A Story About Violence
It feels like my beloved home, America, is burning and it reminds me of a story from Sri Lanka, my childhood home.
It feels like my beloved home, America, is burning and it reminds me of a story from Sri Lanka, my childhood home.
I was five and I was in a village that was going up in flames.
My grandmother and I lived in a small hilltop house that overlooked the village. A mob of angry rioters from the minority faction got triggered. They were furious and rightfully so. They had been oppressed by the majority faction for generations. And they felt powerless and exhausted.
The mob then became violent. They began looting and destroying everything in their way, targeting the majority and also the much greater number of non-violent people in their own faction. They started burning down community buildings, stores, and even their own homes.
My grandmother and I hid in our small house all night. We watched the flames, terrified that the mob would find us.
The next morning we fled the village. The village was in ashes. As it turned out, it did not recover for decades. Life became worse for everyone in the village — the majority faction, the minority factions, the good people, the bad people, everyone. There were no jobs there. No Schools. No cops. No hope. No prosperity.
The rest of the country followed suit. What happened in this village in one form or another happened all over the small island country. For many long years, there was very little of everything. People were fighting for scraps while killing each other. There was no room for rationality, or inquiry, or knowledge. There was no room for progress.
As for me — I grew up a nationalist-Marxist, along with most other children. Questioning the system was essentially forbidden. Nuance was forbidden. The threat was too real and any inquiry that could have weakened the fight was considered inappropriate speech.
Life was ugly, bloody, and poor.
The subgroup of the minority kept fighting violently for their very justifiable rights. Many sympathizers from outside the country funded them, allowing them to carry-on for a long time. The funders were well-meaning and were angry at the historic injustice. They did what they thought was right — from afar.
And so the country kept burning. And burning. And burning. For 25+ years.
A small number of opportunists on both sides benefited from all this. They ranged from looters and racist pundits to ultra-nationalist politicians who now had all the fodder they needed to attain and stay in power.
Entire generations suffered at the most basic level. Rights and equality weren’t even part of the debate — society was too broken to indulge in such luxuries. It was a matter of putting food on the table and staying alive.
This is my story. Human history is full of variations of this same story.
So what does history teach us?
To me, it is that we must do our best to protect our values, our rights, and our social contracts. And that these efforts must come without destroying existing progress that supports our ability to uphold such morality, to begin with.
There aren’t enough words to stress the injustices that the black community in America has faced over so many generations. These injustices, along with George Floyd’s death, are horrendously and inexcusably wrong.
And at the same time the looting, the burning, the destruction, and the violence that’s being committed all across the country in the name of retaliation is absolutely wrong.
The pretense of protesting providing a cover for anarchists, criminals, and antifa-extremists to hurt more innocent people in their life and livelihood is blatantly wrong.
Not just wrong but anyone condoning violence as a strategy is being foolish. History provides us with no shining examples of minorities winning rights through violent struggle. Violence almost always hurts the cause. Violence enables the worst offenders on both sides. Violence reverses progress.
So let’s absolutely, forcefully, and relentlessly fight for our values — true equality and justice for all minorities — particularly African Americans. And as we fight that good fight, let’s also absolutely condemn violence as a medium of protest or otherwise, with the same vigor, and the same urgency.
Because Two wrongs do not make a right.
And because when all we have is violence, we are left with nothing.
Credit: Unknown