Non-violence seems too passive to effectively eliminate
violence. But perhaps that’s the point –
we shouldn’t want to kill off anything at all.
Everything is here with the purpose of teaching us something
significant, violence included. We need
to know the meaning of violence and understand why it’s in us, all of us. Certainly, violence is in the very nature of
this planet. There’s violence within the
body, where alongside disease there lives a battle-worn immune system - one
attacks, the other defends. Nature
itself shows violence, which helps to build defensive strengths, so in a
destructive storm the strongest stalks of wheat bend but don’t break.
We find violence within our own minds too, in the tension
between opposite choices. In the
push-me-pull-you of decision-making, we can observe violence creeping in, to
suggest the most advantageous way to go. On the other hand, we might become the
Holy-Jo and be non-violent for the sake of being righteous.
Perhaps there’s no good or bad here, it’s just non-violence
dancing with violence. But up to this
point in history there’s been so much violence that it seems obvious to do
something to stop it taking control.
Today, in trying to counter that trend of routine violence, we’d do well
to let non-violence take a more active part, to burn out the old violence in
the same way that a ‘control burn’ makes a firebreak to prevent a devastating
bush fire. By initiating non-violence, we step in, to make a different sort of
impact.
At this point in time, after the orgy of violence in the
twentieth century, we need to be looking for non-violent solutions, to stop us
repeating the mistakes of the past. We
don’t need to resort to quarrelling or going to war to solve problems. And yet, that’s still the approach of the
carnivore who can’t stop attacking animals and eating them to solve the problem
of feeding and guaranteeing the supply of food; we keep doing the same things
because the alternatives are still largely untested, as in the perception that
a plant-based, vegan diet is untested and therefore unsafe.
If non-violence is to become the modus operandi of our new
age, we have to learn to walk with it before we run with it. And in the same way, if you become a
vegetarian/vegan you need to practice it a while before expecting to convert
others to it.
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