Violence is not merely killing one another.  It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person, when we obey because there is fear.  So violence isn't merely organized butchery in the name of God, in the name of society or country.    Violence is much more subtle, much deeper, and we are inquiring into the very depths of violence.

- Jiddu Krishnamurti, from Freedom from the Known

Esteemed Reader of our Magazine:
Violence is everywhere reflected to us - in our news media, entertainment, and daily interactions.  Its ubiquity has made us callous and dulled our sensitivity to behaviors and actions that would, if our hearts were open and consciences awake, cause us to shrink in horror; for the images of bodily and emotional damage done to human beings, which we view with sobriety or amusement, are indeed horrific.

We look back with abhorrence to the Roman gladiators fighting to bloody deaths in coliseums, while not registering that we are enjoying and deriving the same perverse pleasure from watching reenactments of these terrific events, and other worse, cold-blooded abuses, both real and imagined, in living color on our movie and television screens.  We live, however vicariously, in an intensely violent world - a world that is comprised of the images we pour into our minds.

Which is not to say the violence we witness, whether firsthand or reported in the news, represents the full extent of the aggressive atmosphere we live in.  Really the violence goes deeper, is more subtle, because it is based on a point of view.  That point of view is that interference is permissible.  This assumption - that it is all right to blithely cut across the subtle trajectory of a life or process - is the root of every kind of violence.  It can be as subtle as interrupting when another person is speaking, or, even more subtly, thinking while another person is speaking.

But before I continue in general terms, I will explain the reason this question of violence and its cause and cure are so much on my mind.  Soon to be a father, I have been educating myself about pregnancy and birth.  Though my partner and I plan the most natural child-birth possible, I have come to discover the ways in which conventional medicine approaches the process of birth.  Apparently the priority in a conventional hospital birthing situation is convenience for the doctor and medical facility (and their respective liability concerns) rather than service to the mother and child and facilitating the miraculous, transformative event of arrival of a being into this plane of existence.

Take, for example, the fact that at a local hospital 30 percent of births end in Cesarean Section, a major abdominal surgery that involves cutting into the mother's abdomen and uterus and forcibly extracting the child.  Of these C-Sections, only about five percent are necessary for the safety of mother and child.  The rest may be for the convenience of the doctor whose shift may be ending, or the hospital that needs to make room for the next birth.  And C-Sections are only one example of the unnecessary violence that makes what should be a beautiful and graceful initiation of a woman into motherhood, and a fetus into person-hood, into a horrific and traumatic event.  There is also the use of drugs to induce a labor that isn't on schedule, and simply the invasion of a mother-to-be's space and rhythm while she accomplishes what is probably the most difficult and transfiguring task in her life.  It behooves every parent-to-be to thoroughly research all her options.

But the violent way we ignorantly approach the sacrament of birth is reflected in many other institutionalized forms.  One in 37 adults in the US - 6 million people or almost 3 percent of the population - were or had been in prison at the end of 2001.  This is not a small minority.  It means that violence is being done against our own population at an unprecedented rate, and the ostensibly desired effects of punishment are not being achieved.  Certainly ours has departed from the Quakers' original notion of providing criminals the opportunity of "doing penance" in a penitentiary.

And, of course, current (and past) US foreign policy, and that of most nations, reflects the attitude of ignorant interference, which includes the invasion, pillage, and imposition of alien values and systems of governance on other, weaker nations.

Truly a society that accepts as normal and even institutionalizes violence is debased and fundamentally primitive.  There is a way for people to be at peace with one another and it begins with each of us, first of all observing the violence we do to ourselves and others, and then taking the unprecedented step of making violent manifestations unacceptable for ourselves.  Even every kind of sarcasm, cynicism, judgment, and criticism expressed toward ourselves or others is hurtful and violent.  We mistakenly believe these will achieve our desired ends, when in fact the opposite is true.  Truly it is by abstaining from violence that our abundance grows, for as Jesus uttered in his Sermon on the Mount, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God."

- Jason Stern