper underlying problem with violence.

Violence isn't clean. It isn't cut and dried one way or the other. It isn't all bad. Birth is violent. Eating is violent. There are cycles and hierarchies of violence because violence doesn't merely operate on an individual level.

So we need a commUnity of love. We need warriors fighting a counter-war of love that supercedes and overrides the master narrative of violence in our world. We need Shambhala and Angels and Wizards and Fellowships and Families.

We need a fucking miracle. And it will be violent, this I must admit, but I don't think it will be earth-shattering violent. A paradigm shift, any paradigm shift is a violent redirection of energies. But we don't need to make the roof crash down to the floor to take the walls down.

It's a slow process, one that's easily corrupted and will take lifetimes to complete on the grand scale of existence, but it begins with breaking silence and admitting that there is violence to be fought.