On Violence: My Gut Tells Me It's Not Natural.

My brain tells me it's not entertainment.

Source: Mother Jones

In my entire long life I’ve only seen one person being struck by someone who meant to hurt them. Only one, and I was nine years old when it happened. I saw a father strike a boy—a beautiful boy around 13 years old, a boy I knew through our families, a boy who seemed enchanted, as if his dark eyes, his full mouth, his Italian curls, his luminous olive skin, were too beautiful for any human being—and when that father struck him the skin on his upper lip burst and it bled. And I cried.

But not before I yelled, “Stop!” My mother grabbed me and pulled me away as I tried to run toward them. I sobbed, my heart in pieces, and nothing my mother could do would make me stop crying. I embarrassed her in front of that father and the others who saw what I saw and then went on with the party, as if nothing of any interest to them had been crushed and spoiled.

I watched that boy crumple and fight back tears and something in me shattered, even at nine years old. It created a path I would have to follow for the rest of my life. I feel the pain for others as if it were my own, and sometimes it’s so acute I have to turn away.

I remember that scene vividly, though it happened 80 years ago. I remember it, I know now, because I’ve never felt that kind of fear or degradation personally. I can’t relate to it in any way. I can’t understand it enough to analyze it or associate with it. I know there aren’t many who can say the same. We live in a world where life is dangerous and unfair, even in our own families. But this is how it was—and is—with me.

Parents can be cruel, partners can be cruel. friends can be cruel, and strangers can be cruel. We hear the stories every day. The violence to body and soul lives with the victims long after the events. They’re scarred by it and it often takes years of hard work to get over, if it’s possible to ever get over it.

I think about it often and wonder then how our society can know this and still find entertainment in, say, horror movies. In movies where torture is a theme, where pain is deliberate, where blood gushes and closeups of faces in agony are expected and even considered artistic. The lead-up to the abuse is a part of the set up—to scare us, to titillate us, to make us feel what the victim might be feeling as they anticipate what’s ahead for them. Horror movies are meant to be participatory. Theater audiences scream with gusto.

I don’t watch movies like that, but I’m exposed to them all the same. Scenes pop up everywhere. Photos of blood and gore are common. I have friends and family who love horror movies, the scarier the better. I wonder about them, I really do, but I love them so I have to assume this is normal. I’m the odd one here.

I wonder, too, how the ease with which the public can accept cruelty as entertainment hasn’t inured them to the kind of cruelty we’re facing now in our own government. I’m appalled by it. Sickened. Shaken. It’s not right. It’s not normal. It shouldn’t happen. But here we are, and half the population sees nothing wrong with it. There has to be an explanation for that, and we tend to want to believe it’s the years of vicious propaganda thrust on us by Fox News, et al. But not all of us have succumbed. What is it about the people who do?

What is in their nature that would lead them to embrace the kind of violence where living, breathing human beings are being harmed or even killed by government actions that could have been and should have been avoided? We’re in a place now where the stories of abuse are so common we can’t keep up. We keep hoping for a satisfying ending, but this isn’t a theater and we can’t just walk out into the sunshine, leaving behind whatever we felt in that darkened space.

We’re divided by those feelings as much as we are by party, by color, by gender, by our origins. That’s what throws us now. Those of us who fight against this regime find ourselves fighting against the people who support them, many of them friends and family. They fight against us in order to maintain the hold this regime has on the country. We don’t understand them and they don’t understand us.

We’re at an impasse that seems impossible, given the harm we see being done without any resistance from leaders who gain enormous power by keeping citizens misinformed and fearful. Greed is the underlying factor, but cruelty is the point. Without the cruelty they wouldn’t stand a chance. No evil system was ever built without violence. They mean to crush us and they will if we let them.

Can we call it what it is? Can we afford to sidestep that one feature of any deadly dictatorial regime—the cruelty? I see us laughing at Trump and his henchmen, making fun of their looks, their thoughts, their mumbling, their stumbling, triumphing every time they get caught even slightly—as if, again, we need to be entertained by them in order to get through this and breathe a little. But their meanness isn’t funny. They get off on it. They will not stop, even when they pretend to take offense and threaten lawsuits and jail time for speaking out against them. It’s a power play. They don’t care what we think. They are supervillains. This is what they do, and now they do it out in the open. If they were really afraid of us they would hide their evil deeds. Instead, they flaunt them.

They are not afraid of us and they should be. We go after them for everything but their horrific cruelty. That should be uppermost in our efforts to stop them, but we shy away from it, just as I do, and maybe for the same reasons. We can’t handle the thought that deliberately setting out to harm another human being is the plan. It goes against our morality, our sense of decency, and therefore it must be an anomaly rather than a goal. It must be a temporary glitch in a culture that doesn’t allow cruelty and violence and has, in fact, put protections in place to avoid just such events.

We count on election cycles to fix it. We expect the workings of our 250-year-old government will kick into action any day now and will right itself. But we’re not safe. This doesn’t look temporary anymore. It’s getting worse instead of better. Our constitution can’t save us if the politicians in control won’t adhere to it. They’re turning our own armies against us. ICE is our Gestapo. The Supreme Court majority has caved. The lower courts fight battles they should win easily. Thousands of government workers have been fired simply because they might do the right thing and follow the rules.

This is anarchy. This is violence. This is cruelty. This is horror. This is real life. We can no longer pretend it isn’t. We can’t close our eyes to this and pretend it isn’t happening. I’ve come to terms with it and my emphasis from now on must be on the brutality, even though it goes against everything I’ve tried to avoid.

It’s time.

Constant Commoner revolves around my thoughts as a woman who has aged and grown and learned by a process that feels miraculous considering I have no formal education or unique abilities. We the people are all commoners. We believe based on our own past and our own feelings. We choose a path we can live with and if we’re lucky we get to share our lives with people who care, who understand.

That’s what I aim to do here. I want to build a community where anyone can come and sit on our porch and grow along with the rest of us.

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