Another perspective on violence
Creation started with a big bang, not a big hug: violence is part of the pattern. The damage of violence is minimised when it is distributed throughout a system rather than centralised into the hands of a few powerful people and their minions. If you live a life without violence you are living an illusion, outsourcing your conflict to unseen powers and detonating it in areas beyond your living space. Most of the southern hemisphere is receiving that outsourced violence to supply what you need for the clean, technological, peaceful spaces of your existence. The poor zoned into the ghettoes of your city are taking those blows for you, as are the economically marginalised who fill your prisons. The invisible privilege of your techno-cratic, one-sided peacefulness is an act of violence. Your peace-medallion bling is sparkling with blood diamonds.
You carry pillaged metals in your phone from devastated African lands and communities. Your notions of peaceful settlement and development are delusions peppered with bullet holes and spears.
Violence exists and it must be carefully structured within rituals governed by the patterns of creation and the laws of sustainable cultures derived from those patterns.
Violence employed in these highly interdependent and controlled frameworks serves to bring spirit into balance and hold in check the shadow of the I-am-greater-than deception. Every organism in existence does violence, and benefits from it in reciprocal relationships.
Duck hunting results in duck death. Yam digging results in the death of equally sentient plants. Abusing your partner results in a spear through the leg. Hunting stingray can make you into dinner for a tiger shark. Domesticated being so stripped of this reality and become passive recipients of violence – either it’s benefits or it’s cruel impact. They devolve as a result.