Justifiable Violence?

I was not a wanted child. Don’t misunderstand me. That doesn’t mean that my family doesn’t like me. It’s just that when my mother announced that she was pregnant with her eight child, some of my siblings were upset. There were already nine people crammed into a small house. Why did there have to be one more?

The person who took it the hardest was my next oldest brother. He was five years old when I was born. For those five years, he was the centre of attention. He was the cute young boy. All of a sudden, his valued place in the family was take by some little runt.

I don’t know if he has gotten over it, but all through my childhood he tormented me and often made my life difficult.

I slept in the same bedroom as he did. My bed had an Indian pattern on the blanket, a mixture of light and dark colours. Even at night the contrast was great enough that you could see the pattern.

I’d be just about asleep and he would say, “John, there’s a snake on your bed. I think it’s a cobra.” I’d strain my eyes to try to find the snake on the Indian blanket, then duck under the covers, trembling myself to sleep.

Another time, he and some friends played Sardines with me. This game is the reverse of Hide and Go Seek. Only one person hides and everyone looks for him. When one person finds him, he stays with him. Eventually there is only one person who hasn’t found the person hiding. My brother and his friends choose me to be the first person to hide. I was so proud to be picked first. I found a great hiding spot. The only problem was that they didn’t even bother to look for me. I found them a couple of hours later calmly watching television.

Once my brother put a cattail between his teeth and mimicked a Spanish dancer clicking her castanets. He asked me to try. When he did, he grabbed the cattail and pulled it through my teeth creating a mixture of seed and blood.

A regular occurrence was his coming into the living room and changing the channel to what he wanted, even though I had been watching something for a long time. This happened time and time again. I could protest, but it was useless. And I felt powerless.

While puberty is a troublesome time, it does have its good points. By the time I was 18 I was strong and fit. I remember watching the Winter Olympics when my brother came in and without asking turned it to golf. That was it. I had had it. He wasn’t going to get away with that any more. We had our usual fight, but something happened this time. I cleaned his clock. He was the one who ran upstairs crying at the end of it.

And me? I was sobbing at the kitchen table. My mother, in a rare show of affection, came and patted my shoulder. She seemed to understand. I was sobbing for three reasons. One, I hate fighting. I really don’t like violence, but I felt it couldn’t be avoided. Two, I felt sad for my brother. I know the indignity that he felt at that moment. I had felt this sting many times. Three, I knew that the years of bullying had just come to an end and I was sobbing for joy. They cycle had been broken.

I repeat, I hate violence, but in the eyes of constant tormenting, it is sometimes necessary to stop the pattern of abuse. If I had caved in, it would have continued.

When I look at history, I see some violent acts that seem justifiable to me. For example, the opposition to Hitler seems right. I can’t imagine how the world would be if people had not opposed his violence with violence.

Here is a quote from Pastor Martin Niemoeller, a church leader who opposed Hitler.
“First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.”

There are times when you just have to stand up and say no in the strongest terms necessary. It’s something that many Canadians understand completely. Why? We play hockey. We know that if you allow the other team to bully you on the ice without any retaliation, you are almost certain to lose. To sit there and allow anyone to treat you with less than the dignity you deserve is to live a life that is less that what it is intended to be. To do less means that you have not earned their respect, but what is worse is that you have no respect for yourself, either.