Violence is a Conversation
Safety Requires Community
I just started grad school while working full time. Two weeks ago I missed my first biweekly post since I started blogging in 2023 (I was enjoying a needed vacation). But it was the perfect reminder to me that I don’t need to stick to a schedule if it isn’t working. My posting schedule may be more erratic moving forward, but I’m still moving forward at whatever pace I can.
This week’s post is kind of a jumble of thoughts I’ve been having about violence. This post is not about public figures, it is about the USA, where political violence is perpetrated against regular people every second of every day through mass incarceration, ICE raids, police brutality in general and against protestors, and the refusal to invest in uplifting our communities in most need.
The screenshot above shows how much violence has been on my mind. Specifically the types of violence we all ignore (or are ignorant of) that provide the foundations of community “safety”, and access to all the cheap products we benefit from in the US. I condemn all of the political violence we see every day, and I wish the same people condemning individual acts could see what I see.
Violence is a Conversation
It is never truly "random"
It always happens in a social context
Your neighborhood is safer when you know the people in it
Unsafe neighborhoods are unsafe for the people who live there too and the cycle of violence leads to survival responses that may not be healthy in future situations, but keep you alive today.
It happens in response to many factors - poverty, local violence, abuse in the family or at school, and any number of unpredictable crises
The true cost of my cheap clothes is the violent coups across the world and the daily violence of poverty
The true cost of my appreciating housing assets in my gated neighborhood is the violence of homelessness and police repression
The true cost of my electronic devices and the minerals contained in them is the forced labor of children in The Congo and around the world
The true cost of “democracy” is the massacres of democratic movements around the world
They say that "a riot is the language of the unheard," so why are the heard committing so much more violence than any riot ever could?
I've developed all the correct coping mechanisms:
Breathing exercises don't work when the silica dust coats my lungs
But the worst of it was the dust: circles of light from the miners’ helmest danced dimly in the gloom, showing thick white curtains of deadly silica. It does not take long to do its work. The first symptoms are felt within a year, and in ten years one enters the cemetery (p 151).1
Meditation doesn't work when I don't have time between my two jobs and family responsibilities
Emotional regulation doesn't work when the police don't regulate their emotions
Violence is a conversation, back and forth down to the first time a child is arrested. Or down to the first time a child is forced to dig up minerals.
We teach this violence as “the way of the world.”
Can we imagine a better future for our children?
Let’s build that future.
P.S. - If you like what you read, please share with anyone you think might be interested. If you really like it, I now have a Ko-Fi page set up if you’d like to buy me a coffee.
Galeano, Eduardo, et al. Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. Monthly Review Press, 1997.