This started out as a comment in someone else’s blog, but it got to long, and to complicated.
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I used to be kind of a pacifist
Then I found some things happened . . . everone sees that picture of the kid turning back the tank in tienamin square and forgets that it came back the next day after the Boss of Tanks gave it a little pep talk.
I had some personal incidents like that. I realized, through practicum, that if it’s him or me, it’s gonna be me. When a bullet flies by you moving faster then sound and the wind of its passing hits you in the face, it blows away all your morals and all you want to do is live. Then you hear the shot, and you have to react before he shoots again. You have the time it takes a man to move his finger a quarter inch to decide where you REALLY stand on violence, and the decision changes your sense of yourself and your fate in life.
So if I’d kill to save myself, if I’d kill to save my friends, if that’s inside me, how can I draw a line based on the circumstance it would take? I’d sleep with someone for enough money – so I’m at least a little bit of a whore. I’d kill a guy in the right circumstances, so I’m a little bit of a murderer.
That brings up another point…many people fight, police, millitary men, their ilk, so that you never have to.
Would you call the police to avoid doing violence? If so, you carry the moral weight for what they do to protect you. You are complicit in their actions as surely as the man that hires a hitman is complicit in that hitman’s murders. What I’m saying is, you maybe don’t see yourself as someone who would shoot someone or hit someone or kidnap a person and drag them off after forcing them into irons. . . but if you’ve ever *called the cops* on someone, or moved to a neighborhood in part because it “has a great police department” or “is very safe,” you have essentially hired at least some of those things done, almost as though you went down to a local pool hall and hired Vinnie “the icepick” Falcone to deal with it for you. . . just the finest line, the thinnest veneer, really seperates the two actions.
Dave Grossman breaks the world into sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs…saying, essentially, that only a small percent of the populatioin is vigourously violent, and there is another small percentage that will do violence in response, and vast majority of people are decent and gentle.
He goes on to compare society to an robin’s egg that may one day grow into something far beyond it’s components – but not without its hard shell. It’s entire future is entrusted against that shell, that hard covering that protects it from factors that the inside of the egg doesn’t even know about.
Once you accept self defense, or defense of yourself through military or police power, you have to wonder what you’d do if someone was just PLANNING to hurt you. Once you realize you’d act against someone planning violence, you have to work, hard, to draw a line between yourself and the people that MIGHT someday try to hurt you.
i used to think about this quite a lot. what would i do in x situation, what kind of person does that make me, etc. and i forgot all about this reasoning. And i hate it when i forget things like that. But now, instead of watching sex in the city reruns at 3 a.m. because I can’t sleep and the only movie I haven’t seen at blockbuster is still gone, I’ll have something worthwhile to think about.
i will read this later, sounds good.
and no not your method, but he def. felt the wrath. tripped over himself to apologize. i’ve talked to a few others though? sounds like he tries this with every single new manager. so whatever. i won’t have to order through him for quite a while.
I’d just call you, big, strong sexy man, to protect me.
I like that you and Fleener have such a special relationship.
I’m no pacifist, man. I see the stupidity of war, yet I’m often drawn to it. I also know from past experience, that given the chance to fight or flight–I fight.
Despite knowing that violence is as much a part of human nature, if not more than, as love, and being fully aware that tons of people die every day due to someone elses bullet, bomb, gas, or knife; it still bothers me. And will probably forever bother me. Sometimes the amount of violence and anger the human race manages to generate makes me sick to my stomach.
But I’m not a pacifist. I’ll defend my family and friends like a dog over a bone. I’m just not one to start the fight.
i pretty much laid out my opinion on this on the original post. and i agree with you very much. there’s a certain pointlessness to following our relationships back too far (a butterfly flaps its wings and i end up suffering male pattern baldness of the hoo-ha, or something like that, right?) but it’s right and it’s important to accept the responsibility for what we lay at each other’s feet.
I certainly don’t recall ever delivering a pizza to Casper’s, seeing as how we don’t have them in Laramie and I don’t even know what they are.
Hmm..I guess I should say…Baaa.
-Sigh- I think it sucks, too, but SO many of my friends are on it..! Gah…society…urging me…to conform..
Violence is good. Especially in a society of weenies, that are afraid of conflict. Which want the goverment and law to protect their shinies and asses. I guess or i lost my mind between xanga sites.