How We Reply to Violence

There is an old line the internet attributes to Albert Einstein that goes something like this: "Problems can never be solved by the way of thinking that first created them."

If not Einstein, maybe it was Mark Twain, ancient Greek poet Sappho, or a World History teacher in Boise who said it. To the author, whomever you are, thank you.

In modern times, we’d say you can’t fight fire with fire. And still, how often do humans do just that?

Get cut off in traffic, then cut someone else off. See politicians acting angrily, get angry at them. Get punched, punch back harder. One country attacks another, the other attacks right back.

Nature has told us for ions that fire can’t put out fire. But water can.

Destruction can’t end destruction. But creation can.

Militaries can’t end wars. But diplomacy can.

So when it comes to violence - which we are far too familiar with - how are we to respond? How are we to make known our horror, anger, grief? And how can we make our actions the beginning of the end of violence?

"Between stimulus and response there is a space,” wrote Viktor Frankl. "In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

There is so much untapped possibility in our response to violence.

After President Kennedy was assassinated, conductor Leonard Bernstein wrote his grief down on a yellow legal pad:

“This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more devotedly, more beautifully than ever before.”

We humans are mortal, but we carry something of the immortal in us - love, belief, grace, those forces with impact that can outlive and outlast us. That cannot be assasinated, destroyed, erased.

As Pablo Neruda - or Walt Disney or James Baldwin, depending on which part of the internet you ask - wrote, “You can cut down all the flowers, but you can’t stop springtime from coming.”

I have often believed that the worst of times can bring out the best of us, the immortal in us. Our love for those we walk alongside, our belief in a world we cannot yet see, our grace that can transform both the receiver and the giver, may we bring those to our response to violence. And in so doing, move towards freedom from it.