Advanced Essay #4: Violence

In this essay I really wanted to think about violence in competence to different things. I talked that it is a part of who we are a humans and that there is and isn't any good excuses to use violence for anything. Thank you and I hope enjoy reading my essay.

You just slapped a person. It was because of something they said or did, but it was also violence. Nowadays we don’t realize just how violent we as human beings have become. Violence is incorporated into our daily lives so deeply that sometimes we don’t notice it at all; most of the time we don’t even feel like it’s a big deal. There is so much of violence in movies or in real life, things like slapping someone else is violence. We just justify these things, by excuses that have nothing to do with violence but instead affected our emotions and things like saying things like ‘They deserved it because they cheated on them.’

Google's definition of violence is “behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something” which is good representation of it’s meaning. It proves that accidentally bumping into someone rough enough to knock them down, is not the same thing as punching them. But we also have to think about how right it is, because punching your pillow is not the same thing as punching a person.

We need to think about what excuses we use to justify violence, and which of those are actually good and which of those aren’t. One example of excuses people make for violence is when it's used as self defence, and I am not saying that it is not a good excuse but we do have to turally examine it. We need to  think about what we consider self defence, like is it considered self defence only if you are fighting against someone that is hitting you at that moment, or those it spread to verbal abuse as well?

In my English Class, we watched a TED talk called, The Psychology of Evil, in which the speaker says that “Violence is a disease.” I find that what he said is very strong and could be a very good point. What I interpret from the words of Philip Zimbardo is that we can consider that the idea of good in violence can be cured, it is possible for it to be cured by just realizing that we have to control ourselves and our actions. Violence is curable, but only on an individual level, each person must begin to take control of themselves because if not, then the disease of violence can spread, and eventually becoming unstoppable.

Domestic_Violence.jpg

I recently saw a picture that I interpreted to be a representation of the essence of violence. In the image, a woman is holding up her hands to block the man from hitting her. There is a light right behind them. He looks mad and she looks scared. Even though they look like shadows you can almost see those emotions in their faces. The shadows thae are shaped as humans makes it seem like they lose their humanity even when they look totally human. This image is important to me because it is the typical and stereotypical situation, and yet we don’t take it seriously.

Instead of violence think of it as judging a person. They are not even come close to being the same thing in any way. Every single person judges everything that others do. But when it's about another person, we make a connection with that person while we judge. I find this similar to when we fight with another person. We don’t always share those judgments, but when we do, there is different ways they impact the person being judged, as well as, change the person judging. We think of judgments as bad things, but they can be good, too. That is when they burn into compliments. Unlike judgment we make, in this case there is no good way that violence can occur, since someone always gets hurt.  

No matter how bad violence morally is, there is no way to remove it from our lives, in a society and world we live in today. The only thing we can do is find a way to forgive and accept the effect it has on and in each and every one of us. Violence destroys everything we have, but it builds a new world; we are protective, and terrible, but we also use it as one of the ways of showing that we are alive. Since we are build from our flaws and bad judgments, we are made to live the terror and messes that we made. The unsolvable puzzle where you are holding violence as one of the pieces.


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