Violence

A woman is walking down a street in Crown Heights, Brooklyn and is savagely beaten by three adult males.  They steal her cell phone, her money and leave her laying on the street with a broken nose.  There is a video from ABC news of New York.

http://7online.com/uncategorized/raw-video-woman-assaulted-robbed-in-crown-heights/358023/

That's the website for the video.  Be warned it is raw, heart wrenching and inflammatory.  Inflammatory for me because after seeing the video my first impulse was revenge of the most horrific kind.  Capital punishment by physical beating was my first thought.  The fact that I will be, through my tax dollars, buying these guys lunch for years to come seemed insane.  As crazy as the fact that I have been buying lunch for Charles Manson since 1971.
 
The level of violence in the world has repercussions for all of us in ways we can never fully grasp.  Street violence is the most visceral.  It is the most frightening, the most difficult to accept and to understand.  The violence of nature, a tsunami in thailand is heart wrenching and explainable.  The violence in the Middle East is frightening but historically explained and there is always hope it will end.  [There have been no overt physical assaults on Israel from Egypt since the Camp David accord.]
 
I'm a liberal, literate, well-educated, relatively well-informed cosmopolitan resident of a great metropolis.  First and foremost you [well, actually you will have to speak for yourself] I will never become inured to violence.  There are shocking instances: the video of the assault in Crown Heights, war in the middle east, and natural violence like a tornado.  I just shocked myself when I wrote natural violence, but it's true. Violence is in nature, in our culture, our movies, our TV, our sports, on our streets and our homes.

Violence will always be a part of Nature.  Will it always be a part of human nature.

I'll never forget going to the movies with an army buddy.  We became friends in basic training at Fort Gordon, Georgia.  He was the company clerk and was from Georgia.  We were watching a typical good guys versus bad guys movie of the mid 60's, probably a western.  When the good guys got the upper hand and forcibly seized control, my friend lost control.  He jumped up in his seat and cheered.  He screamed: "Kill 'em".
He was a black man.  He was in his early 20s and was born and raised in Georgia.  This was 1966.  Was his response as natural as a tornado? As explainable as the wars in the Middle East?  Is violence preventable?

The attackers of the woman walking down the street in Crown Heights were Black men and the woman appears to be white. Is that assault a product of the violence against blacks in 1950's Georgia?  What is the root of the kind of violence that leads adults to such unprovoked, horrific, physical assaults on strangers?  I mean both the violence that night in Crown Heights and the violence in Georgia in the 1950's.

From the U.S. Department of Justice:
51.9% of woman
66.4% of men
report being assaulted as a child by an adult caretaker.

Think of Adrian Peterson, the Viking football running back who beat his son with a "switch" and admits to having a "whooping" room in his home.  The story with photos of the injuries is on line.

Again from the U.S. Department of Justice:
21.6% of women report
being raped before the age of 12

32.4%
were raped between 12 and 17

1.3 million adult women &
835,000 adult men
report being assaulted by an intimate partner.

Human violence is a learned behavior.  We know this, but  because of our own experience with violence we know its power.  And so we, I mean I, maybe you, respond to violence with violence.