I don’t know why I constantly harp on this on this blog—it really has no place on a Montreal food site—but I’m constantly horrified at the violence people do to each other. It literally makes me cry. (I’m crying right now). And I constantly remind people that violence is not just hitting, shooting or killing people . . . it’s accidental violence like leaving your two-year-old in his car seat while you go to work on a hot summer’s day, it’s intentional verbal abuse, harassment, not leaving someone alone when they just want to be left alone . . . it’s all forms of inflicting whatever torment you have in mind on another person, or an animal, for that matter. Even a plant deserves respect.
I’m a great one for history and I’m watching a movie of the unspeakable—unspeakable, I don’t know a better word—the Japanese empire wrought on this world in the Second World War.
And my son has a Japanese passport? How can I possibly explain to him that his ancestors murdered 300,000-plus Chinese civilians, with relish, in the Nanjing massacre? And that the author of a book about it, Iris Chang, committed suicide with a gunshot wound to the head because she couldn’t deal with the stories?
What is it in us that deals violence? Why? It certainly doesn’t advance us evolutionarily. Unless you use the old argument that, yeah, tigers kill Arunachal macaques and we somehow have the animal urge to eat, so we have to inflict violence. But that’s because that’s what tigers NEED to do. They don’t kill things or molest them just for sport.
I’m sure what I’m saying here has been said a million times but it needs to be said again.
And again. Until the violence, in every form, stops.
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