`If you don't get out now, you will be left there all day." The speaker was a woman who looked about my own age. I had been holding open the door of a shopping centre, to allow an older woman with a stick, and a younger woman wheeling a buggy to walk out in front of me. But as soon as they saw their chance, people came rushing in and out, pushing and shoving through the open door. The other woman was right. Unless I made a dash for it, I could be left holding the door.
I walked to my car and as I was about to turn the key in the ignition I heard a bang on the windscreen, through which I could see the angry face of a man shouting at me, "Will you make up your mind, missus, are you coming or going?" When I indicated to him that I was leaving, he started to scream expletives at me for wasting his time. He had been waiting to park as I was "dilly-dallying".
This all took place after a weekend when two young people had been murdered and a 15-year-old lay critically ill in hospital after he had been brutally attacked, less than half a mile from where I live. I had also just met a young man, John, who called to register for a tai-chi course at our newly opened sanctuary at Stanhope Street, Dublin. He had just finished a course in self-defence skills, because he had been brutally attacked in Dublin city centre six months earlier as he went one night to find a taxi to take him home. Four young men severely kicked and beat him, leaving him with two broken limbs and a smashed-up face.
Having spent a week in hospital and a month out of work, he found that they had not only taken his money and his phone and broken his body, but they had also managed to break his confidence. He found himself living in a state of constant fear. He wanted to register for the tai-chi course as a way of finding some inner peace.
His attackers are still at large. He reported the incident to the Garda, but they were never found, even though plenty of people witnessed the attack, but they passed quickly by, afraid to intervene. Those young fellows are still out there, still terrorising people. The violence goes on and on. But John is determined not only to defend himself but also to defend others, and to learn to do so in a non-violent fashion.
John is just one of many innocent people who have been brutally attacked in the city. Almost everyone knows of someone who has been attacked on our streets in recent days and months. The level of violence in Ireland is rising to a frightening degree. Every other day people are being beaten and battered, left with horrific injuries; occasionally people are actually killed as a result of such attacks.
Some people like to think such attacks have to do with gang warfare or disputes over drugs. Some of it certainly has; just as some of it has to do with people who are involved in extramarital affairs or who have differences with their partners in relation to their children; or young people who have consumed too much alcohol and who hang round the streets at night and who are simply paying the price for their indiscretion. But the vast majority of victims are innocent people, minding their own business. It is only when it happens to somebody close to us that we realise that we are all potential victims.
So what can we do?
There are precautions we can take, certainly. As the Garda Siochana and organisations like Victim Support and Crime Stoppers advise, we can be vigilant, never carry large amounts of cash, never walk alone through dark, empty streets or laneways or through parks at night, arrange to meet people in well-lit places where there are plenty of people around, carry mobile phones and use them to contact gardai straight away if we think we are being followed, take taxis, and keep car doors locked when driving or waiting.
All these precautions are sensible, and if followed they will reduce our liability to violence, but they will not prevent it. That's because violence isn't only something that happens on the streets or in certain blighted homes.
Violence is everywhere and the big acts of violence and brutality that we know about are simply the cumulative effect of all our violence to each other. If we want to tackle violence in society, we first need to recognise our own capacity for violence and acknowledge that what is happening out there in our violent society happens in our personal relationships too. It happens in our misunderstandings, our failure to communicate, our resentments and prejudices, our avoidance of some people and our silent treatment of others, our self-righteousness, our impatience, our desire for power, our greed. It happens in our families, maybe in a small way, but it happens; with neighbours, friends, co-workers and communities.
The seeds of violence exist within each of us; but so do the seeds of peace. We all carry these seeds within us and constantly give messages of peace or violence in everything we say or do. We give these messages in the way we walk, talk, listen, eat and drink, drive, sit, stand, the way we include and exclude, the way we compete and co-operate, the way we relate and withdraw, the way we treat the strong and robust as well as the weak, frail and vulnerable. Until we take responsibility for our own capacity for violence, we cannot even begin to prevent violence in society.
Unless we learn a peace-filled way of being and living and teach it to our children and children's children, all the institutions and systems in the world that we put in place to curb violence will not eliminate it. There will always be some degree of violence, and it can be curbed and reduced by different systems of control, but a peaceful, non-violent society can only come about if we make it happen in our own lives.
Sister Stanislaus Kennedy is a Sister of Charity