Revenge

                                                                       Revenge

                                                               by Marco M. Pardi

Revenge and punishment are two different things. Punishment is inflicted for the sake of the person punished; revenge for that of the punisher, to satisfy his feelings.” Aristotle (384 – 322 BCE) Rhetoric: 1.10

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As the pace of attacks ascribed to or “inspired” by one or another group seems to accelerate the reactionary statements multiply.  Some dredge up assertions from over two thousand years ago: “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” One of our presumptive candidates for the upcoming U.S. presidential elections has advocated killing the families of known or suspected terrorists, reinstating waterboarding, and going well beyond waterboarding.  That this person, completely ignorant of facts on practically everything plays to emotions rather than logic comes as no surprise. Nor does the support for this person across the country.

I have never adopted the La-La position of All We Need is Love.  The individuals I’ve met over the years who espoused that mantra seemed just as ignorant as the aforementioned candidate, and living carefree lifestyles in complete ignorance of those who would deny them those lifestyles and the people working 24/7 to ensure they could go on strumming their guitars without a sour note.  Turn the other cheek seems like good advice for people who like to have their ass kicked.

I will not go into specific details as confidentiality laws and personal integrity prohibit and/or curb that.  I will say I’ve encountered far more than my fair share of males and females who would kill, some without so much as a blip on their EKG.  The descriptive, Dead Eyes is quite accurate.  Some of these people seemed likely to be bored with the person coming to kill them.

But how to respond?  So often we hear the admonition, If we do what they do, we become them.  There are two fundamental ways of looking at revenge: Personal and Impersonal.

The personal is the one we, as individuals, have been familiar with the longest.  Another child smacks you on the playground, you smack him back.  Even in this early stage there can be valuable lessons.  In the 4th grade a boy punched me.  I punched back, knocking him down against a fence as his nose erupted in blood.  I felt so badly for him I rushed to him and helped him up.  While I was doing that he punched me in the nose and I erupted blood.  Lesson: When your opponent is down, finish him.  At least ensure his will to fight is gone.

If the person who harms you is clearly more powerful, find a way other than playing into his hands.  I’ve done that.  But here we are also offered the opportunity to drift into the impersonal.  Society tells us to seek out an authority figure, or institution, and not “take the law into our own hands.”  That can be a really hard sell.  When my daughter was a young child living with her mother in a condo complex one of the men in the complex exposed himself to her.  She told me of this years later, after she had grown and married.  She also told me of the advice her mother gave her at the time: Do NOT tell your father. He will come here and beat to death every man he finds in the complex.  Her mother could have her bright days.    

There were many fights, and some play, on that 4th grade playground I mentioned earlier.  But most ended quickly.  The ground was hard clay, overlaid with an uneven sprinkling of gravel.  The down in getting knocked down was often more painful than the knock.  One morning a particularly enthusiastic all out brawl developed.  A human coliseum quickly formed around the combatants – we were Roman Catholic, after all.  Soon a pretty, young Nun, her black veils billowing, bore down on the scene.  As the fight progressed unabated we watched for her Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down.  From her place at the Imperator’s spot she yelled, “No kicking in the balls!! No kicking in the balls!!”  To this day I’m sure what her response would have been had I run to her to say Jimmy hit me.

So despite the soporific tones of the moralists, we must admit to at least a reservoir of personal intent, if not a history of action.

Recourse to the impersonal seems more appropriate in more serious cases, even when the victim – or those associated with the victim, might conceivably be capable of direct and personal response.  A former colleague of mine, now deceased, was away from home when his wife incautiously answered a ring at the front door.  She was practically decapitated by a shotgun blast to the throat. There was no evidence of entry, nothing taken, and no “return address” on the act. It should also be said she had no level of employment that would engender such an attack against her personally.  It was either a jumpy amateur hit (in one area where I was stationed such a hit could be had for as little as $5.00 U.S.) or a message to him. But either way, he had no recourse but to work with the “law of the land”, which in the end did no good.   

How does one gather the maelstrom of revenge and hand it to “the authorities”?  When a criminal act is reported the entity claiming jurisdiction assumes the role of the aggrieved.  Remember the last time you were indicted for something?  The paperwork read, The State of _______ versus YOU. Who is the State?  Presumably you have injured the citizenry, who have deferred their authority for revenge to an institution.  Of course, if someone harmed my child this institution would be hard pressed to get one step ahead of me.

My only in-depth adventure into the criminal justice system was when I was selected as an Expert Witness for the Defense in a pornography/obscenity trial.  The Central Florida county where I lived brought charges, after a months long investigation, against a truck stop for selling graphic magazines in a back room. As the county’s only Anthropologist, it was assumed I could interpret the nocturnal shrieks and moans permeating our fair neighborhoods as evidence the behaviors shown in the magazines were within current community standards. I suggested to the defense counsel they might better have selected a serial Peeping Tom as their expert, but I did rise to the occasion, as it were.

I was amazed, and more than a little offended, that the prosecution did not challenge my subject matter knowledge in this area. After three full days and thousands of dollars the trial ended in a Hung Jury – no pun intended.  What interested me most was the process through which each side “struck” potential jurors. If attorneys do not already know intimate details about citizens, it does not take long for them to uncover them.

But still, what about those real crimes?  Years ago a friend’s 9 year old son was abducted on his way to a convenience store.  Several days later his body was found tied to a tree.  Two men had grabbed him and, over the course of those days, repeatedly sodomized him and tied him to the tree for archery practice.  The Medical Examiner testified his death was very protracted and painful.  How does a parent leave this to law enforcement? Sit through a trial?  Accept the verdict of a jury, especially in States that do not have the death penalty?  And, even where the death penalty is enforced, does watching a person “put to sleep” – like a sick dog at a vet’s office, satisfy the indescribable feelings of the parent?

Oh, yes, the hand wringers and the kumbaya crowd intone understanding and forgiveness.  The morally superior but experientially vapid among us pat our hands and chant their hackneyed phrases of  “higher spiritual wisdom”. So who came up with this hierarchy of spiritual development?  Madam Blavatsky’s “Ascended Masters”?  Please find me one example of a moral code not written by man, and please don’t bother with claims of “divine inspiration”.       

Well gosh, isn’t this rhetoric out of character for a person who accepts the referential term “mystic”?  The simple answer is: No.  The explanatory answer is: Mysticism is the awareness of all things. There is no catechism of think this, not that.  There is no inherent or mandated change of behavior; “What did the Buddha do on reaching enlightenment? He went back to washing his bowl.” Mysticism is the awareness of IS. There is no inherent mandate to dream up what could be, or what should be.  And there is certainly no basis for claiming a higher position on some imaginary hierarchy of being.  In the words of Jon Kabat-Zinn, “Wherever you go, there you are.”

So if you feel wronged and in need of redress, fine.  Sense it. Examine it. Be aware of it in its fullness.  I happen to think that people who self flagellate over such thoughts and feelings of revenge, who condemn themselves as wrong, immoral, undeveloped, or whatever other pejorative is current are like the woman I knew years ago and of whom I said, “You could mail her a hammer and she would beat herself to death with it.” 

Be the fullness of you and stop trying to be the artificial construct others would make of you.  Realization may mean you deliver a “kick in the balls”, but the return address is you, not some self-righteous other who sanctioned the act or disapproved of the act.