Bob Herbert has a great column in the New York Times today called An American Obsession:
"Dr. King understood with unusual clarity the price to be paid for the terrible belief that every problem could be settled by a bullet or a bomb. He warned his followers and the nation as a whole to avoid the "quicksand" of violence and hatred. He urged blacks to remain nonviolent in the face of horrendous injustices, and he spoke out boldly against the war in Vietnam.
He might as well have been whispering into a hurricane. Extreme black power advocates excoriated him as a Tom, and supporters of the war told him, essentially, to shut up and stick to civil rights.
We've honored Dr. King, but we've never listened to him. Our addiction to the joy of violence is far too strong. We'll search like hollow-eyed junkies all day and all through the night for a rationale, any rationale, to keep the killing going. Democratic politicians have suffered for years because they have been insufficiently insistent on violence as a solution to national problems."
Maybe Mr. Herbert is right -- maybe the drive to engage in violence is so embedded in our culture that it can't be restrained. Look at the continued resistance to any suggestion of gun control, or the persistently high violent crime rates in our society.
For all the pious talk about how awful war is there is this persistent conception that it is somehow ennobling, or an irrepressible component of human nature. Politicians who show any hesitance to engage in violence are immediately dismissed as effective leaders, as Herbert notes in his column.
The other truth that is rarely acknowledged is that in our society violence is often considered entertaining and fun. Many Americans watch extreme violence on television for entertainment or listen to music that glorifies it (such as rap, rock, punk, or country). A while back a General even admitted that it can be fun to shoot the enemy. I have certainly met people in my life who seemed to enjoy physical confrontation, and some of them expressed a desire to serve in the military because they said they wanted to fight.
I think it is clear that using violence to force others to do what you want isn't a given of human nature -- look at crime rates in other industrialized countries, the near absence of guns from countries like Japan and England, or the peaceful change in places like South Africa. Wars have been around along as humans, that's true, but I always believed that human history was evolving toward a state where violent conflict was increasingly rare. There are some indications that this is true on a macro level, even given the current situation in Iraq.
Is the dream of non-violent change dead? Or is it just in a window of decline? My hope is that it's more the latter. There are unquestionably circumstances where war is justified or required. If one side in a conflict determines to resort to violence then the other side is usually compelled to respond in kind. King was a powerful counter-example. But in an era of "wars of choice" and "pre-emptive war" where the threshhold for war is being increasingly lowered, the constituency for non-violence seems increasingly marginalized. Let's hope this is a temporary situation.