I’ve had this debate going on in my head since I was a kid. Non-violence vs violence. And here’s where I landed:

I’m personally nonviolent. I always want things to be peaceful. But I’ve also come to the conclusion that those of us who choose non-violence have to at some point accept that violence is being used against us. Constantly. The state uses violence to keep us in line. It uses violence to keep the system running on us. Violence is every day. And it’s top-down. But at the first sight of bottom-up violence, everyone has their pearls in hand.

We are being beaten, killed, abused by the system. But when we symbolically use violence against arbiters of death, suddenly violence is wrong again. But the constant threat and use of state violence is hand-waved away.

I choose non-violence. But the constant slide backwards is not solved with just non-violence. Because non-violence is exactly what we’ve been trying the entire time we’ve been sliding backwards. The class war has been ongoing and one sided. Just because I’m nonviolent doesn’t mean I can’t see the value in violence used against those who are killing us. Bite the hand that starves you.