It's hard to know what to do to get violent people to stop being violent. It's one of the great conundrums -- conundra? -- of human behavior and shows up in controversies over all kinds of things from foreign policy to spanking.
On the one hand, you have the "high road" or "don't sink to their level" school of thought. Its advice is to answer violence with reason and restraint, which displays moral superiority. This works pretty well if you're Martin Luther King or Gandhi, but less well if you're a short, outnumbered third-grader.
On the other hand, you have the "fight fire with fire" or "talk to them in their own language" school of thought. Its advice is that if your adversary is getting rough, so should you, because anything else will convey weakness and cowardice. This works pretty well if you're a superpower, but less well if you're trying to slap up a great white shark.
Mostly, I enjoy the privilege of living in a violence-free zone since I gave up my boxing classes. Nobody shoots at me and nobody hits me, and although some guy did almost run me over with a truck the other night, he wasn't a former boyfriend and I'm sure it was a mistake.
There are people who will tell you that violence is always the correct answer to violence. The eye-for-an-eye people. And there are people who will tell you that violence is never the correct answer. The turn-the-other-cheek people. I understand both positions, and that's why I can't get on either bandwagon.
Like most aspects of being human, the violence-response question is complicated. Every situation is different; rules don't cover everything.
For example: Torture is always wrong, correct? What if torturing one terrorist could have prevented all the deaths and losses of Sept. 11?
Of course, we want categorical rules, because that would make things easy. Americans, especially, aren't very comfortable with gray areas (except maybe the ones between what's unethical and what's actually illegal -- there are people who LIVE in those areas).
Good, wise people can disagree about the right response to violence, because there are good, wise arguments to be made for different positions. But people need information, because an uninformed opinion is the only truly worthless one.
The Post-Gazette ran a picture on its front page a while back of an Afghan man and his son, who the father claimed had been injured by American bombing. We got a lot of letters about that from angry people who accused us of publishing Taliban propaganda and being un-American. They asked us where the pictures were of the Sept. 11 victims (evidently, their paper carriers had been tossing their PGs down storm drains for the previous six weeks).
My own neighbor gestured indignantly at me with his laundry while asking why we had to harp on dead Afghans. I'll tell you what I told him.
No, we're not in the business of publishing propaganda for the Taliban. And it may come as a surprise that we are also not in the business of publishing propaganda for the U.S. government. (Remember how we used to vilify it? Remember how it was too big and corrupt and wasting our money?) We have a free press. And the way that works is, we go out and take pictures of things and ask people questions and look things up, and then we publish what we have found in the world.
Is it always right? Sadly, no, because the work is done by human beings, and the information we get is filtered through human beings, so sometimes it's like math people have done in their heads.
But our job is to get what's going on and give it to you -- so that you can make up your own mind about it. The press shouldn't tell you this is a good war or a bad war. Or whether there can be such thing as a good war. That's not our job.
Many who now denounce anti-Americanism are the same people who don't want to pay their taxes. We wave the flag and don't vote. We've leveled a village to "save" it. War is full of contradictions.
You can love your country and still wonder whether what it's doing is right or wise. You can believe in a just war and still regret violence and mourn its innocent victims.
Sure, it would be great if we could go forward with one mind and no dissent. If we could get all these fractious naysayers to quit raising questions and toe the line. Free speech is fine in theory, but it shouldn't be allowed to get in the way, right?
Just ask the Taliban.
Samantha Bennett can be reached by e-mail at sbennett@post-gazette.com
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