On violence -- thoughts of Wendell Berry after the Boston marathon bombing

http://progressive.org/commerce-of-violence

[Excerpt]: On the second day after the catastrophe in Boston, Thomas L. Friedman announced in The New York Times that “the right reaction is: Wash the sidewalk, wipe away the blood, and let whoever did it know that . . . they have left no trace on our society or way of life.” We should, said Mr. Friedman, “let there be no reminder whatsoever.” And he asserted, with a shocking indifference to evidence and his own language, that “the benefits—living in an open society—always outweigh the costs.” He is speaking to (among others) people whose loved ones have been killed and people who will never again stand on their own legs. How can he think that all the traces of any violence can be easily wiped away? How would he wipe away the traces of a bombed village or a strip mine or a gullied field or a wrecked forest?

Mr. Friedman, like other journalists, asks us, as he wrote, to “notice how many people came running toward the blast within seconds to help.” And that is very well. To know that people would run to help, perhaps at the risk of their lives, is consoling and reassuring. But we have got to acknowledge that the help that comes after the violence has been done, though it undeniably helps, is not a solution to violence.

The solution, many times more complex and difficult, would be to go beyond our ideas, obviously insane, of war as the way to peace and of permanent damage to the ecosphere as the way to wealth. Actually to help our suffering of one man-made horror after another, we would have to revise radically our understanding of economic life, of community life, of work, and of pleasure. We employ thousands of scientists and spend billions of dollars to reduce matter to its smallest particles and to search for farther stars. How many scientists and how many dollars are devoted to harmony between economy and ecology, or to amity and lenity in the face of conflict?

To learn to meet our needs without continuous violence against one another and our only world would require an immense intellectual and practical effort, requiring the help of every human being perhaps to the end of human time.

This would be work worthy of the name “human.” It would be fascinating and lovely.