If you haven’t already, please read the introduction post. That will give you context for this page.
Whilst it might seem a contradiction to my “violently angry†post of last week, I am a pacifist. And it hurts my heart that anyone would feel that pacifism is something to be ashamed of.
My pacifism is not born of fear or weakness. It is not born of some delusion that all people are fluffy kittens. Nor, as you learned last week, is it born of a lack of violent inclinations.
My pacifism is rooted in my idealism and in my oft-disappointed belief that we humans could do so much better. I believe in love and light, in peace and harmony. We really could do so much better…
My pacifism is not restricted to physical violence; I also oppose emotional, spiritual, psychological, and sexual violence and warfare. And I believe that all violence begets violence.
I believe that most violence (perhaps all) is born of other violence or of fear. That oppression is a form of violence.
I believe that pacifism must extend to ourselves. That was the hardest one for me. But it’s also the one that we have the most power to apply. That’s the one that most helped me start being my own better self.
I reluctantly try to live with the apparent fact that the world we’ve built includes people whose violent acts require physical responses. That oppression is sometimes only thrown off by violent acts. That we are unlikely to ever achieve a non-violent world.
However, I also believe that violence is too frequently applied as an answer, pushing people deeper into the well of darkness from which their own violent behaviours originate. That we humans are too wont to follow our violent and angry impulses in our search for solutions.
So I won’t apologise, and I won’t feel ashamed, for trying to be part of the peace, for trying to remove myself from the violence. That garbage is best left to fiction.
Cross-posted to the Not Ashamed section of my site (so that it’s all tidy).