Episode 38: Violence

Welcome to Wisdom from the Area of View, the podcast for those who wish to learn how to crush their anxiety and find meaning and purpose in their lives. Good morning, good afternoon. Mark Klein, how are you today?

Hello Enid, how are you? I'm very well.

okay. I got an email from you this week. We've been talking about things that are happening in the news and we want to try to be topical and try to, but we know that people listen at different times. But interestingly enough, we had another tragedy this week and that becomes topical because it happens way too often in America. And here we go again. Another act of violence, right? On our very soil, our souls too. Homegrown terror. You sent me an interesting article that you wrote. I don't know where you wrote it, but it was last year about violence. And I read it and I thought, yep, all the time. And then I got looking at your book, a little plug for your book, Wisdom from the Area of View, the superpower that can change your life and this world. And you have a chapter on violence. And I thought, let me just read that chapter one more time. Let me just read the beginning of it, if I might. You write. During the daily commute to my office, I would garner a sense of the mood of the day. Not my mood, the mood of my small universe. Were my fellow drivers that morning speeding wildly, cutting each other off to gain a second or two, or graciously waving their fellow travelers into their lane? Were the eyes of the people I passed on the street fixed on the concrete below or raised, eager to acknowledge their neighbors with a smile? Each day seemed to have a personality of its own. I refer to it as its karma. Bad Karma Day, I would say out loud. If that were the encounters, disappointments suggested. What I experienced in those early morning hours often proved to be an accurate foreshadowing of how my day would unfold. I have no idea from where that sense arose. How could I know something so intangible and invisible? But it's not all that surprising. Every one of us experiences something similar. We seem to know certain things and cannot explain how. I just felt it in my bones, people used to say. For me, that's the case with violence. I know in every bone of my body that it is a heinous thing, an abomination, an overwhelmingly destructive force that smashes hopes and dreams without remorse. Violence sadly permeates so many areas of our lives. If I had the power to do one thing in this world, I would eradicate violence. All of it.

every last drop of the poison it represents. Yeah, let's talk about that. You wrote that in your book, you wrote an article, and here we are again.

What say you?

Yeah, I hate violence and I know it's really bad for not only the society, it's bad for each of us. I don't think we appreciate it, how bad it is, what it does to us. know, if there was, I feel very firmly that if there was less violence on TV, movies, streaming services, everywhere, if there was less violence everywhere, we'd be way better off. And now this is a tough thing to sell because we've had violence for hundreds of thousands of years since man first walked this earth. So it's nothing new, but it's terrible. And I don't know how to get this idea across. talk about swinging at windmills. Trying to convince people that violence is the worst thing for us, for our health, our personal health, our mental health, our societies. I don't really know what else to do. I've written about it. I speak about it. And yes, I do know it in my bones. And the tragedy you just spoke of that we're recording this several days after the gunman fired onto that Catholic school and into the Catholic church where the students were praying on the first day of school, sadly took the lives of two young children, injured many more. And you wonder, normal people think, How is this even possible? Where does this come from? And then of course people say, well, this person is just inherently evil. And I think you I may have talked about this, at least whether we talked about it on the podcast before or not. I don't believe in this thing called evil. I don't think there's this entity that's evil. Evil comes from somewhere. in the sense that I think it's nurtured, not the old nature versus nurture. Are we born with something or is it bred into us in one way another? I'm fairly confident that violence and evil, let's say evil, comes from, is developed.

There's no, I don't think there's a single newborn baby on this earth that has ever born evil. We make these children evil by the way we treat them. I always said if people had unconditional love from the time they were born, we wouldn't have any of this. It wouldn't exist. That's really what it comes down. It's the absence of love and the absence of love fomented with exacerbated by the

Mm-hmm.

by the unkindness and the cruelty with which some children, too many children in this planet are treated. If we didn't have that, if we had parents who love their children and who let them know that they were loved, gave them that sense of confidence, we wouldn't have this problem. This is really the fundamental issue as far as I'm concerned. And yet,

And yet you hear people though who have had a good childhood and all of a sudden something happens and they go off.

Well, that's what it would seem like when you read their stories. But if you grind, if you actually were living in their homes with these children, I'm going to bet that that's not the case. Right. So it's not so much, you know, I've had five, four children and they're all they've all turned out remarkably well. Thank God. But I look back and I think, OK, what do I what do I do wrong? So. I was fairly, I wouldn't say strict, but maybe my kids would think I was. I mean, I never hit anybody. I wouldn't do that. But I would raise my voice if I was unhappy about something. And so I look back and go, maybe I shouldn't raise my voice. But my kids never, ever doubted that I loved them to pieces. I used to joke, I love you guys to pieces. That's what I would say. None of them ever doubted that, ever, ever, ever. Even to this day, and they're all grown up. They all know it, right? And I think that's how they treat their children, knowing that, because they understand that when you know you're loved, when you know somebody cares about you and has your back. I remember one of my kids, I won't mention which one, once said to me, on more than one occasion said, excuse me, of ruining their life, right? Screaming at me, because I wouldn't let this particular child of mine stay out late with. his or her friends. I'm trying to stay away from the gender. And then several years later called me up one night and wanted me and used me as an excuse so that they didn't have to go out late with their friends. Because their friends would know that their father wouldn't let them do it and that this child didn't want to go. And the point of the story is that this child knew that

Friends. The gender. Yeah, yeah.

Even when this child was hating me, speak, not he or she never really hated me, when they were angry with me, they knew, they always knew that I was doing it for what I thought was their own good, that I was looking out for them. They knew I was always on their side. And so even though I might've been strict or not allowed them to do something they wanted to do, they always knew it came out of love and concern. And when children have that, actually, it's not just children, right? It's very important in children. It's most important in children because that sets the stage going forward. But it's also true of adults. So, you know, people in relationships, if a man or a woman is in a relationship and they feel loved and listened to and cared about, they know their significant other has their back and cares about them, then most of the stuff, you can get by most of the problems, whether it be financial or otherwise. But when you don't have that, that's a real problem. I think I wrote about that in my first book. call it keeping the tank full. doing kind things for your significant other, showing you support your significant other, even if you don't agree necessarily with what he or she is doing. But understand that you have that support. That's what people need, right? You don't go shooting children in a church if you have always felt loved, cared for, you knew somebody had your back, you knew somebody your parents thought you were valued, that you were important. It was important that you existed on this earth, that they cared about you. for you, they loved you. So I think that's a look, maybe there's some experts, although you know how I feel about experts, but maybe there's some people out there who

disagree, it's fine. People are allowed to disagree. I don't have the, I don't think market cornered on truth, certainly. But I do think that's really the case. So I look, when I hear about these things, you know, obviously we're all very troubled, especially when it's children, but I'm troubled all the time by violence. Now I'll tell you another little story. So the other day, my wife and I went to Gettysburg, which as you probably know, is very close. It's an hour, less than an hour and a half from where I live. very close and we have driven by the exit to Gettysburg, the battlefield, numerous times. And we always say, we're going to stop. We've been living here for many, many years. We've never stopped. But this time, my wife said, we're going to Gettysburg. So she made it a reservation for a guide. And we went up to Gettysburg and... It's a funny, actually it's a cute little story. she arranged, guess in one of the few parks where you can have a guide drive you around the park in your car. So the guy gets in your car and drives your car. So we go up a little early, we go through the museum, see the movie. It's fantastic actually, very interesting place. They did a fantastic job on it.

you're kidding.

But I'm kind of digressing a little bit, but we'll get back to point. Anyway, so we go see the museum a little bit, we see a movie, and then it's time to meet the guy. We go to the sign that says meet guide here, right? And I walk out first, my wife is, I think she was in ladies room or getting something, whatever. So I get to site first. And there's a gentleman sitting on the bench, older gentleman, and he's got a walker, right? So I smile at him and I go, hi, how are you? And then a couple minutes later, my wife walks up and. This guy looks at us and says, are you the Klein family? And we look at each other and he's the guy. He's the guy and the driver with a walker. It was pretty funny, but it turns out he was a great guy. just had surgery a few months ago. It was fine. But anyway, it was kind of funny because you look at you go, this is our driver, but it worked out fine. So we go through the battlefield. We spent like over six hours there, a long, long time.

He your driver?

Now my wife loves history. She finds all of this absolutely fascinating. And I look at this, it's not that I don't like history, I like history just fine. But I look at this, I'm thinking, why, it bothers me to me, I'm sure I'm gonna get cards and letters about this, but it bothers me that we not celebrate, but acknowledge these battles, these wars, right? I get we want to honor the people who died. I get it. And believe me, my heart breaks whenever I see these things. But we had 50 something thousand people die at Gettysburg, you know, in over three days, right? I think it was the bloodiest battle in US history. In any war, more people had died in that period of time than I think in any war in our history. I think that's accurate. You think 50,000 people died in the Vietnam War, 50,000 Americans, I should say, soldiers. We're not talking about the Vietnamese, which is another horrible situation. But let's just talk about American soldiers. 50,000 American soldiers died in Vietnam, plus or minus 10%. That many died in three days at Gettysburg. So a war that lasted how many years? 10 years or eight years, whatever it was in Vietnam. Three days, we lost the same number of people. terms of so it's a horrific battle. And so I have a lot of trouble seeing these things, because I see the sorrow, the tragedy, the death. And I think, this is so unnecessary. this gets us to the aerial view for a second. So when you're like me, and you spend a lot of time in the aerial view, and you see all time simultaneously, and you recognize that, how foolish wars are. So, right now people go to Vietnam on vacation, right? All the time, people who go to Vietnam all the time.

Mm-hmm.

And yet when you and I were growing up, was, go to Vietnam. The only way you went to Vietnam was as a prisoner of war, right? And so these times shows you how foolish these wars really are again and again and again, because history will repeat itself no matter how hard you try, no matter how much you rage, you got the fact that to ignore history is to repeat it. You can write books, study, you can do anything you want. It's gonna repeat itself. We have a Holocaust museum here in Washington, DC. Anybody who doesn't think that can happen again isn't paying attention. Whether it's the Jews or any other ethnic group over the history of our world that's been persecuted, will be persecuted again. We see it all the time. I look at these things from a different point of view. To me, they're just so sad and so troubling. People say, well, let's think about the Civil War. It was fought to free slaves. I agree. Slavery was... about as bad as anything can get on this planet. Unfortunately, slavery still exists in some way like this in this world. Most people don't know that. It has existed since time immemorial. It's always been heinous. And anything you can do to overturn or destroy slavery, the institution, you should do. But we assume that without the Civil War, slavery would still be going on, and that's probably not true. So my point in all this is that violence Violence is such a negative influence on us individually and on our society that we should do all we can, in my view, teach our children and inculcate our society with this concept that we should do everything we can to avoid it. It is just anathema for the soul of the individual and the soul of the society.

True. I wanted to talk about something else about violence, though, and that is, and you mentioned it briefly in the beginning, that we see it in the media, we see it in blogs and on Twitter, et cetera, et cetera. It seems to me that we're all suffering from a disease right now. And that is, to me, the disease of indifference. We don't care. It's a one-day story, and the next day we're on to something else. We're indifferent to it because it happens all. the damn time. We're killing each other. For whatever reason, whether it be mental illness or you think it's children who are raised and they're not loved, whatever the reason, we're indifferent to it. We watch it, we see it, we move on. How, in God's name, do we stop the violence? I what does it take? I have a good idea. I mean, we have too many guns. We have more guns. than people in this country. We have more guns than we have people in this country. And yet, and yet, we will not make laws that will mitigate that. There was, I guess one of the cures to me is the way we vote. But how do we stop it? What do we do to stop the violence? How do we defend against the indifference that we're all becoming accustomed to?

OK, so a couple of things to dissect here, think. First is, I'm not sure it's indifference. I think we're desensitized. I think when it happens, if we were indifferent, we would watch that and nobody would go and grab their heart and see these two children that had perished and the other children that were injured. Most, vast majority of people will gasp and grab their heart.

Okay.

But we desensitize because it happens way too often. So I think people still care. Look, we read about the Luigi Mangione's and the people that are supporting that idiot. But it's a minority. It's exacerbated by the, or not exacerbated, it's right, wrong term. It's magnified by the fact that we have social media. And so a few people can make a lot of noise, but the number of people who support shooting somebody in the back, or in this case, shooting children in a church is really relatively small. So we're not, I'm sure it is, but we're not indifferent, we're desensitized. And then you said, you talked about, okay, one of the issues is guns. So I would just say this.

We hope.

Violence, guns are a method to exercise your feelings. other words, violence has existed forever or anger has existed forever and rage has existed forever. And so we used to beat people with sticks or shoot them with arrows or stab them with a knife. Now we have guns. So whatever the mechanism is, it's different than the underlying cause of the violence. They're two different things. Now you could make the case for sure that, well, now it's a lot easier to kill a lot of people than it used to be. 100 % agree with that, right? And we do have way too many guns. I actually wrote, I think in that article I sent you that I had written, and I just was working the other day on a revision of that. We have competing rights in this country. This is one of the issues we have. So we have a second amendment that says we have the right to bear arms. And I, as you know, if it was up to me, there'd be no guns on the planet, right? They'd be gone. Okay. People can roll their eyes, can't hunt, can't do it. I get it. still, maybe it's a little bit much, but there wouldn't be any guns available to kill people. Let's put it that way. But we do have a second amendment and there's a reason we have a second amendment. I accepted the reason we have a second amendment and you can make the case that if Iran had a second amendment, the Ayatollah wouldn't have been in power for the last X number of 60 years, whatever it is. I get it. I understand why the right to bear arms is important. And there are so many guns now that it almost doesn't matter what law we pass because they're out there. Unless you confiscate the hundreds of millions of guns, then the bad guys will always have the guns. We're in a mess in terms of guns right now. think. Yeah, yeah, mean, exactly. So that's we're not going to we're not going to get rid of the guns. I mean, it's just not going to happen. but it wouldn't matter. Hang on a second. It wouldn't matter if everybody had a gun, if nobody had the desire to shoot somebody. Right. So it doesn't matter what the weapon is.

Well, you can even produce a gun on a printer.

If you could have any weapon, but if you don't have the desire or the inclination to hurt someone, then you don't care if there's a billion guns. It wouldn't make a difference. Meaning I'm not saying... The guns aren't part of the problem. They are part of the problem, especially automatic weapons. But if we got rid of the underlying cause, it wouldn't matter what the weapon is. Because we've always had weapons, and people have been assaulting and killing people with weapons since the day of Cain and Abel. There are multiple factors here. So I think since we don't think we can get rid of hundreds of millions of guns in this country, I don't see any chance of that happening. Then we have to work on what we can work on, which is why people feel this way, why this urge to commit violence. And guess where we're going to go? We're going to go to the aerial view. Because when you see the world that way, you realize that there's no reason to be violent. In fact,

Yeah.

There is no gain from violence. If your mission, as we've talked about, is to make this evolution from selfish to self-less, inward to outward focus, then the last thing you want to be doing is committing violence. It's the exact opposite of the direction you should be going, which means at the end of your life, if you've been violent, you have failed. You have failed in your mission. Now, I can't tell you what happens. Some people say, you go to hell. Well, I don't happen to believe in that, but... All I know is that you have failed in your mission. What the repercussions are? No idea. I have no idea. If there are any and what they are, I cannot tell you, nor can anybody else. But I know you not fulfilled your mission. And that is a bad thing. That is an F, right? You have failed in the purpose of the mission of your life.

Talk to me a little bit about mental health. Is it not possible for someone to, let me be colloquial, go off the deep end? mean, that all of a sudden something snaps in the head and for whatever reason, they become violent.

Well, I don't think it's all of sudden. I don't think it's all of a sudden. People don't wake up, you know, one night, you when they're watching, humming Broadway tunes and the next morning getting up and killing somebody. That's generally not what happens. So.

I could.

Well, anything can happen, violent people, when you start searching back, it took a little while for them to get there. Things happened in their life and they started to crawl down this dark path and then they ended up. Yes, I'm not disagreeing. Sure, of course, there are obviously mental health issues. Some of them are organic. Some people have organic issues, but I still think most of them are a consequence of the society in which they are brought up. I just finished a book, and it's an old book.

All right, but it's still a mental health issue, right? It's a mental health. Okay. Yeah. Right. Right.

Yeah.

called a fine balance. It's about a story that back in the days of a dear Gandhi in India. And the amount of violence and cruelty, especially to children or to everybody was just beyond the pale. I mean, you and I. having grown up the way we grew up, we go, how do you treat children like this? How do you do this? Right. So and there's no society that's immune from this. It's you know, this book had to be about India, but you could have been written in any society throughout the history of our world. You know, if we if we understand why we're here and we understand that we're here to take care of others, beginning with children, then all this changes. Now, I get the fact that humans have been on planet hundreds of thousands of years and it hasn't worked yet. So this podcast is unlikely to flip that switch you talked about. we have to try. Each of us has to try. We have to first say that violence is anathema. It's terrible for the soul, for the individual. It's not enough to say it's terrible for the society because people go, well, that's nice. But what about me? What about me?

You're kidding, I think it's

If it's about you, then you're missing the point. It should never be about you. It should be about what you can do to help others. From as young as age as you can think, if you're focused on that and you're not putting that... camera on you and me, me, me, and what do I deserve? Let's get back to the competing rights I mentioned. So you have a right for the Second Amendment that says we have right to bear arms. And then we have this thing called the Declaration of Independence that says that God has given us these unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Rights, boom. These are our rights, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. OK, well, if you can't go to church, you can't send your kids to school, you can't go to the movies without fear of getting shot, then what about your right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? That seems to have been negatively affected by this ability to have to this violent society. So our rights are being impugned by this. by what's going on. And yet we have the second amendment. So you have the right, the second amendment of the US constitution and this paragraph or sentence in the declaration of independence. And they are at odds, right? They are at odds. So which one is right? Well, if you're thinking of me, me, me, me, then depends which side you're on. you're like, if guns are the most, are very important to you you think I have a right to have a gun and you can't take it away from me, it says it right here in the constitution, then you're right. But

Correct. Right.

But there's another way to look at it. You could say, yes, I have rights, but I also have the option to limit my rights voluntarily, not because the government passes a law, but voluntarily because I want a society where my neighbor's kids or my kids can go to school or church and not have to worry about getting shot. So we have to be careful in how we identify the importance of rights. Yes, we have rights, but we also have the ability to generously limit our own rights by choice. We can say, have the right to do, I have the right to own a gun, but I'm going to lock it up. so young children can't get it. Or I'm going to make sure that when I teach my children that the gun is only to be used for hunting or somebody or defensive purposes when somebody breaks into your house, that a gun is never to be used to injure somebody else. So you can limit your rights. We can all limit our rights voluntarily so that the society benefits. Just because you have the right to do something doesn't mean you have to exercise that right. You could be gracious and voluntarily say, you know what, for the benefit of the society, I'm gonna limit some of my rights. You understand the difference? It's the change in the focus of me, my rights to everybody else and the life, the society in which we wanna live, the communities in which we wanna live.

No, point well taken. But let me ask you this question. The repercussions of violence, and there are many repercussions of violence, who's responsible? Who takes charge? What do we do? For example, in this case, we're talking about Minneapolis, just for a minute. The mom of the killer, who's now deceased, refuses to talk. She's not talking to the authorities. Do we then, do we hold the mom responsible? Mm-hmm.

Well, he's 23. So that ship has sailed. You can't. Now, is the mommy's possible or the father? I don't know anything about the father. Well, ultimately, they had a lot to do with this. Because this doesn't happen. That goes back to what I was showing you. It doesn't happen out of nothing.

That's right. That's why I brought that up. Okay, so tell me.

Right. now legally, can't hold the mother of a 20, he's 23. has for five years now, he's been of age to do, he's an adult. So legally, he's responsible for his own behavior, not anybody else. But because that's a tall order in our legal system, it'd be very hard to make any kind of case against a parent at that point. Is the parent responsible at some point? Sure, of course, to some degree, maybe not completely, but absolutely to some degree. not giving this child help when he needed it, because he clearly needed help at some point, right? So, you know, I don't want to be too harsh on the mother. I don't know the story. I don't like to rush the judgment, but.

Mm-hmm.

People don't end up like this for no reason. They don't just, like you said, snap. Something's gone on along the way. And kids who are brought up with lots of confidence because their lives are filled with love and they know somebody has their back, they don't end up like this generally, right? Look, maybe there's an exception somewhere, but you know, but. Generally, no. Generally, it doesn't happen, right? Look at our community growing up. We grew up in very stable families. Now, I don't know about you, my parents fought all the time. They were always fighting, but I always knew that my sister and I had their support. They were gonna look out for us. They were gonna take care of us. And I never worried about being loved, right? It wasn't a perfect childhood. I didn't like growing up listening to my parents screaming at each other day in and day out, but... But I never thought they don't love me, they don't care about me, I'm on my own. I never thought that, even though at a young age I ended up being on my own, it just worked out that way. But I had that background of those first 19 years of my life when I knew I had parents who cared about me. So. You know, the proof is in the pudding. Look at communities where there are very strong nuclear families and extended families and whether it be religion, you know, the church or whatever religion brings them together, whatever ties the community together. These communities have less of this problem, right? It's when you have communities where children are on their own, they have either a single parent or no parent. It's much harder for these kids. mean, it's really quite difficult. And as a society, we have to address this. We can't just ignore it. If we ever want to wrap our arms around this violence problem, it's not going to go away for sure unless we fundamentally change the way we look at our own lives and we look at our societies.

I think we, yeah.

I agree. There's all sorts of issues. I'd love to, we have run out of time, but to look at just exactly who is committing these crimes and who have been the aggressors in this, I think we might be interesting to see just who we're talking about, who have committed these mass murders on our soil. But let me end this podcast about violence, nonviolently.

But let me just say one thing before we do that. I can tell you for sure, politics will not solve this problem. No, no, politics will not solve this problem.

Well, it certainly would help. I'm going to. You and I will will disagree to the day we die that it's all about who we vote for. OK, it may well be that we will have to repent in this generation, not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, wait on time. Martin Luther King Jr. with that. I have the final word, it is indifference. I enjoy talking with you all the time. These are touchy issues, there's no question about it. We don't always see eye to eye on things. But the one thing we do see eye to eye on is that we have to be kinder to one another. We have to really care about one another and think about the actions that we do and also the choice of words that we use when we're talking to people. Anyway, I'll leave you with the final word since this is yours, yours doc.

Yeah. The only reason I say politics won't solve this is because politics is going to be up and down. it's all going to the opinions are going to waver. But if we treat each other like you said properly, especially the children, if we fill our world with love and support. and teaching kids the right way to live and that they have people who care about them and love them and will look after them. That's how we're going to get our arms around this. That's the only way we're going to get arms around this. And the reason we should do that is because from the aerial view, it is clearly evident that we are here for each other. We are here to take care of each other, to watch over each other, to take that camera off ourselves, to not worry about our own individual rights. What can I do? What am I? What are my rights? And focus more on How can I live a life that focuses more on the welfare of others than on myself? When we do that, then we'll start to get wraparoms around this violence problem.

Well said. As always, I appreciate it. We thank you all for listening. Thank you for sending those cards and letters. And if they're obnoxious and nasty, them to him. You got his address. yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Have a good day, my friend. Take care. Bye-bye, peace.

That's fine. Don't ever send anything mean to Enid. She's the most wonderful person. All right, you too. All right. Thanks everybody. Bye.