First, I want to continue the last paragraph from my previous post about Violence. It was about turning the other cheek. I asked you to imagine what would happen with a healthy regular person when they hit you and you instead of hitting them back stop, look them straight in the eye without fear or aggression, but with a question “and now what?” He or she had hit you with an emotion because of feeling of powerlessness, that was all they could do, but you stopped and didn’t allow the violence to continue. Your behavior deflated the emotion.
I remember one day I came home crying. It was not just crying it was weeping, I couldn’t stop. Now, after 50 years past, I don’t even remember what happened that day. My mom met me at the door and followed me to the kitchen where I laid my head on the table and proceeded weeping uncontrollably. She was running around trying to do something to help me. Suddenly she grabbed a plate gave it to me and said break it and I did. I smashed the poor porcelain plate on the heavy duty tile floor when my mother was ready with the next plate. I took the plate and stopped. We both were laughing. She said that it was nothing to cry about if it only took one plate. And we started to clean the floor. The incident was completely forgotten but the lesson stayed with me. I never needed to break any porcelain plate again to come down my strong emotions.
I understand that we all are different and many of us will need more plates to break before we learn to control our emotions. I wrote that to show that a regular person, not a sadist, will not hit you again, you are not just a porcelain plate.
In my first post I wrote that violence, almost always, is a result of powerlessness and I gave examples of a parent who can’t control the kid uses violence to stay in control as well as a toddler will kick his powerful mother when feeling absolutely powerless in getting what he wants. We can observe how the relationship with violence changes within each of us during our life time. This little baby who was kicking his mother grows up into a big and strong person who never uses violence against women as an adult or the kid who was bitten by his father grows into a person who believes that violence will help him to solve all his life problems and the one who is physically stronger is always right. The experiences that we had in our lives build our opinions.
Next I really wanted to observe the entire humankind growth and change in its relationship with violence. Too many of us, especially religious people, have a tendency to believe that humans do not change. Our life changes due to the growth of technology, but morally and emotionally we still are as good as another cave man. I can’t agree with that.
When I was 27 or 28 I decided to read The Bible. Since I was into Judaism at that time I was especially interested in the First 5 Books of Old Testament, which are actually The Torah. I was so impressed with the book that I proceeded to read on, but lost all my interest reading about all those wars and started skipping pages and books until I ran into The Ecclesiastes. I didn’t know then that there was an author, it was written by King Solomon, the son of King David. They both were real people and those words were their real thoughts. When you think about it, at first, you will admire how wise King Solomon was, how similar his thinking is to what you think about when you are young; and how little humans changed since the Ecclesiastes was written about 3000 years ago. That what I would think later, but at 28, I was so disappointed reading that life is vanity and that everything returns to square one, I quitted reading The Bible for a long while. Most of us are searching for the meaning of life at that age and reading that there is no meaning is extremely disappointing.
It took me many years to find peace with the fact that the ancient people were as smart and intelligent as we are now. I realized that many ideas that I considered my own had been discussed and written about by others who lived long ago, some of them lived long before Jesus Christ came into the picture. In spite of all of those realizations I still believe that we, as all humans, as humankind, still growing morally and emotionally, the process is so slow that it's hard to notice. King Solomon was old and disappointed man when he wrote his Ecclesiastes, but he still gives us hope that the Sun will rise again tomorrow and we should continue with our trip ahead. Karl Marx gave us another hope when he said that humankind is still in its infancy.
In spite of so many scientific and technological problems we, humans, are facing now that need to be solved fast; we’re also facing more and more moral problems that we used to hide from in the past. It was considered bad manners “to wash your dirty linen in public”. Today we are learning how open and transparent discussion can help you solve so many problems with your laundry. I believe that this transparency will be the key to moral and emotional growth of humankind into adulthood. I want to use violence as an example to observe the moral growth of the humankind during the last 7000 years or so. I will use some words and events from the Five Books of Moses, Jesus Christ, Gandhi, Mandela, and Martin L. King. Hopefully, I’ll write about that tomorrow.
