Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone

Discursion: Violence

i.

Fighting doesn't solve anything. Everyone knows that. But then, the point of fighting isn't usually to solve anything, it's to settle something. There's a significant discrepancy between the two; ask anyone who used to (or still does) get into fist fights.

I was never that guy. Certainly I had some schoolyard scraps, but those were more wrestling matches at recess and I was semi-retired by fifth grade. I don't believe I've thrown or received a punch since I entered middle school. It had a lot to do with self-awareness: I knew I was not a fighter, did not relish the idea of getting into fights, and did not particularly enjoy witnessing them.

I can't overlook the role my mother played in the development of this penchant for diplomacy. Like most women, and mothers, she had an innate revulsion for cruelty and injustice. But more, she simply detested violence in all forms, the way most sensitive, evolved individuals do. Being a boy I did not, and do not, necessarily share that stance, or I do with some reservations. Hence my tolerance for-and, occasionally, appreciation of-realistic portrayals of mayhem in movies, or the otherwise indefensible spectacle of grown men trading punches in hockey games. But I did inherit an inability to comprehend brutality for its own sake, or the notion of deriving pleasure from someone else's pain. Of course there's considerable ground between behavior most rational people abhor and activities (like fighting) that some people can rationalize and even celebrate.

Toward the end of S.E. Hinton's book Rumble Fish the doomed older brother-a street legend who, like all tragic figures, sees everything clearly after it's already too late-looks at the Siamese fighting fish and suggests that their violence is territorial, not instinctual. If they existed out in the river, they wouldn't fight. This may or may not be true, but it's an allegory for gang violence, which is nothing if not a territorial battle.

It also, of course, speaks to the larger theme of violence being-among many other things-a consequence of timing, luck, and location. My old man grew up outside of Boston, and all of my extended family still lives less than a half hour from the city. It was, and remains, a very blue-collar, ethnic environment. As such, inadequate if revealing descriptors like old school, tough, and real were, and are, invoked. Even though genetics made me inclined to determine that the pen is mightier than the sword, if I'd grown up in the same neighborhood as my father, there are ways I would be different. Too many ways to count, certainly. I believe it's entirely possible I may have turned out much the same as I am today, but I'm also positive circumstances would have ensured that I was harder, less reflective, and more resilient. Put another way, the fact that I can even formulate such a hypothesis tends to bolster this theory, and I was taught-and trained myself-to use my mind instead of my muscle, not as a calculated choice so much as an inevitable outcome of my upbringing. Mostly, I remain grateful I had the opportunity to succeed (and be allowed to succeed) without the old-fashioned type of problem solving that impedes a healthier assimilation.

ii.

Writing is fighting, and few writers used their skills with as much focused indignation as George Orwell.

Orwell embodies an era when exploration (physical and intellectual), engagement with the world, and an insatiable appetite for experience were not rites of passage so much as imperative points of departure. Of course it was, in many regards, a simpler time: no movie stars or radio-friendly pop singers (no radio, for that matter), no prime-time news anchors sensationalizing the story of the day. To a certain extent, we counted on our writers (think Twain or Sinclair, or Dickens) to give us an unvarnished view of what was happening, hidden in plain sight.

In his harrowing essay "How the Poor Die," George Orwell describes his unexpected-and unpleasant-time at a nonpaying hospital in Paris. It's a typically instructive discursion on the issues that obsessed Orwell, and about which he wrote with more clarity than anyone else in the last century: poverty, class, and the cultural machinations that perpetuate these conditions.