[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 137 (Tuesday, September 27, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: September 27, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                            WORDS OF WISDOM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from Ohio [Ms. Kaptur] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, in this job we are asked to do a lot of 
reading and generally want to. It amazes me how often the written word 
in our country has degraded us as a people as opposed to uplifting us, 
particularly so often in the written press, including many of our 
newspapers. Thus it was with a great deal of satisfaction, as I passed 
through the Pittsburgh airport on my weekly trip back to Ohio, that I 
discovered an article on the editorial page I thought of such worth 
that I wanted to read it into the Record. It was written by Samuel 
Hazo, the State poet of Pennsylvania, director of the International 
Poetry Forum and a professor of English at Duquesne.

                              {time}  1750

  The title of this particular guest editorial was ``The Tyranny of 
Violence.'' He says, ``Thornton Wilder once remarked that violence 
results from a breakdown of the imagination.'' That certainly caught my 
eye, and I kept reading. It said, ``This has always implied for me,'' 
the author, ``that violence occurs when we shirk what visionary 
thinking demands or when we don't think at all.''

                        The Tyranny of Violence

                            (By Samuel Hazo)

       If we involved in a dispute, for example, and suddenly stop 
     thinking and begin to shout or even fight, then violence has 
     won. When manners and civil respect are replaced by the 
     brashness of turf claims and gang rights, violence has won. 
     Similarly when nations abandon or ignore diplomacy to resolve 
     disputes and revert to war, violence has won. In all 
     instances where violence in word or deed becomes the dominant 
     force in human relations, the power of the imagination has 
     been ignored.
       To say that violence is the option of first resort when 
     people stop imagining or thinking is really to say that 
     violence is the language of the stupid. And any society that 
     permits itself to be tyrannized by the stupid or by 
     conditions created by stupidity is a society whose 
     creativity, civility and idealism can never be released.
       The reactionary reflex of relying only on the use of force 
     against the white whale of violence does not tap our creative 
     resources. On the contrary, it prevents our arriving at those 
     strategies and emancipations that are victories of intellect, 
     and these, as Shelley and Thomas Jefferson have shown, 
     originate exclusively in the imagination.
       A classic example of surrendering to a defensive reflex is 
     the widespread possession of handguns in domestic residences. 
     Stripped of the monotonous arguments of the National Rifle 
     Association and its incorrect interpretation of the Second 
     Amendment (which originally stipulated one month of militia 
     training every year for all gun owners), the possession of 
     handguns for self-defense is a concession to fear. However 
     understandable such a fear may be in our present 
     circumstances, handguns can only provide a limited amount of 
     protection against those who operate by stealth (thieves or 
     muggers) and none at all against drive-by murderers.
       Moreover, an armed citizenry can easily develop an Alamo-
     or-fortress mentality, turtling up against a real or imagined 
     danger. This actually permits the danger to flourish at 
     will and prevents the rebirth of a social climate where 
     lawbreakers are answerable to society's standards and not 
     vice-versa.
       Another example of the tyranny of violence is the curious 
     attraction that the insanity of drugs has over the young. 
     Forget for a moment the nonsense that life can be enhanced by 
     ``chemical highs,'' as the drug culturalists would have 
     everyone believe. Forget, if you can, the criminal underworld 
     that drugs enrich. Think only of what a leading plastic 
     surgeon for nose reconstruction said in Pittsburgh recently 
     on the subject of ``the cocaine nose.'' He began by saying to 
     his fellow plastic surgeons in convention here that the 
     ingesting of cocaine (snorting) can be fatal at first snort, 
     as it was to a promising young basketball player several 
     years ago. If death does not occur, the snorter can look 
     forward to the rotting of the inner membranes of the nose, 
     then the nostril flesh, then the nose bone, then the facial 
     sinuses and ultimately the brain. By then the boneless nose 
     will have collapsed flush into the face itself. Anyone who 
     thinks of these consequences in advance and still pursues his 
     addiction has simply turned off his imagination and opted for 
     violence against his very self.
       Can violence be separated from the subject of abortion? Put 
     aside, if possible, the political, sexual and theological 
     dimensions of the abortion issue for a moment. Put aside as 
     well the fact, as everyone knows, that decriminalization does 
     not render a previously criminalized act moral, only legal; 
     it is a truism that the immoral can be legal, and vice-versa.
       But all such disquisition becomes moot when abortions are 
     performed, and these terminations (as proponents and 
     opponents admit) are by nature violent to the unborn. They 
     literally end life at its source, assuming, of course, that 
     life begins at the moment of conception. This assumption, by 
     the way, is not a theological or political fact but a medical 
     one. If life does not begin then, when does it?
       With regard to sexual diseases, do we not do violence to 
     our sense of ethical justice by ascribing moral 
     equivalence between those who are involuntarily or 
     accidentally infected and those who voluntarily risk or 
     court infection? This does not mean that cures should not 
     be supported and pursued. But reducing sexual relations to 
     a matter of mutual consent and hygiene certainly does not 
     say all there is to say about the nature of sex and human 
     personality, to say nothing of sexuality's spiritual 
     dimension. In fact, it tends to separate sex from 
     personality, which, according to anthropologist Margaret 
     Mead, is the very essence of pornography.
       Assuming that hygiene is the ultimate sexual norm is 
     reminiscent of the standard military practice of showing VD 
     films to recruits as a means of having them avoid venereal 
     infection.
       The aforementioned violent short cuts--physiological and 
     psychological--have already done serious damage to the 
     national fabric. The question is whether the damage is 
     repairable so that we can again be the law-respecting and 
     imaginative democracy we were intended to be. But can we 
     correct the social consequences that arise when children are 
     taught, not manners, but self-defense as the first law of 
     social life?
       Can we still uphold the dignity of the individual when 
     countless social, political, military and economic pressures 
     insist that Americans are made for the system and not the 
     other way around?
       Have the rudeness and illiteracy of talk shows on 
     television or radio, which have given gossip a bad name and 
     dignified mere blab as free speech, done such violence to 
     genuine conservation that people can go for months on end 
     without having a crucial talk with anyone?
       We shall see.

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