Yesterday we were leaving a home after a St. Vincent De Paul home visit when I saw a sticker on the outside of the window in the first float flat. The picture of the gun with “We don’t dial 911 made me think of quote that Thomas Merton wrote in 1968 about violence in our American culture. He said:
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“The real focus of American violence is not in esoteric groups but in the very culture itself, its mass media, its extreme individualism and competitiveness, its inflated myths of virility and toughness, and its overwhelming preoccupation with the power of nuclear, chemical, bacteriological, and psychological overkill. If we live in what is essentially a culture of overkill, how can we be surprised at finding violence in it? Can we get to the root of the trouble? In my opinion, the best way to do it would have been the classic way of religious humanism and non-violence exemplified by Gandhi. That way seems now to have been closed. I do not find the future reassuring,”’‘ — (Thomas Merton edited with an introduction by Gordon C. Zahn (Boston, MA: McCall’s Publishing Company, 1971), p. 230
Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, who lived away from the world, had enough insight to describe how violence is embedded in our culture. Our President sends ”Killer Drones” to assassinate people all over the world. Child soldiers in Africa and American university students are conditioned to kill without conscience or thought. Our country sheriff encourages people to buy guns to protect themselves as well as the sources mentioned by Merton in the quote.
Violence begets Violence, Faith and Violence are incompatible, killing leads to more killing, we are numbed to violence in our American culture are easy to say but what are we, or can we, do about it. Wisdom leaders like Dorothy Day or Martin Luther King Jr. that ending violence in our culture starts with us. Dorothy Days says: “The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?”
“We all know the destructive power of violence but some of us need to learn the healing power of nonviolence not just in words but in heart, mind and action. Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.” (Martin Luther King, Jr.)
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