Violence Begets Violence
By REY FLORES
Is it me or is violence becoming more prevalent across our society? Is it because most people have a cell phone nowadays with a camera and are able to share these ever-increasing acts of violence across cyberspace on social media? Perhaps it’s a little of both, but it’s definitely a lot more violence.
For the past six months, there has been a constant stream of beheadings and mass executions of Christians, all caught on video for the world to see. What kind of sick people not only commit these crimes, but videotape them as if it was their kid’s little league game?
Just in the past week I have watched videos of what appears to be a three year- old boy hanging by his neck; a supposedly Christian man tied to a board and being roasted alive like a pig and a woman buried up to her neck, being pelted by stones and blocks of concrete as big as a football.
I seriously do not look for or enjoy watching these sick displays of inhumanity , but as they cross through my news feed on different social media and my emails, I cannot ignore them.
It’s always terrible to hear of people being killed in such violent ways, but when it is women, children, or religious, it is especially heartbreaking, at least to me.
In the African nation of Burundi, three Catholic missionary nuns were murdered and allegedly raped prior to being killed. What makes the crime more heinous is that all three nuns were all elderly; the youngest one would have turned 76 the day after she was murdered.
The above aforementioned atrocities all took place on foreign soil, but violence has no borders. Just last week, I also saw a few videos shot here in the United States that sent chills up my spine.
The one that shocked me most was a video of a mob of youths running wild in a Kroger’s grocery store parking lot in Memphis, Tennessee, and at one point grabbing one of the store’s employees who was mercilessly assaulted by the group.
As the young man lay in a fetal position trying to cover his head, several thugs kicked him in the head and picked up full sized pumpkins from a store display and proceeded to throw them as hard as they could on the employee’s head.
I think most of us are familiar with how heavy a pumpkin can get, so imagine having one of those things slammed on your head repeatedly while lying already injured on the ground. One of the cold-blooded participants videotaping the attack can be heard yelling “ooh, look, they got a white dude!” all the while laughing about the whole incident.
The most frightening aspect of all of this violence is that much of it is being committed because of our differences in race or religion. Apparently we have moved on and away from trying to have civilized interactions with each other as human beings.
Today, we are in a collective societal digression where we settle our differences with anger, hate, and a weapon. Whether the weapon be our fists, a knife, or even a pumpkin, the sin and the act of murder was already committed in our hearts the minute we hated the person.
Is there a hope for peace?
With Jesus Christ, there is always hope for peace and reconciliation, but we must seek it out first. We must love God to truly know how to love one another. Why would we love one another when we cannot stand each other and want to kill each other over just about any reason?
When Cain killed his brother Abel, right then and there we had our blueprint on how to settle our differences. Violence begets violence. Murder the unborn in his mother’s womb and we’ve already lost our minds. Why would any human life matter after that?
Yes, we must seek peace always. We must make sacrifices, pray and fast, and receive Holy Communion as often as possible. We must make amends and end the violence in our own hearts and even the violence we practice on ourselves when we stress, when we eat too much or eat too much of a bad thing. We kill ourselves when we abuse our medications or when we drink too much.
How do we expect others to respect us and not kill us when we don’t respect ourselves and kill ourselves in so many ways?
If it isn’t a machete attack on Chicago public transportation like there was last week, or if it isn’t the latest race-based hate crime; what will it be next week? Will it be a major act of terrorism on a geopolitical scale or will it be yet another liquor store owner being robbed and killed in any given American city?
Will the violent videos documenting rape, murder, and beheadings fill the internet cyberspace with more ultra-violence next week? Will there be more of it?
While we cannot predict what others will do, whether it’s an act of road rage, a hate crime, or simply murder in the first degree, what we can do is act upon the goodness left in our world and pray for each other.
Take courage and act like the human beings God made, you and me, in His own image and likeness. If we hate each other, than we also hate God.
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(Rye Flores is a Catholic writer and speaker and be contacted at reyfloresusa@gmail.com.)
