Violence is a disease

I want to bring you an excerpt from the latest letter to the Diocese from the Bishop of Newark:

Forty years ago this week, the city of Newark erupted in five days of violence, which claimed the lives of 26 people, caused millions of dollars of damage – and sullied the reputation and fabric of life in this city for at least the next generation. The reasons for the rebellion/riot/revolution are many and multivalent, and we need to keep sorting through the stories and evidence -- for our learning and healing. Yet at its root, I believe that the violence of 1967 emerged from a toxic combination of fear and frustration.

The fear was of the other – separated by race and culture and history, and an insidious legal and economic system that was organized to maintain the separation. The frustration boiled over as more and more people felt that there was no way to break through the fear, and fear’s manifestation of racism, economic inequality and the devil knows what else.

Much attention has been devoted to enumerating the sequence of events of 1967 -- and uncovering new evidence, and evaluating mistakes and misjudgments. That is important and necessary work. But there is a subliminal danger in thinking that violence is limited to situations and places where the fear and frustration quotient is especially high; places we have been told to stay away from – inner city neighborhoods, the West Bank, Iraq and Afghanistan.

But violence does not have such obvious boundaries. It turns out that violence is one of our most serious cultural diseases. While most of us recognize that violence is a disease that needs curing, it is perhaps less obvious for us to realize that we have been taught – for at least a millennium, that violence is the cure to the disease. We retaliate. We punish. We seek vengeance – done with permission and in the expectation that it will make things better.

It doesn’t.
...
We are called to stand with Christ in that place between our violence and our victims. Sometimes that means standing between our own ego, which wants to retaliate – and our Christ-nourished soul, which yearns for humanity’s full freedom. We have had many examples of prophets and saints who have stood in that place – Mahatma Gandhi, Desmond Tutu, Martin Luther King, Jr.; and I would add my college music professor Henry and my sister Andrea. Their words and actions -- by intention, instinct or grace, have helped to provide us – for an instant or a lifetime, with a vision of freedom.

Of course, the Religious Right would not agree. Sometimes I wonder if they read the same Bible I do.