Violence in the World

Every year, the USA spends 300 billion dollars with problems caused by social feuds, bickerings, property damage, killings, maiming and physical abuse. The money spent to protect family members, enforcement of law and order, police investigations, hospital and medical bills due to corporal lesions, etc, could have been utilized in far better ways.

Wales and England also spend 40 billion dollars on the problem of domestic violence. Colombia and Brazil are next in line. In 2005, the city of Sao Paulo had 2,576 assassinations or 7 per day. In the State of Sao Paulo, it was 7,276 or 18 people for every 100,000 inhabitants. In 2003, there were 6,021 assassinations in Rio de Janeiro or 40 for every 100,000 inhabitants. New York City has 540 murders per year or 7 for every 100,000 inhabitants.

The police reports of these cities showed that the one single overwhelming reason for such killings was motivated by a deep and strange sense of revenge on the part of the murderers.

Many took the lives of others for no other reason than to simply avenge some small insult received by these people. This exaggerated and disproportional sense of justice has two factors as its causes (one is psychological and the other is spiritual):

    1) Emotionally unaffirmed persons possess an exaggerated sensibility which cause them to be highly sensitive to attitudes or words of rejection, humiliation and despisal. Their immediate impulse and denying reaction is to simply take out their weapon and wound or kill the person whom they feel to have profoundly affected them in their very delicate, vulnerable and human weakness. It is the same reaction that we ourselves would have if someone stepped on a toe that was recently operated. It hurts worse than stepping on a healthy one. Such unaffirmed people have an extremely low self-esteem caused by an inferiority complex that makes them to be highly  intolerant to others. Join this to an emotionally repressed feeling of anger and you have the formula of violence in the world.

    2) The second is the lack of forgiveness in peoples’ lives. Christ's teaching on this marvelous virtue and attitude has still not been largely assimilated nor accepted by the world. The spirit of forgiveness could save many lives including the ones of those who are thinking of taking revenge on others. Revenge ends the lives of all, whereas forgiveness guarantees the existence and continued life of each one of us.

 Anthony Mellace