Contemplating violence
Every human makes mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes are weighty and have serious consequences.
However, there is a difference between making a mistake and perpetrating an act of intentional violence.
There is a difference between losing our minds temporarily – having a brain snap – and being relentlessly, deliberately cruel and violent.
When I was in my twenties, a person who had been my fiancé invited me to the house we had bought to discuss separation. He then attempted to rape me. It was a brain snap, completely uncharacteristic. It only required me screaming and the neighbours calling out for his brain snap to end, and contrition and shame to take hold.
I knew he had lost his senses for a moment.
When I was a young mother, I remember a day when I was so exhausted, so frustrated and at the end of my tether with my baby daughter that I looked into the abyss of enacting violence. I was one heartbeat away from losing it. It was only through a miracle that I pulled myself back from the act.
Tell me you have not been there? So close to doing something – speaking words of violence and hate, or raising a fist?
Or perhaps you actually crossed that threshold.
Perhaps your violence was through disconnection, silence, coldness, ridicule? Are these acts not violent when people use silence and refusal as weapons with deliberate intention?
To know our capacity for violence is to face our shadow. It is only through facing our shadow that we can know it, and in knowing it, hold the reins on our capacity for violence.
We live in a world of culturally accepted violence. People denied access to health care, dignity, the rule of law, and justice. People targeted for being different. The policy makers and politicians are never penalised. Instead, they profit.
Almost every Western country has been built on violence, and still profits from it.
Exploitation and colonisation of people of lesser means with fewer laws to protect them.
Intentional, deliberate, systemic and individual violence must be taken seriously. And it cannot be that one group gets protection from the law and can get away with anything, while the other groups are bound by law yet have no protection.
Making a mistake and losing it – paying the penalty for our mistake and learning the lesson, is different from a deliberately, intentionally violent act. In these cases, wisdom would forgive.
For the person who made the mistake is me and you. But one breath away.
Photo Taken September 11th 2025, Article published September 11th, 2025
