Responses
I have been thinking about how we as individuals and we as a culture choose to respond to pain and to violence.
I am wondering if those responses have fundamentally changed across the world in the last 10 years. I am thinking of things like the Peace Wall in Peckham in the wake of the riots, and Norway's Rose March after the bombing and massacre.
There is something moving about a society spontaneously responding to violence with acts of peace rather than acts of vengeance. It feels as if our culture is learning something. It's a slow learn, it's a halting realization, but it is growing, one response at a time.
I hope that responses to violence have also changed in the US in those same 10 years, but I am not sure I have seen the same visual evidence of that. Hard to say. I suppose the President of the US almost breaking down at a town hall meeting in the wake of the Gabrielle Gifford massacre and the lack of the immediate falling into party lines/gun control argument restarting could be one of those signs.
I still wish we had been wise enough, as a nation, to have formulated a less violent response to violence dealt to us 10 years ago.
I am wondering if those responses have fundamentally changed across the world in the last 10 years. I am thinking of things like the Peace Wall in Peckham in the wake of the riots, and Norway's Rose March after the bombing and massacre.
There is something moving about a society spontaneously responding to violence with acts of peace rather than acts of vengeance. It feels as if our culture is learning something. It's a slow learn, it's a halting realization, but it is growing, one response at a time.
I hope that responses to violence have also changed in the US in those same 10 years, but I am not sure I have seen the same visual evidence of that. Hard to say. I suppose the President of the US almost breaking down at a town hall meeting in the wake of the Gabrielle Gifford massacre and the lack of the immediate falling into party lines/gun control argument restarting could be one of those signs.
I still wish we had been wise enough, as a nation, to have formulated a less violent response to violence dealt to us 10 years ago.