Violence Is Not and Never Has Been an Option
We can learn more from our failures than from anything else
“We all fail in life. The question is: How do we respond to our failures?
“And the answer is that we must respond peacefully, with character, by recognizing that we may be doing some things wrong and that we may need to reconfigure our lives.”
I wrote those words in November 2019 following a mass shooting in Santa Clarita, Calif.
Those words come from a Thrive Global piece that I published that month and year, a piece that was titled, “Violence Is Not an Option.”
Violence has never been an option.
This has always been true.
We have lost too many souls to violence, to nihilism, to a fatalistic sense of hopelessness.
What every one of us should know is that it is okay to have setbacks in life, but we must respond to those setbacks with character and peacefully, as I wrote six years ago in my Thrive Global piece.
In that piece, I mentioned that sometimes we all feel like failures.
There is no doubt that we all fail in life. We are all human.
In that Thrive Global article, I cited Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player in history, as someone who learned from his own failures, when, for instance, he got cut from his varsity basketball team in high school, before he transmuted this seeming failure into a blessing.
Jordan regrouped, improved his attitude and his game, and became a champion at the University of North Carolina and with the Chicago Bulls.
I also cited Steve Jobs, who dropped out of Reed College and left Apple, before he came back and created products that helped to change the world.
Both Michael Jordan and Steve Jobs learned from failure and ended up succeeding after they delved deeply into their souls, changed for the better and enriched all of our lives.
Again, we all fail in life. And we do so all the time.
But when we fail, when we lose a job, or lose a friendship, or fail a class in school, or get dropped by a loved one, the solution is not to react with violence.
In my Thrive Global piece from November 2019, I added, “Some people, young and old, may believe that their lives are ruined because they have a small number of followers on social media, a small number of friends in real life, poor job prospects, a broken marriage, a broken family, no girlfriend.”
When we face the truth about our lives, we might conclude, as I wrote earlier, that sometimes we are doing something wrong.
And one of the things that we may be doing wrong is that we put too much emphasis on metrics and on other values that are shallow and even toxic.
It is clearly the case that we are facing many crises right now, such as the looming threat of A.I., climate change, fading job prospects, an economy that is declining, higher prices for food and gasoline and medicine, as well as a wannabe dictator who is trying to muzzle us, who is trying to deny us freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press.
Yet, as I have written before, there is hope.
Viktor Frankl, who survived the Holocaust, pointed out that hope resides within our souls. No one can take away the love inside us. No one can take away our free will. No one can take away our spirit.
I believe very deeply in God. And this helps me a great deal.
But even if people do not believe in God, we can all summon the love within us to stay away from the shallowness and toxicity of social media and to limit our cell phone usage, as I wrote years ago, in August 2010, in a piece titled “Reading With or Without Depression.”
In that piece for the HuffPost, I noted that a Kaiser Family Foundation study had pointed out that children aged 8-18 spent more than 7 hours on electronic activity every day, which I imagine has only increased in the past 15 years, as newfangled technologies like A.I. have become more popular.
In my August 2010 HuffPost piece, I wrote, “How, in the age of Facebook, Twitter and text-messaging, will kids find time to read, let alone sleep? And when I say read, I mean sentences, not fragments, the idiom that pervades many of the new technologies.”
Many of us, young and old, seem to have lost the ability to communicate clearly.
As a people, we no longer seem to have critical thinking skills because we have, in many cases, stopped reading literature and quality news publications.
I wrote another piece on a related subject for the HuffPost in March 2011, a piece that was titled “‘Facebook Depression’: Do You Have It?”
In that piece, I pointed out, “Kids…need to be taught the value of real, palpable friendship, the kind that you can only forge through offline contact with another individual.”
What I wrote of kids is true of children of all ages.
We all need to interact in a healthy fashion with real human beings, not A.I. chatbots and not virtual friends or followers.
The more we interact with actual human beings, the more socialized we will become and the less violent.
If I can return to the issue of literacy, we all can benefit from reading literature and the newspapers of record, preferably offline.
When we do so, we will not only develop a greater degree of empathy for other people; we will also develop more of an inner life.
Reading literature and the newspapers of record also helps us to stay engaged with the world and with others in a more responsible and civil manner.
If I am remembering correctly, Harold Bloom wrote years ago in The Daemon Knows that reading literature “helps to prevent violence,” whether directed within or without.
Bloom, of course, was right.
Reading literature can indeed soothe us and transport us into an imaginative realm, while it strengthens our character and hopefully gives us wisdom.
At this time of many crises, some of which seem existential, we need to listen to other prophets, too, like the Rev. Martin Luther King.
And we should heed his words.
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”