We get the world we agree to

When I was a single mother, my daughter and I were asleep in bed on two occasions when we had home invasions|robberies.

Someone came into our house while we were sleeping to steal.

I determined, after the second home invasion, that I needed to learn to defend myself and my child.

I found someone to teach me self-defence, a wonderful human committed to teaching me to hurt, maim and kill so that I would not be hurt, maimed or killed.

I am a small person in stature, but I rarely feel small.

It was important that my size was never an obstacle.

The majority of the early work I did with my trainer, Bill, was to cross my self and culturally imposed threshold of not hurting, maiming and killing another human.

Women, in particular, are raised to nurture and care for others. The threshold crossing from care to harm is big. And incredibly liberating.

If someone is threatening our safety or the safety of our family, is nonviolence the right response?

I am clear in my ability to harm, maim, and, if necessary, kill.

Many people who find their way to Syntropic World are highly invested in nonviolence. And for the most part, I agree with them. I would choose nonviolence when possible.

Yet to only be nonviolent in a violent world is to become a victim, a supplicant to violence.

We need to talk about violence. As Syntropic Steward leaders, we also need to be able to reconcile our violence, from shades of mild anger, all the way through to our capacity for physical violence, which for so many is terrifying.

Violence is a response to violation – an injury, irreverence, profanation.

To violate is to cross a boundary, a threshold of permission. If there is no consequence to a violation we become party to, and therefore responsible for the violation, with an equal level of responsibility as the violator.

Please read that again. If someone crosses a clear boundary in violation of the codes of that boundary, and we do nothing, we are equally responsible for the consequences as the person who violated the boundary.

We get the world we agree to.

We get the world we agree to.

Which begs the question, what world do you agree to?

Where are your boundaries? How strongly do you hold them?

And what are you prepared to do to defend them against violation and violence?

When we consider our relationship to violence and our ability to be violent, we face our darkness, the stuff we would much rather ignore. Yet ignored darkness has a nasty way of leaking through our pores.

It might do so through passive-aggressive language, innuendo, ridicule, making irrelevant, showing contempt through facial expressions, or words laced with venom and covert manipulation. It might also mean not being direct and specific, not asking for what you want or need, not saying NO! and meaning it.

Straight aggression is far more integrous than passive aggression. Straight aggression is coherent. Passive aggression is masked, manipulative and covert. Passive aggression is dishonest.

Unreconciled violence lives in gaslighting. Deliberately and wilfully manipulating another against their will and consent.

In a world dominated by powerful algorithms, where manipulation and spell-casting are the air we breathe, passivity is foolish and childish. We have to fight – fight – to reclaim our agency.

The lords of the algorithm are the terrifying spider kings who have captured us in their webs. Nonviolence is to be the prey.

Is that the world you want?

We might start with non-violence. But when our world starts legally abducting anyone they do not like off the streets and deporting them to a foreign country gulag, a different type of violence is required.

When the current operating system is hell-bent on destroying our planet, and decades of protest, articles, science, appeals, and various limp-wristed laws are not sufficient, throwing removable paint on symbols is an escalation of violence that does no harm to life. We gasp at these actions, while the real terminal harm violence goes unnoticed again.

I do not propose killing like Luigi. But if they come for me, or my family or friends, I will act with violence. My words will rage. My physical being will rage. I will intend on harm against harm intended on me.

When a government is run by convicted felons, rapists, corrupt officials, serial liars, attorneys general who make up BS stories without batting an eyelid, profiteers and mafia types, when they pander to men who gloat over genocide and annexation, when they threaten annexation, when they have broken the backs of the judiciary and the monopolists to bend to their will, then we the people need to respond with violence.

Violence in our words, in how we speak about what is happening, in our protest.

For to supplicate to the bully is an eternal purgatory, relentless. The bully can only be met with an equal or greater expression of violence, or the bully will rule. As they are now ruling.

Let us begin by raising our voices collectively. We should speak with clear, unambiguous anger at town halls and directly to our representative officials. Let our numbers swell on the streets and in rallies—no sugarcoating or nice, safe words.

Instead, find words that we dredge from the core of our being as a response to egregious violations expressed in one thousand horrible ways.

Let us know the contours of our anger and violence, crafted often through generations of inflicted cruelty and terror. And rather than be shaded in our anger, through passive aggression, allow its truth to channel through us as a force that strikes to the heart of the truth of what is happening.

Unafraid of the torrent of anger that streams through us.

So many people want to know their life’s purpose, so many people seek authenticity. But they refuse to look deep into the well of their own capacity for violence. And so never find what they are looking for, because it is always a half light, missing its twin darkness.

Violence dressed as nice. There is too much of that.

I want to feel you, me, us, roar.

Roar!

Pure. Real. Clear. Fracturing the spells. Bringing the violators to their knees.

Standing for all-human dignity and justice and no less.

No less.