an encouragement towards peace in these violent days

It’s been a week. Earlier this week there was another assassination attempt. Then, handheld devices started exploding in Lebanon. Recently their was another mass shooting in a school too. Every we look we see violence. Modern culture (probably every culture?) seems steeped in it. I can’t help but think: shouldn’t we be better than this?

Violence is such a visceral response to anything that it is only able to truly beget itself. People oppress with violence leading to people responding with violence leading to further violent oppression (and so on). It’s a never ending cycle, whether we are talking nations or bullies at school or whatever other violent situation that plagues us.

Let’s take the handheld device-turned-bombs situation. ==The war on terrorism isn’t won by becoming objects of terror ourselves.== People might think that they can “kill all the terrorists” or whatever but in actuality it only further perpetuates the terrorism (mostly by radicalizing bystanders, honestly). To be crystal clear (hopefully): if this sort of violence is the only solution we are willing to entertain for a problem like terrorism then we are all f*cked and the earth is just going to give out underneath us in a giant mushroom cloud one of these days. While the above specific circumstances apply to Israel, the US has done some really terrible things that have caused some really terrible collateral damage so I say this as much about us as Israel.

I probably out my politic a bit much here but the idea that violence is ever redemptive is a 100% a myth. We should be countering terror not with more terror but engaged, intentional nonviolent acts that turn terror on its head. It is possible and it is effective. Take the example of Bulgaria in WW2:

According to history, the deportation of the 48,000 Jews living in Bulgaria proper was stopped because of the protests of the people. According to wikipedia:

The events that prevented the deportation to extermination camps of about 48,000 Jews in Spring 1943 are termed the “Rescue of the Bulgarian Jews”. The survival rate of the Jewish population in Bulgaria as a result was one of the highest in Axis Europe.

One story that resonates deeply is that of Metropolitan Kyril (a leader in the Orthodox church there). Upon hearing that the trains were coming to transport the Jews to a camp like Auschwitz, he rounded up anyone that would join and marched to the train station where he declared to the SS soldiers that the fate of the Jews would be his fate. I’ve heard some tellings that have him lying on the train tracks. Regardless of those details, it caused an uproar so significant that the nazis left empty-handed.

Imagine if ==all== (or even most) of Europe, starting with the German church, had responded this way?

Where we must resort to it (and I get the appearance of necessity at times), it only serves to prolong that difficult march towards peace we need by planting the seeds of further violence. We shouldn’t revel in it or be so quick to glorify it. I really dislike that the best candidate for president is so quick to say that if someone breaks into their home they are getting shot.

I guess it just boils down to this: ==in these days were blood flows so easily from violent acts, whether necessary or not, lets strive to choose peace and be quick to intentionally seek it whenever and however we can.==