Bombs

The radio blandly delivers the news that a bomb has killed three people somewhere across the world. How do you react? Do you react? Does the news sink in?

It is easy to become desensitized to violence. After all, our roots lie in violence. Century upon century of war and mayhem. The carnivores among us depend upon daily deadly violence against millions of other sensient living beings to sustain themselves.


Al Jazeera English is a good sensitizing medium about violence. It broadcasts the aftermath of bombings with graphic images, unlike the sanitized Disney reporting of American TV.

As a nurse who has tended people with amputations and severe burns, I hear the bombing fatality reports with visual associations of human gore and suffering. I know the smell of charred flesh. I know the horror of a caring person when confronted with a body irreversibly altered by trauma.  These internal experiences daily fuel my belief in universal non-violence as the next potential evolutionary leap for human beings.

We appear to be dithering on the threshold of that great leap. Barack Obama, an educated and intelligent man with great power, endorses violence in the name of freedom. I would wager that he knows there is no real freedom as long as human beings rely on violence to attain it.

Violence is a symptom as well as a habit. Well-fed, healthy and educated people do not resort to violence when they are included in decisions about their own lives. Violence is a symptom of poverty, enslavement and corruption. The bomb in a street is a lethal symbol of choices for power and greed over shared human values. A claim of moral superiority by anyone who murders is a lie. Finding the path between violence and death to attain freedom and peace is the work of humanist practice.