A Time To Kill

The struggle with evil by means of violence is the same as an attempt to stop a cloud, in order that there may be no rain. - Leo Tolstoy, novelist and philosopher (1828-1910) The simile aside, violence remains one of the few holdovers we humans have from our prehistoric past. Every carnivore and many omnivores engage in forms of violent acts to secure food, to protect their young and their nests and to protect themselves and their mates. With rare exceptions, no primate or any other kind of mammal other than humans kills for fun, for profit, for revenge or for spite. Humans stand alone as the one species that kills regularly for reasons other than those related to food and protection. Everyone who kills has a reason. When you put all the reasons together, they all look like lame excuses for retreating to our primitive past to solve problems. We teach each other that killing is acceptable by making some kinds of killing socially permissable. We play ethical games where someone asks if another would kill with a gun if they found a person about to rape, torture or kill their child or spouse. The answer is almost always yes. That is the expected answer, which makes the answerer align their thinking with that of the asker of the question. But the question is absurd. There must be 1000 places that the person answering the question could shoot the potential rapist or killer to stop him without killing him. Those possibilities seem not to occur to the answerer because the question was designed to elicit a reply approving of violence, even from a normally non-violent person. I have never heard the question framed in such a way that the answerer could choose a non-lethal way to discourage the person doing the threatening. That, after all, is not the objective of the questioner. Our newspapers show the results of violence on their front pages. Our television newscasts show the results of violence only when it is excessively so. "Ordinary" violence is too mild to put into their broadcast, but lots of blood will take the lead every time. That's a form of social approval of violence, even though the media would never agree. When it comes to socializing people--especially children--what they see, hear and read registers in their brains as being socially acceptable. Unless lessons come hot on the heels of the violent

pictures about violence not being right, about other means of dealing with problems being more acceptable. A child watching television all of one evening could easily experience three violent deaths and numerous other violent experiences that imprint themselves onto the child's brain. That has a cumulative effect over months and years. True, most of us do not act on that accumulation. Only a very small percentage of people do. What percentage of people for whom the accumulation of violent experiences on television eventually turns into a violent act of their own would be acceptable? Three percent? One percent? That would mean that at least one person you went to grade school with would likely become a killer after you ceased to know them. In general, we do not teach social skills and emotional skills to children so that they have the ability to walk away from a potentially dangerous situation without feeling cowardice. We don't teach kids ways to talk themselves around violent confrontation. If you read that last sentence and don't know any, you have made my point. Even if we did, we would have to teach every child, not just most. After all, it only takes one in 100 people to kill unnecessarilly before you can think that someone you knew as a child would likely have killed by now. Indeed, if you didn't learn enough alternatives to violence, maybe you might find yourself in court and prison one day because you couldn't cope with something. Teaching every child means putting such lessons and skills on school curriculum. As diligent as most parents are about teaching their children, some get missed. We see those kids later, as prisoners, as victims of emotional breakdowns, as takers of drugs, as gambling addicts and as participants in several other unhealthy pursuits. It's not a big deal to help every member of every community. But unless we close the gap between the important messages reaching most children and reaching every child, our rampant social and personal problems will continue. We need to make important changes to school curriculum. It needs to be done yesterday. Talk about it. Bill Allin Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic

Social Problems, a guidebook for parents, grandparents and teachers who want to properly and fully prepare their children to face lives they can manage as adults. Learn more at http://billallin.com