Hit It!

I’m having a hard time getting my mind around a concept: hurting your child, or any child, badly enough to kill him. I’ve struggled with this before, and I’ve failed to comprehend it, both then and now. Like infinity, it’s something that I simply cannot grasp on any level. It truly is alien to me. I started down this gruesome path the other day after reading a story in the newspaper about a father that had killed his 3-year-old daughter by repeatedly picking her up and throwing her against the wall. His reason for this behavior was that he had gotten angry with her because she had soiled her underwear.

Violence has simply never been an option for me, but especially violence against someone that I love. I recognize the fact that violence exists in Nature, but in that arena it is simply a way to ensure survival. I also realize that violence exists in human nature, but in that arena I truly don’t understand it as a reaction to any circumstance other than perhaps a last-ditch defense of one’s family or one’s self. Maybe I’m too weak in this emotional area, or maybe my psyche is deficient somehow because I don’t have this response to more situations. (Hey, maybe I really am a pussy.)

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t want to come off sounding like a saint here. I have plenty of shortcomings and personality deficiencies. I definitely do get angry, sometimes even to the point of being enraged, but I’ve never acted with violence while in that state of mind, or any other state of mind. I’ve been in exactly two physical confrontations in my life, one when I was 8 and one when I was 18, and I vividly remember them both. Both were circumstances where I was physically threatened and literally could not walk away because others didn’t allow me to. I did walk away after both situations were over and my tormentors did not, but I remember that I did not feel good about "winning". I had to physically hurt someone else, and I knew in my heart of hearts that that was not a good thing. But I don’t think most people believe that hurting someone else is a good thing.

I don’t think that I’m alone in my non-violent response, either. Most people that I’ve talked to about the subject of violence are pretty much the same as me in this regard. Now, most of those people are gay or women or transgendered because they happen to be the majority of my closest friends, and a non-violent reaction is typically looked at as a feminine reaction, so maybe that explains it. Maybe we don’t react with violence because we’re basically lazy people. A violent outburst - hitting, throwing, screaming - requires much more energy than simply sitting down or walking away, which happens to be my preferred response. Maybe we’re more civilized. Maybe we value life more. Or maybe because we have been the targets of violence, we don’t react that way ourselves. I don’t know, but I’d like to. I’d like to know why I cannot get my head to hold the idea of beating an infant to death while it comes so easily to someone else, because maybe then we as a society would know what to do prevent the death of another little girl or another group of high school students or another Matthew Shepherd.