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Abscondo Podcast #89: How to end violence now

When the Milwaukee Bucks decided to boycott the originally scheduled game 5 with the Magic...

When the Milwaukee Bucks (my favorite NBA team) decided to boycott the originally scheduled game 5 with the Magic, I was filled with conflicting thoughts and emotions. They took a stand: racism and police brutality will no longer be accepted. While this single act won’t solve the problem, I believe it can start a conversation that will.

The problem isn’t just one isolated incident of racism or police brutality. The problem is an entire system of violence—a culture of violence that is so rotten to the core that it is no longer acceptable. These elite athletes are willing to risk their season—perhaps their careers—because they, like so many of us, are completely fed up.

I, too, have had it with police violence in any and every form. I am also fed up with a military that arbitrarily kills people in foreign countries, with the government’s trampling on personal liberty, with the endless threats from the legal system and life-destroying prison sentences to back them up. I know how the entire system treats minorities, but nobody else’s life in this system is any picnic either and this has been going on for far too long.

Just as in the days of Fascism and Communism, government authority is terrorizing human beings and we are fed up.

But it doesn’t stop there. I’ve also had it with the violent attitudes of people—the sarcasm, open hatred, mocking, road rage, even shouting and threatening each other. Then there are the lost souls who would steal or murder, there’s the brutality against children and spouses, and the frustrated sexual aggression everywhere.  

Everywhere we look in this violent culture, we see threats and symbols to trigger fear and exalt violence. This is not just about the United States, there is a global pandemic of violence that is causing far too much fear and suffering. Beyond racism and police brutality, the violence is from top to bottom—including the angry individual behavior that causes the police to respond, including the violent attitudes and tones, and including the crime.

All of this is caused by only one thing: lack of love. Sin is where love is not, and nothing will ever get better until we decide to learn what love is.

No symbolic gesture like a sports boycott is going to make any difference. It, too, is only a failing strategy of the ego—more shaming and blaming, more pointing to an oppressor and a victim, more calls for punishment—this is all the stuff of ego, just more of the same.

The cure is the antidote to ego—the undoing of it—and it is unconditional love. If we are fed up, this is the only path forward. This is the complete and lasting undoing of violence and hatred. If George Hill, Eric Bledsoe, and rest of us want to solve the problem—then let’s talk about love, forgiveness, presence, awakening, the escape from ego.

Now is the time to go deeply within and then speak the real truth—as we all must if we want anything in this world to change.

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