Violence

What is violence? The dictionary defines violence as follows:

Violence n.

Physical force exerted for the purpose of violating, damaging, or abusing.
The act or an instance of violent action or behavior.
Intensity or severity, as in natural phenomena; untamed force. Abusive or unjust exercise of power.
Abuse or injury to meaning, content, or intent.
Vehemence of feeling or expression; fervor.

Violence is anger, a natural instinct of the human being gone bad. We all know what it is. We all know how hard it is to control ourselves. None of us can completely overcome it or get rid of it as it's too deeply written. It's part of the human coding to get angry, to fill your blood with adrenaline, and fight. After all, once we were all uncivilized caveman, needing these instincts to live. Now, we're all in trouble. We have to learn how to control ourselves and not do what we so much wish to do. Fighting and violence are ways to relieve stress. Anyone that has ever wrestled with a little brother knows how much fun it is.

We get older and, all of a sudden, roughhousing isn't fit for us. We're too old. Thanks to technology and modernism there's no need to engage in any other physical activity, so all the stress just builds up. You either control yourself or you don't. Everyone breaks at some point and in the end someone usually gets hurt, or even worse. That's just physical violence.

What about that verbal violence that had become part of how we teenagers speak? I donšt think a curse word is always used as a curse word but when it is, it hurts. Then therešs the backfire and a whole verbal war starts. It usually goes downhill from there. We all know that most physical violence starts as verbal violence.

Anger, violence, stress, fear, adrenaline-- they all used to be such valuable things. Now they just get in our way.

What can we do about it? Only so much. Learn how to control ourselves, relieve ourselves from stress in other ways (sports) and well, control is the key word. One more problem, who's to teach us this and when? Well, our parents when we're as young as possible. It's a lot easier to learn to control your temper when you're young then when old.

So, we have real problems to solve. I don't want to sound pessimistic and I'm not. I'm actually very optimistic (can't say why Išm optimistic though because I don't know), but there isn't much we can do to control ourselves. Control doesn't help all that much if someone comes up to you with a knife and wants to fight (not that that happens very often); but in the long run, teach control to yourself, your friends, your children, and anyone else you can.

Noach K. Goldstein
Ramat-Yishai, Israel Write to Noach

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