Violence is a word that is sterile, anti-septic. Non-violence is the same. Each of these words, one the antonym to the other, are safe, academic words that don’t express the suffering they are supposed to describe. What is hidden under each word?
| Violence: fear, hurt, pain, searing, cold, weakness, ache, loss, grief, suffering, power, control, dominance, submission, rage, frustration, violation … | Non-Violence: reason, intellect, compassion, wisdom, kindness, love, determination, safe, tolerance … |
Gandhi once said something along the lines of, "The world has a choice: Nonviolence or non-existence." Within myself, I must consider my fears – that my "self" will be destroyed if I allow others’ violence against me. This is a profound fear; it seems based in the desire of every cell of my body to continue its own existence. That fear feels inborn – I have never been without it; walking alone or in a pack, there is the fear of my own flame being extinguished lingering in the background, keeping me company.
I have questioned the "how" of nonviolence – how do you get there? How do I stop what feels to be an instinctual reaction to protect myself? How do I accept force against me? How do I submit to my spirit, rather than to my body? How do I overcome things that aren’t even ideas, that were not taught to me, but seem to be there none the less? HOW?
I have asked these questions for what feels like a long time – though I imagine 5 years is not long enough to understand the spirit. Perhaps I should ask myself something else entirely: "What drove you to desire overcoming the violence inherent in the body?"
I suppose there is a story behind that question that I may need to be reminded of. I’d decided at some point – perhaps my early 20’s – that civilized people of means (which is what I wanted to be at the time) didn’t get involved in fist & cuffs; that men of means relied upon the systems of justice they’d created to resolve conflicts. At the time, I didn’t see the naiveté of "justice they’d created", until the violence at the World Trade Center in Sept. 2001. The drums of war began to beat while at the same time, my life seemed to be unraveling as the things I thought were Truth were not. It was my 27th birthday and I’d gone to my mother’s apartment in Southern California for a birthday party. My girlfriend and I were trying to make it through the quakes in our lives – she was from New York, her mother was a nurse in the city. Everything was falling apart and no matter what my "means", I couldn’t keep them together. I walked into my mother’s living room to find Red, White & Blue streamers and bunting, with my whole family wearing t-shirts that had an American flag on them. I think the US had already started bombing Afghanistan.
I flew into a rage. I demanded the streamers come down, the flags disappear – this was MY birthday, not America’s. I insisted America was stupid – acting under the rule of an idiot. I’d watched the news, I knew the president was hyping the war drums. I knew that Afghanistan had offered to extradite anyone, provided we could produce reasonable evidence of their involvement. I knew there were plenty of protocols in place to deal with this single cowardly act – but none of them would be pursued. Instead I saw a country who had suffered from war for the last century – 3 generations of people living in war; 3 generations of people for whom War was a culture. I passionately argued for reason and restraint. They took the streamers down, but kept their American flags on.
I left Orange County 4 days later, heading for Southeastern Connecticut without my girlfriend.
I was lost and drifted for awhile. I had work and I had friends. Mostly, I drank. We had destroyed what little there was to destroy of Afghanistan. I had an overwhelming feeling that the people of Afghanistan would have submitted to anyone that didn’t want to kill them all. I kept drinking. The war was anti-climactic. There were no parades, no celebrations – there was no joy in defeating the defeated. Without the climax, there had to be another war.
The war drums began again, this time with lyrics to their rhythm: "You don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." It was now time for Iraq. I wrote poetry to my lost loves, America and Jody. I drank and sobbed alone in my apartment. I imagined my death a thousand times, each time with less and less fear. All that I had believed – all that I had placed my faith in – all that I had identified with and used as the foundation of my world-view had crumbled. There was no love, no hate, no peace, no war, no justice, no freedom – only suffering which I had no control over. I wanted to die. I drove drunkenly at trees with my hands off the steering wheel only to have a bump in the road redirect me. I was certain there was a god and he wanted me to suffer. I wanted everything destroyed – I wanted the mushroom cloud and a Kalashnikov and everyone, including me, destroyed. I went to work and said they were lucky I didn’t have a gun. I went to the bar and found people I wanted to kill. I looked for the one that would kill me.
A friend of mine called me up one day and asked if I would hack a website for him. "That’s not bag anymore," I told him. "But I can point you in the direction of some information if you’re interested in doing it yourself."
"OK – but these bastards need to be hacked," he responded. I was curious.
"What site are you trying to hack?" I asked him. He pointed me to a PETA website. I think the campaign was called, "Holocaust on your plate". I began reading through it, looking at the pictures of industrialized "animal agriculture". My friend’s father was Jewish – though I don’t think there was ever a practice in their house and he was mad as hell at what he perceived as Jews being the analog to cows. I saw it differently. There was a quote from a jew interned in Treblinka – Isaac Bashevis Singer – who wrote, "as long as man will hold a knife to the throat of a weaker beast, man will hold the knife to the throat of a weaker man." Somehow this hit me very powerfully. I quit eating meat that day. I saw a way out – that if I controlled myself, if I refused participation in the -as I saw it- chaos of the world, I could respect myself, I could rebuild the foundations of my beliefs with ideas unshakable, even if the world at large wouldn’t adhere to them.
More Later