Fire with Fire

You can’t fight force with force, Fire with fire

You can’t fight force with force.  Martin Luther King, Jr. said it, the bible said it, Mahatma Gandhi said it. 

You can’t fight force with force,

fire with fire,
violence with violence;
Arming our schools
is not the answer.
 

You can’t fight force with force,

fire with fire,
violence with violence;
We only escalate the problem
and raise the stakes.

You can’t fight force with force,

fire with fire,
violence with violence;
More guns, more arms,
more power is not the answer.

We need to build our communities, play on our empathy rather than our selfishness, on our bonds rather than our individualism.  Balance is the hardest objective to achieve.  The pendulum always swings to extremes.  It’s swung too far in one direction – we need to turn it back.  We need to turn ourselves back to looking toward one another, embracing, sharing, giving.  Not to discount the individual within each of us, our rights to be the best that we can be, to follow our dreams – but to figure out how to live our dreams together, rather than stepping on those in our path to climb the ladder. 

I know it sounds simplistic; I know that by itself it cannot be the only answer, but when Terry and I sat at Whole Foods sharing a table with Grant, and I handed him a bookmark with the image of two shapes embracing and dancing on the cover of my book, I added – after a discussion regarding the paper on the table between us with a large picture of a local gun shop in Bellevue selling out of automatic assault rifles and military-style weapons, “I would argue that if people are this close to one another, they won’t even have the space to shoot each other.”  And tango is not the only way to build community – there are so many ways, so many interests that people have that can bring them closer to one another, to highlight each of our humanity. 

We need more of that. 

And we must work together to do it.  Connection can’t be built alone.