Need to seek real cause of violence

Understand first that I did not grow up around violence. My father was basically a pacifist, a Methodist minister all his adult life, though he did have a temper, and six sons. We never got beatings, but we did get our share of spankings.

At school, we would get “licks” — you’d be called up to the front of the class, told to bend over and the teacher would pull out a paddle and slap your buttocks with it two, three or more times, depending on the severity of your crime and the teacher’s level of frustration.

For the boys, the number of licks we got over the course of the school year was a badge of honor.

I don’t remember any girls getting paddled. I guess they didn’t see the sense in competing for punishment.

I wasn’t a fighter growing up but I did play football, back when there were far less restrictions on how it was played and practiced.

I wasn’t much of an athlete, but I was proud of how hard I could hit. Never mind the concussions, it was a matter of pride.

Still, I was not a violent boy.

• • •

Have you noticed how hard Americans have tried to tamp down the violence that my generation grew up with? Check out the hilariously violent Saturday morning cartoons of yesteryear and compare them to the ’toons kids now enjoy.

I defer to my dear ol’ ma about whether the Three Stooges were a bad influence on us, but even if they did make us want to hit each other with hammers to the head, it didn’t out-influence my parents’ say-so. They taught us a better way to resolve our differences, and those underpinnings far outweighed the make-believe violence we saw on TV or at the movies.

Of course, it wasn’t all make-believe violence, then or now. I now wonder what that bully in junior high was going through at home; chances are he was being beaten by his father, and that caused him to lash out. I have since learned that the abused often become the abusers, but back then, it wasn’t so clear.

Most of America’s violence, I now surmise, starts with abuse at home or at school. It can be physical or mental/emotional, but it all hurts, and it frequently makes the one who suffers through it want to hurt someone else.

And nowadays, many of those who are hurting have the ability to do much worse to others than they ever had happen to themselves. When you have a nation with more guns than people, that’s what you get.

Until we address the underlying causes of the violence that permeates our culture, no one will really be safe. We’re fooling ourselves if we think it starts with video games, or because of mental illness and access to firepower. Those may contribute to it all, but more than anywhere else, it all starts at home.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

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