Paramilitary forgiveness

I note that his own actions were fuelled by anger -at least that is how it reads with regard to the desire to retaliate. There is something of right in this it seems to me: it is not good to simply acquiesce in wrong done as if giving it a blessing; simply forgetting it is not to care, really that a wrong has been done. Anger shows we care about the wrongs done to others, anger is the flip side of love, even.

The interesting thig is that the reaction tends to produce an equal and opposite reaction. Opposite not in the sense of non-violence being meeting violence but of violence pushed in the opposite direction -towards the original perpetrator [or representatives of them or their community]. Perhaps our sense of justice is about wrongs rebounding on the offender and that it would be fitting if *we* did that in the absence of a more automatic nemesis.

Alistair says: "My experience is that people easily turn to violence when their voices aren’t being heard, or when they feel under threat". The wrong of being ignored [accounted nothing] or being [unjustly?] threatened results in feelings that there is a balance to be reweighted or a return to be made.

He writes further; " came to realise that people who use violence – myself included – see things only from one angle only. They don’t see that if you use violence yourself, you encourage revenge and hatred in others. You end up with a never-ending circle of violence. "

The attempt to re-weight the balance or to push back to the perpetrator the wrong thay have done is itself perceived as a wrong and so the cycle kicks off. It is interesting that seeing the wider picture and acknowledging that there may be reason for the other side to have behaved as they did and do can help break the cylce by revealing the cycle to be based on a partial truth. At least that's how I think it goes.

Got to go now; but I think that there's more in this story I want to comment on and engage with. Later -I hope.