Now-a-days it seems that there is at least one in everything you do. Whether it be business (i.e. the government) or some community event or walking down the street. There’s always someone that is willing to use physical threat or other forms of coercion to get what they want. And the worst part about it? They get away with it.
In Toronto we’re having horrible gang violence with illegal guns (wow, that gun registry really worked!) knives and anything else that they can get their hands on. Worse, they’re killing others. And what happens? Everyone runs away from them and hides.
In London, the police are chasing men that just tried to blow up a Subway stop, and what does everyone around do? They run away and hide!
Canadian soldiers are fighting terrorist thugs in Afghanistan right now, and what does the leader of the NDP want to do? RUN AWAY AND HIDE.
I play indoor and outdoor rec league soccer. In outdoor, there is a guy that keeps getting let back in. He plays rough. He’s also probably 220 pounds and really muscular. He runs into people, tackles them and checks them without first playing the ball (i.e. he assaults them). It got to the point that no one on my team would play the same wing that he was on.
In indoor soccer we have a similar thug. He plays the man, not the ball. When you come up to defend against him, he fakes kicking the ball at you, and when he’s almost but not quite going to get to the ball, he plays your body instead of the ball because he knows he can’t get it cleanly but most people will back off and he’ll get it anyhow. The bigger the person, the more he does this. Why? Because he knows he can get away with it with the big guys and he leaves the others alone because it would be too obvious (and generally he doesn’t have to because they just assume that he’s better and they let him by).
Why do these thugs exist? For the same reason that bullies on a school yard exist. Because no one is willing to stand up to them. The teachers aren’t defending the smaller kids, and the smaller kids haven’t been taught to stand up for themselves and in fact are taught that they shouldn’t. End result, years of terror.
In outdoor soccer I repeatedly bitched at the ref to call the guy, to give him a card for what he was doing. No dice. It took me jumping up when he slide tackled me (a no-no in rec league soccer) and smashing down on his leg and almost breaking it and then standing up to him when he went after me after for anything to happen. And then instead of the ref realizing that it was the thug and more to the point, the ref (i.e. the authority figure) that did nothing about it that was too blame, the ref gave both of us a game suspension. Yes, that’s right, the victim gets punished. Not only do we do nothing, but we punish the victim for standing up for themselves and refusing to be a victim.
At this point, I’m very tempted to join the Canadian military and go fight in Afghanistan. Not because I want to kill anyone, but because it’s my duty as someone that can do something about it, to fight back against thugs. To put down the rabid animals as they so rightfully deserve.
It is specifically this climate of “turn the other cheek” that causes bullying and thugery. We’re taught that we live in a civilized society and that we don’t resort to violence.
I’ve got news for you. I may be civilized, and so may you be, but the thug is not. You have no common ground with which to air your grievances and get a resolution; especially when the authorities do nothing.
Objective law is the study of law that are both non-contradictory and protect the rights of the individual to live their own life free of the threat of violence. We have forsaken these most basic of concepts that has been around for thousands of years in favour of a false-hood. You cannot negotiate with terrorists/thugs/bullies. There is nothing to negotiate. You can only carry on intelligent discourse with another person if you’re both civilized and respect the other’s rights. Since these (mostly) men do not recognize your rights, only their own desires, it is impossible to do so. The only recourse that a just man, and a just society has is violence.
But what of the “cycle of violence”? Cycle’s of violence are a myth perpetrated by socialists. But what of it? Even if the concept was true, the problem then lies with allowing your enemy to fight back. It is your right to use whatever force is necessary to defend yourself from violence: Both now, and in the future. If the threat is real and the person will retaliate back, you thus have the right to kill the thug to ensure that you will be free from further violence. And then there is no cycle of violence. This is the original concept (at least in the modern age) of the death penalty. It is the end of the cycle. It is the last recourse to solving someone that does not respect others and will use whatever force is necessary to get what they want. Thus their lives are forfeited specifically because they are willing for forfeit another’s. It has nothing to do with punishment, or revenge or anything else. It is about defending the victim from their attacker and ensuring that the victim and all future victims are safe from the thug. This is the key to objective law. The recognition that laws and punishment are not there to either punishment or to rehabilitate the person. The punishment phase of an objective justice system is there for one reason and one reason only: To ensure that the offender will not harm another again. Whether that’s done through rehabilitation, or whether that is done through horrible incarceration, or a combination of both is a matter of finding what works and using it regardless of how distasteful we may find it as civilized people.
The point to all of this is simple: It is time we stopped turning the other cheek. It isn’t working. It is time that each and every one of us fight back. Whether it is the woman that gets no justice from the police and bands together with other victims of the same rapist and goes and kills him or castrates him, or whether it be every man who is in the vicinity rushing the thugs with the guns in down-town Toronto and beating the life right out of the them. Or whether it be Canada standing up and saying “If you harm our citizens we will revisit it on you ten fold. We will stop at nothing to ensure the freedom of our country and our soldiers. And then backing it up with more and more troops and revisiting the terrorism of the Taliban right back on them with snipers and explosives in their encampments, and roadside bombs etc. etc.” (which is what we should be doing with the hostage situation in Iraq btw)
It is time that we stopped inviting these thugs to harm us. It is time that we once again taught the thugs that the result of thugery is death and that you can’t possibly get what you want out of it. Because only when the outcome of their actions is death or at the very least severe pain and humiliation, will the thugs stop. Because it is the only thing they can possibly understand. That’s how a civilized society deals with bullies. What we have now is a society of cowards and we’re getting exactly what we deserve for our cowardice.