Flashpost: American Violence - Anomaly or Pattern

I am going to regret this in a day - but I am about to say something that will probably be surprising coming from me, but again as someone who spends my entire life knee deep in American history, I need to say it.

Nothing stops me in my tracks more than when something violent happens in our country and anyone says, "This is not who we are." Perhaps it is not who we want to be, but like America's entire existence is built on violence - political violence, social violence, economic violence, environmental violence, sexual violence, and racial violence.

It is EXACTLY who we are:

Enslavement.

Forced Breeding.

The Revolution.

The Trail of Tears.

The Civil War.

Lynching.

Hiroshima.

Tulsa.

Japanese Internment Camps.

The Civil Rights Movement.

Hurricane Katrina.

Ferguson.

Sandy Hook.

UVA.

Pulse Nightclub.

Alligator Alcatraz.

To name a few. Of course, whatever your ideology or worldview shapes what amount of violence and which kinds of violence are justified or not, but to say that unqualified violence is not who we are - its just historically inaccurate.

When I was in college, I took a capstone class my senior year where we had to interrogate how our faith fit into our politics. One of the subjects we covered was what we thought about violence. When I started that class, I considered myself a personal pacifist and while I still think that frames my own actions in the world, I am less righteous about the actions of others.

Perhaps, I am too desensitized or perhaps the sheer amount of violence and hate that we have access to on a daily has made me less naive - I am honestly not sure. I still hope for a non-violent world but I am just not sure what that looks like.

Can you have non-violence in a Nation-state that depends on violence to survive? Can you have non-violence in place where property rights matter more than human rights?

I don't know. It's hard out here folks, so do what you need to find peace and try to turn off the news.