Violence prevention

According to Shankar Vedantam's July 2 story "Therapy Helps Troubled Teens Rethink Crime," often violence is not a calculated thing, but a matter of someone getting mad and out of control.  That seems consistent with many cases I've heard about.  On Tuesday, in a neighboring town, at a youth baseball game, an umpire made a call, and as a result was assaulted by a parent and a coach.  Even in cases where it's a little more pre-meditated, often it is still the same dynamic where someone feels disrespected and is filled with rage, so they decide to go after the person who angered them.  A recent case in the news is that of Aaron Hernandez.  After he was arrested for murder, more stories came out of his reacting violently when angry.

The article tells about a program in which young people were taught to slow down and think before acting.  During the year the program was going on, the students in the program had a lower arrest rate than the control group.  However, the change did not last after the program was over.

I think it's a step in the right direction.  Making guns less readily accessible would help too.  So often criminal justice focuses on punishment.  By then it is too late.  I hope we can continue to work on preventing crime before it happens.  When crimes happen, the victims and the perpetrators can have their lives ruined.  Let us teach our young people not to ruin their own lives and other people's lives.

It is present in human nature, this ability to burst into violence.  It bursts out in certain circumstances.  It seems to have to do with feeling disrespected.  It has to do with anger, and anger seems to come from hurt.  Can we care for our young people so they don't have to erupt into anger?

Maajid Nawaz grew up feeling alienated, and became an Islamist radical.  When he was in prison in Egypt, he was adopted by Amnesty International.  Because of this experience of being embraced, he changed, and became a counter-terrorism activist.

Rejecting people, we alienate them, incite them to violence.  Embracing people, we inspire them to compassion and reconciliation.  No, it doesn't always work that way. It doesn't guarantee safety.  But people are more likely to be nice to us if we are nice to them.

It seems so simple and obvious.  Why do people not do it that way? Why when my country feels another country is a threat, do they drop bombs on that country?  We have made more enemies in places like Iraq and Pakistan than we had before we were bombing them.

Arizona immigration law comments by Packy Anderson

Packy Anderson wrote the comments below on his Facebook page, and gave me permission to repost them:

I'm glad I don't have to go to Arizona anytime soon; I'm not sure if my passport is up to date. I'm descended from illegal immigrants, and I could easily pass for a native of Ireland. If I can't prove I'm a citizen, they could arrest me.

The AZ law requires police officers to question a person about his or her immigration status if there is "reasonable suspicion" that person may be illegally in this country. That's a particularly vague wording, and it gives a police officer carte blanche to question anybody they can concoct a "reasonable" rationale for. If I don't happen to have proof of my citizenship on me, then I'm subject to arrest. The only thing that can assuage my fear of being arrested without cause is the knowledge that I don't fit the racial profile the law was enacted to target, and that's not much comfort. So, until AZ changes it's law, I need to carry a passport to move freely without fear of arrest within a section of the country I'm a citizen of.

I go through life with the assumption that if someone CAN abuse the power they have over me, they WILL. This is a nation of laws, and unless the law guarantees that the police are not allowed to treat me in a particular fashion, I have to assume that they will. And I also assume that if the police are likely--or required by law!--to treat any other law-abiding person in a particular way then I am also going to be treated in the same fashion.

Finally, of course, a lot of it comes down to my personal religious faith. The man I follow once said "whatsoever you do to the least of my people, that you do unto me." Sure, I'm not an ethnic Mexican trying to make a living surrounded by people who despise me because of my ethnicity. I'm also not old enough to remember the days when my great-grandparents couldn't get jobs because workplaces had signs hanging outside saying "Irish need not apply". But if I don't care about such things with my entire heart and try to change them (and, since this is a law in a state I'm not a resident in, the most I can do is speak out against it), then I'm doing these things to my saviour.