violence – Hank Kalet

Inky to South Korea: No apology necessary

The Philadelphia Inquirer offers an apology to South Korea, explaining that the Asian nation has nothing to apologize for in regards to the Virginia Tech shootings:

Don’t get us wrong. It is touching and impressive how you, as a nation, seem crestfallen over the trail of death left on an American college campus by an immigrant from your land. You have held candlelight vigils at our embassy and your president has expressed shock – three times, so far.

But, really, the suspect came to America as a child. He was raised here. Maybe we should be apologizing to you for not taking better care of him. Or maybe the ugly twists that the human spirit can take are just unfathomable.

We are dismayed that you worry about a misdirected backlash against your citizens who have emigrated here. Most of us would like to think America is better than that. But we also recall that, after 9/11, some ignorant people attacked Sikh Americans in the preposterous belief that their turbans marked them as members of al-Qaeda.

Obviously we need to work on our behavior and international image.

So we accept your apologies, unnecessary as they are – as lessons in grace and humanity.

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The illogic of violence

Interesting column in The Star-Ledger today by Raymond A. Schroth, a humanities professor at St. Peter’s College on torture and its relationship to Easter.

Jesus, he says, in his death, embodied the intersection between politics and religion and his death should standa s a reminder, a warning really, that we all share responsibility for the violence — both to body and spirit — done in our names.

For the death of Jesus was the prime moment when politics and religion became one. His arrest, trial, imprisonment and execution was a political event, a judicial murder. Politicians both religious and secular saw Jesus as a threat who had to be removed. Even more than Adam’s fall, this is the Original Sin of mankind: All those from Cain’s murder of his brother Abel to those of us today who have tolerated political violence share the responsibility for Jesus’ death.

All state-sanctioned violence — he writes specifically about torture, but I would add war and the death penalty to this — falls uner this ethical rubric. This is why the Vatican has a theory of just war to separate othe legitimate uses of force — defensive and proportional only — and why the pope oppsed the invasion of Iraq and the Vatican opposes capital punishment.

You don’t have to be a Catholic or even a Christian — I’m not — to agree with Schrath’s argument. Read Camus on the death penaly or Gandhi on the counterproductive nature of revolutionary violence to get a broader sense of the spiritual and physical dangers of state violence — or organized violence, like the Intifada.

Watching stone-throwing Palestinians face off against Israeli tanks (proprtionality?) or suicide bombers targeting civilians (the weapon of the powerless wielded without regard for life, engaging in a ceaseless downward spiral of violence, bombers begetting tanks and bulldozers begetting bombers and so on), can anyone tuly say that this violence is making anyone safer?

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It could have happened here

When I heard the news of yesterday’s bank robbery in Readington, my first thought obviously was for the family of the FBI agent who was killed. But I also wondered about the Dayton bank robbery on March 16 — when I read about bank heists, or anything really, I always wonder whether they may be related to things happening in the four towns my papers cover.

Then came word — first off the record and then later on the record — that the Readington heist was indeed related to the March 16 robbery of the Bank of America branch on Summerfield Boulevard.

That robbery also turned violent, though the injuries were rather minor. But watching the news late last night and reading the reports in the various New Jersey dailies and online, I can only marvel at how lucky we turned out to be.

Yesterday’s robbery was the fifth — and possibly the 10th — in a string of heists that had grown more and more violent. The Dayton heist was not the first in which shots were fired, but it was the first in which there were injuries.

And while it appears that the FBI agent was killed by friendly fire, the trajectory of this robbery string makes me believe that the escalating violence was destined to result in a death sooner or later.

The best we can say about this is that it’s over. The final suspect was nabbed late Friday, meaning four men are in jail, charged in connection with the robbery spree.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
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