Recently, I was listening to a news interview of a rabbi from a neighboring congregation to the Chabad Synagogue in Poway CA where a 19-year-old shooter killed Lori Gilbert Kaye, 60 and wounded three others. He commented that violence is the new norm.
Hate and violence have always been a norm in the U.S. It is how indigenous people were pushed off their land. It is how slavery was established and held in place. It is how women were kept from voting and speaking in public. It is how factory and coal mine owners attempted to intimidate predominantly White workers from organizing unions. There has never been a time when someone was not made the “Other” and violence used against them to keep them in their place. Violence is not a new norm. It has always been the norm.
Is violence more widespread? It may look that way, but I’m not sure. Indigenous people and people of the African diaspora faced constant violence every day in the U.S. Driving native people off their land was incremental, done over centuries. For Black people, the violence of slavery is obvious but for free-Black-people during slavery and after; violence would rear its head in a chance encounter on the road or in a store. Or the numerous attacks on prosperous Black people who had become too uppity and forgot their place in White society. Of course, there was and is violence that takes place in our homes were intimates attack, intimidate and kill each other.
What may be different today is that everyone is a potential victim of violence, including the class of people who benefited the most from the violence in the past. Violence is now seen as the answer to everything and demonization to create the other is aimed at anyone. However, one of the deadliest formats of that violence is the same. White supremacy and all it entails; xenophobia, romanticizing European culture, uplifting Christianity and otherizing people of color – especially Black, people is an American norm.
As for mass shootings that do not appear to be ideological, political or racially motivated, we must understand them in the context of a society that has condoned violence to solve everything. The people who commit this violence – usually young, are following a dominant example of how conflicts and emotions are dealt with in our society; through violence.
Today the hate and violence America has always run on are catching up with us. Hate and violence have taken on a life of their own like a virus and fire. They jump from place to place, consuming everything in their path until nothing is left to infect or burn. And like a virus can only be stopped by healthy practices and a vaccine. And like we must starve fire of oxygen and fuel. We must confront violence and hate with justice, peaceful conflict resolution practices, and love.
Fortunately, confronting hate and violence is also a norm in America. The basic understanding that all of humanity is created equal and endowed with unalienable rights is a foundation for justice. The belief in E Pluribus Unum, – Out of many, One – is a motto that speaks to the understanding that we have much more in common than not and that we must love each other – not necessarily like each other – and live together as one community.
However, we must not look only to our shores and our domestic communities. We have exported our violence across the globe. It breaks my heart that 52 years later, these lines from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. continues to be true,
“My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years, especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.”
We must understand that the violence we face today reflects our own violence. We have cultivated and grown a hateful and violent culture here at home. We exported that hate and violence across the globe, and it has returned to haunt us in every nook and cranny of our society, showing up most poignantly in our schools and houses of worship. It is foolish to believe the karma of demonizing people, killing them by dropping bombs on them and sending our troops – our loved ones – to shoot them will not somehow impact us here. It is arrogant to think we can teach our children that violence is not the answer while at the same time be responsible for killing innocent people and support killing people around the world under the pretense of national security.
We can believe what we want, but reality has a nasty habit of overwhelming belief and wishful thinking. If we don’t want violence to be the norm, then we must believe violence is not the answer and stop being violent ourselves from domestic violence to war. Give peace a chance is not a naïve political slogan. It is our only chance.
