How to Handle Violence in Cities
It has a name, usually the name of a person, someone with authority, someone who makes the rules, someone who directs a group of people. It comes in many shapes and forms and it is difficult to get rid of once we allow it into our space, life and time. It all starts with a simple look, with a simple gesture, and we fall for the trap; violence hurts. I have seen it happen, I have been part of it, I have been the culprit, and then again who knows why, unlike birds in the sky, we don’t stop each other from hurting.
Yesterday is only a dream, and tomorrow is perhaps a journey, and wondering why things happen brings nothing to the table, if not a sadness that won’t go away. A nostalgic cry for people who left us, not because they wanted but because abuse in our world goes unpunished, no matter how hard we try to implement laws, punishment, stigmatization - this is not sufficient.
Life is very long if we are looking at ourselves, with each moment that passes, each moment that tells us we have failed at seeing why domestic violence, abuse, violence, crime, and many others, happen. It can happen to anyone, to you and me if we do not watch our words or actions and it is very difficult to say when and how.
Being part of the cycle is the way to go if we would want to continue making the mistakes of the past, ending it means we have to take a stand. And I’ve heard this before: neutrality creates support for the wrong cause. The cycle ends only when we put a stop to our own actions, without naming others as responsible.
It’s a difficult thing to do, to forgive, to really let go and forgive the violence we have to survive each and every day as we are isolated, or we isolate ourselves, as we attempt to make amends with the historical past, as we learn how the world works: where some are less valued than others, where some lives count more than others. It’s difficult to see the violence that happens in the world, as we become very much ingrained into the life we chose only to find out it’s not worth living without peace and love.
Once upon a time, I heard the story of a boy. The boy had wished for a Christmas tree his whole life and his mother would not buy him the tree for Christmas he so desired. There were so many other things she could buy, but not the tree, the tree was forbidden, this woman was callous. The boy cried each night during Christmas and thought that one day he would have his tree, but he never did. When he became an adult, his mother bought a big tree for the family and now children he had, but this didn’t do the trick, instead it angered the now adult who at this moment had a fit and destroyed the tree, throwing decorations all over the living room and breaking the tree in pieces. The woman in the story is me, the timing of things didn’t work quite well and it’s not easy to see the mistakes we have made.
Returning back to the issue with crime in cities, there are things that can be accomplished with the way we look at things. In many cities, there are pockets of people, people conglomerate with things they know, things that are familiar to them, and that make them comfortable. Learning to adapt isn’t easy but it’s possible and having an open mind is possible when we find that our lives are valuable, more than money that is thrown at us to purchase our dreams, our peace and our love.
Money doesn’t buy love, it doesn’t buy peace, it doesn’t buy our sanity. Forgiveness gives us all of this and then again crime in cities continues to rise because we don’t forgive others. There are stories which are shocking such as forgiving someone who would hurt our children, and yet some people have already gone through this and the only reason we move forward is because of forgiveness. We don’t know how helpless we are until we are faced with the reality we really don’t know a thing, there is so much pain in the world that goes unseen, during periods of time of peace in one place, there are periods of war and famine in others, it’s not possible to have a perfect world because we are too many to count. So, in this case the Bible is a little bit wrong, where we are just cattle “sheep following the herd towards paradise.” Paradise doesn’t exist other than here, in the now, without domestic violence.
It has a name, it is usually a person, a group of people, an organization with power diminishing us and making us feel like our lives are less valuable than theirs. The solution perhaps is just to move on and leave things as they are because the world will never change, young people will be restless, old people will complain about the things are in the present and we will always have crime in the world, famine in some, and oppression in others. Life has taught me to accept things as they are, to just sing to the life that springs with every thought I find in me to bring to the table, not to my group of followers in LinkedIn, or in Facebook, or in real life, but simply to the table. The food I am bringing to the table today is forgivenesss, peace and love.