Violence Begets Violence: When Do We Become Accountable?

When will we as individuals take accountability for the violence we create at home and around the world?

It is bad enough that as adults diplomacy, decency, and a basic sense of humanity evades many of us while we single-mindedly pursue our goals or silently consent to destruction at the hands of another, but now it seems increasingly common to read daily about children committing heinous crimes; murdering each other, their parents, or other members of the community; raping, robbing, the list goes on. It seems like we are producing a generation of criminals and what’s more, wondering where these children came from.

Filled with unanswered questions and anger we bury our crying eyes in a box of tissues while shaking our fists towards the sky and asking “Why, God, why?” We lift our heads so quickly towards the sky in search of a scapegoat that we miss the fact that the answer is, in great part, earthbound. Last I checked children are socially conditioned through two basic sources; family interactions and society. I seem to remember a biblical passage that goes something like this “violence begets violence.” So, why ask God again for the answers He’s already given us? Growing up, my mom used to say “God helps those who help themselves.” Seems to me that we could give God a breather while we take a moment to retrace our footsteps to find out where we lost our sense of humanity. From that place which exists in all of us we can walk down a different path together. Maybe then we will discover the potential to evolve as a human race.

Though raised Catholic and educated in Catholic grade and high school, I’ve not turned out to be a particularly religious person. Perhaps it is for my disagreeable perception that it offers inherent inequality. For me it probably started with an unsatisfactorily answered question posed to a priest in high school.



“If you say that we are all made in God’s image and likeness then why can’t women be priests and homosexuals be seen as equal by the church?”

My Catholic faith went quickly downhill from there and having found more often than not their pontification over specific issues and groups disheartening over the years, I decided that for me there must be a better way to treat people with respect and dignity if only to start with and spread the basic assumption that we are all different, but equal regardless of our gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, or other affiliation. I think that without truly believing in and holding on to that as a foundation for the construction of a civil society, no legislation will ever be created and no war will ever protect us from the impending social suicide.

That said, I am not suggesting that religion has no inherent value. On the contrary, I think that religion can act as one source with the potential to suggest etiquette for a civilized social construct; but when it or any other source takes the next step and sets one race, one gender, one sexual orientation, one religion, or any singular civil liberty above all, it is doomed to tear down the very construct it purports will bind us together. Anyway, it doesn’t appear that the religious affiliation of someone excludes them from criminal or violent behavior. In fact, in many cases currently and historically, that very affiliation is said to be at the core of the fight.

Similarly our government offers us no reprieve. It seems now that we are ruled arbitrarily by a government that doesn’t see a need to produce justifications for its actions, or decides it is better to abolish a system of checks and balances through an act of Congress as a matter of convenience to start a war and detain people. I can’t help but ask our leaders my burning question. How is it that we expect to emerge as leaders in the establishment of a global democratic system when we fail to maintain one in our own country? I’m not really sure anymore that the nay-sayers in this country and in many others are dissenting against democracy so much as hypocrisy.

Faced with such contradiction whereby arbitrary rules are sanctioned and exercised by a group, but condemned for individuals amidst increasing unjustifiable violence, what makes it so inconceivable that we are producing violent children that mimic the examples adults have set forth as guidance for them? The children haven’t stopped listening. We’ve stopped realizing the message we’re sending. They in fact are abiding by the moral code society offers them. It is only afterwards they’re shocked to find out that “in their case it’s punishable.” Is there anything civil or democratic about a society where the law only pertains to some but not to others?

Whether our beliefs are religiously or secularly rooted doesn’t seem to really matter if the overall result pits one human life against another. In the moments that we embrace our differences as justifications for a superiority complex, we fight against ourselves and every life is affected, every liberty reconsidered, and the pursuit of happiness which we’ve been striving towards grinds to a screeching halt while we pick up the pieces in the aftermath. Can’t we do better than this?