Brutality is how violence most often manifests. We lash out in our living rooms and bedrooms. An angry thought becomes a vicious blow. What looked like love becomes a grim truth. The very worst display of misguided freedom has changed the trajectory of life. The realization is devastating. Trust has been violated. The world has turned bad.
The moment violence is done everything changes. Violence in the Brutal guise of domestic discord is a universal confession that we have work to do.
Bronx School Stabbing Leaves One Student Dead and Another Wounded https://t.co/Ldkf2IVQRt
— Stephen C. Rose (@stephencrose) September 28, 2017
The New York Times online home page is never without violence to report.
But most lethal violence is unreported. It is the unnecessary and painful deaths of those who are left out of the safety nets of the world. It is the dead and injured in car crashes everywhere. Only a universal consciousness can comprehend the problem in its actual magnitude. Brutality has many names and faces.
In the wider world, brutality is rarely mentioned but it is the fundamental character of anything that inflicts injury or death. Donald Trump has inflicted brutality in the past with jaw-dropping spontaneity.
Our world is literally a powder keg
Today brutality is waiting to be exercised all over. We see it in Puerto Rico and we blame the weather. But weather cannot bear the blame alone.
We have the intelligence to know how we might build differently.
We have resources tied up in the weapons of violence, the use of which is unthinkable. We are meant to become unified with weather – with nature – not oppose it.
There is always a way forward
Ending brutality is as simple as realizing how powerful we are. The greatest power we have is the capacity to say no to evil. First, we must see evil as what we do that we need to amend.
Second, we need to recognize that the will of everyone on the globe is involved. Only individuals have the capacity to make decisions.
Finally, we need to start dismantling the infrastructure of brutality. The money we spend on destruction can more than harness sun and wind. We can build a new world with the aid of 3d printing and graphene derivatives.
Nonviolence is the only viable future
The simple truth is that nonviolence is the only approach that will save us from a repetition of a past we have already rejected. We have begun to see nonviolent processions walking around the world. I maintain these can be silent. We know what we want. Ending brutality in ourselves and in the world is a worthy Goal. We do it daily. We can achieve it universally.
We are too close to a tipping point not to allow things to tip the right way.
