benlehman

This whole rant is apropos of this thread on the Forge. Ron has this bit where he says this:


I'm talking about the straightforward and undeniable observation that asserting one's position through violence is absolutely required in real life. No ifs. No arguments. No possible bullshit denials. We all know that "finding one's warrior" is part of living life - the alternative is living in some form of fear.

Yes, pacifists too. That's a matter of finding someone who will be the warrior for you. Without machine guns emplaced somewhere, no Mother Theresa.


I'm not going to mince words around this. This is macho bullshit in its purest form.

The opposite of fear is not violence. The opposite of fear is courage. That is what it means to find your "warrior within" and, frankly, if you need violence to do that, you are one pitiful sunnuvabitch. Courage isn't violence, and to confuse the two is to make yourself and every other man into a monster. More often than not, violence is cowardice.

Or, as I said in Vincent's post, I just can't bring myself to call a Quaker any less of a man.

Something I should clarify -- I am not a pacifist. We are not perfect people, we do not live in a perfect world. There may be a time when I will need to perform some act of violence, and I'm probably not even going to hesitate about it if I need it. But damned if I'm going to mistake that weakness for manliness, or that cowardice for courage.

Courage is about a lot of things which people mistake violence for -- it is about striving, about struggle, about confrontation, about difficulty, and about pain. Courage is the ability to look through the confusion of a desperate situation and see with perfect moral and rational clarity the right thing to do. Courage is having the will to do the right thing, even if it means your life, even if it means someone else's life. And not a scrap of that has anything to do with the wretched, miserable impulse to hurt other people and make yourself feel big.

Cowardice is courage's opposite, with all that entails. It is retreating from the right path because it is too hard, less fun, difficult to see. It is about giving into the suffering of life, not striving, about backing away from confrontation, about backstabbing, about avoiding pain, about purposefully clouding your own moral vision so that you can say "I didn't know" when they come to lay the blame. Cowardice is about doing the easy thing, even if it means your life, even if it means someone else's life. And that often has an awful lot to do with the wretched, miserable impulse to hurt other people and make yourself feel big.

Mother Theresa didn't walk the streets of Calcutta untouched because the crooks were afraid of someone else's machine gun emplacements, and to say that is an insult. She walked the streets of Calcutta because other people, even thugs, could see in her rightness, propriety, a sense of purpose and a sense of holy dignity that they could never violate. The Quakers didn't live in peace because of the Puritan's massacres and the Southerner's slavery, but in spite of them and opposed to them. Ghandi didn't have a militia backing him up, just a sense of human dignity, a helluva good organizational talent, some charisma, and the courage to never back down from the right path.

To say otherwise is a cowardly lie, and I will not stand it from anyone.

To be courageous is to live with moral certainty. To be a coward is to live in fear.

Sometimes, the most courageous thing to do is to take the hit. Sometimes, it is to get up and walk away as fast as you can. Sometimes, it is to say what they want you to say. Sometimes it is to pull the trigger. Sometimes it is to not pull the trigger. Sometimes it is to embrace the other man. Sometimes it is the say "I love you still." Sometimes it is to say "I will not countenance this." Sometime it is to just sit there and take it. Sometimes it is to cry uncle. Sometimes, it is to cry.

It's complicated, contextual.

But it has fuck to do with violence.