I’ve been quiet for the last few weeks mostly because I felt
I had an emotion overload and needed to pause for a moment. Within that time many people have been shot,
killed, and injured due to violence here in Chicago but as I scan through the newspapers
and tweets I am interested in people’s choice of words and phrases. The one that catches my eye the most is when
people say “they died in senseless violence…” do people understand what they
are saying? We cannot make an excuse for
it and say ‘well you know what I mean’ because when people say these things in
a moment of anger or sadness it is what they truly feel.
If we look at the word “senseless” the
definition for it is: destitute or
deprived of sensation; unconscious.
So the statement is saying that someone died in the middle of an
unconscious moment of violence, would it have been better if they died in a
moment of conscious violence? I know it
doesn’t sound right but that is what the statement of “senseless violence” is
implying.
Most of the people (there are others) I have read about or
watched say a statement like this have been people in an impoverished, gang, or
drug type of community or Pastors. Why
is that? The neighborhood I grew up in was a blue collar community and we had
our gangs but rarely drugs until the mid to late 1980’s. In 1989 we moved
further North into a higher income community but with a higher rate of racism
from the community, school, and the police. I didn’t go back too much to the community I grew up in but by 1994 I
was back in that community and in other poor communities working on reducing
violence. So it hasn’t been until very
recent times that I have not been either living and/or hanging out in some of
these communities and I feel out of place and out of touch. But it has given me the opportunity to rewind
my thoughts and feelings about what I experienced.
Most of the people that I’ve known over these years were
people that have had hard lives either by choice (in their older age) or
because “it is what it is” and that’s where the phrase “senseless violence”
lives within these communities. In a
community where the city government has forgotten (by choice I believe) to
service, where the board of Education doesn’t think that the school needs new
books or windows, where Churches view the area residents as “devils” it is
common to see violence as a way of life.
Not because they are monsters but because people are fighting to survive
on a daily basis. In a community that is lacking the very basic of human
needs and rights you have to do what you have to do to survive so violence is
born in these sorts of environments.
So
as people have grown accustom to seeing violence the feeling that some of it might
make sense is not uncommon. They might
have witnessed what can be seen as positive results from violence being inflicted on
the local store owner that was over charging certain customers. They might have seen the local bully get beat
up because he took advantage of a disabled person and the Brothers out on the
street took care of it after calls to the police went unanswered.
In all of this you have Pastors in local churches that
witness some of these events as well and they try to help but place the
condition of “You MUST accept Jesus Christ as your Savior” before any real help
is dished out. Not all of these pastors
say that or imply it but some of them that have large congregations start to
walk around like a chief of their own gang when they come out of their
churches. When the Brothers on the
street see this they tend to check up on these pastors to see if they truly are
a chief or are just trying to walk a walk they shouldn’t be walking. Most if not all of these pastors fail quickly
in the presence of these Brothers because they don’t have the heart that these
Brothers do in terms of being secure in their role. So when these pastors fail they become
submissive to the despair that flows through that community and plug into the matrix of “it is what it is.”
When these Pastors accept that they just became part of the
system that accepts that there is a level of violence that makes “sense” and
that is truly an unconscious thought.
We cannot think that a level of violence is acceptable in
our society because someone will start to place standards on whom, what, and
where that violence is acceptable and chances are that it won’t be the people
that the violence will affect…but has someone already done so?
What is a sensible act of violence, can you tell me?
Peace/AMOR
Gerardo
