Vengeance, bloodlust, sever dehumanization, rape, torture, acting with extreme prejudice, whatever its form, violence is aggression with no restraints, further fueled by a mindset that seems to believe these actions are acceptable. In violence, we do not just consider injuring others but also give the green light to doing so, often with forcefulness as unrestrained as it is self-justified. Some people are not much more than savages lurking beneath a flimsy veneer of socially acceptable behavior, whose inborn aggression threatened civilized society with violence, war, and disintegration. There may be talk of honor, but it is mostly just more fuel for the fires of violence and has nothing to do with real honor. When Christ said, “The Kingdom of Heaven must suffer violence,” he means not the violence of long babbling prayers, not the violence of tedious invective sermons without wit.” And how interesting is it that, as aggression begins to lose of some it popularity as a go to indicator of manliness, various qualities commonly associated with being female, vulnerability, softness, emotional literacy, are starting, however slightly, to become thought of as virtues for men, with the tacit implication being that people are required to be more civil. Whatever its negative connotations, violence cannot be condemned across the board as always a bad thing.

 A great deal of violence is abhorrent to almost all of us, like child abuse and rape, but there is plenty of violence that we are divided about. One man’s terrorist may be another man’s freedom fighter, such as in the alleged Paris, France train attack that was supposedly recently throttled by three men from Sacramento, California, when they jumped him, beat him, hog tied him, and are now being honored by Mayor Kevin Johnson, on 11 September 2015, in a parade that will take place in Sacramento, California. We may say that we regret the civilian casualties that occurred on 11 September 2001, but not let such regret prevent us from continuing to pursue our attack centered agenda. We might severely injure or kill others in order to save our child’s life. And so on. So in considering violence, we are required to take into account its prevailing context, not to excuse nor marginalize it, but to better understand it. Many view violence as a learned behavior and a learned behavior only! Winning becomes overly important.

 Cooperation becomes emphatically secondary to competition (as reflected by our economy), with the winners getting huge spoils, like parades, talks shows, and too bad for the losers. In this, however, there are no real winners. Sooner or later, everyone gets hurt, if only through being part of a damagingly divided humanity. Violence, ultraviolent video games, misogynistic programs, increasing poverty, all are expressive of a culture that rewards, glamorizes, and profits from violence, a culture that provides minimal care for those less fortunate, and marginalizes the poor, the unemployed, the disabled, the homeless, the PTSD crippled veterans, the outcasts, the unwanted, the ones most heavily burned by our collective shadow, all of whom are seeking shelter in places that foster violence, even as it preaches against violence. Violence is an innate behavior, not just learned. Ordinarily, we do not have to be encourages to be violent in order to get violent with someone who is harming our child, this usually just comes quite natural, no matter how removed from aggressiveness we have been prior to the circumstance. However, most people do not act out desires to be violent; they try to deal with things within constraints of the law.

 In the television show Secrets and Lies, starring Ryan Phillippe, we met a man, Ben, who would not harm a fly, he lives in a Norman Rockwell upper class America painting, but he was sent to jail for murdering his own son, and we are almost given no time to rest in his heroics. Our discomfort grows, as we soon realize that our hero may not be who he says he is. A good guy rising to the occasion, doing his duty, or is he something else? And if he is something else, how do we then hold him to his heroism? His relentless good guy presentation of himself start to feel like America’s mainstream presentation of itself to the World, a freedom loving, straightforward, we will protect the innocent picture of morality, when you include the fact that he may have been framed as something other than a hero. As we watch more and more of the show, Ben’s heroic exploits bring us closer to the truth, the increasingly uncomfortable truth. Do we root for him, or turn on him? Vices are the harpies that infect and foul the feast. The more violent emotions ever tend to sure themselves. If the patient survive the first paroxysm, his mind speedily begins to verge towards its natural equilibrium. He who can attest to a villainy is best qualified to punish it.