Can We Imagine a Future Without Violence?

8 min readFeb 11, 2024

Good morning — as I was researching my last article, I came across a quote from Dr. King about the assassination of President Kennedy and I felt called to wrestle the following question:

“Can We Imagine a Future Without Violence?”

I also want to make sure I’m being clear — I’m not asking if such a future is possible or plausible or what changes have to happen to bring it about. I’m asking a question about the present, a question about our own social and mental and emotional and spiritual state — I’m asking if we can, through the lens of our imagination, see such a place from here.

“Can We Imagine a Future Without Violence?”

What a question for a Superbowl Sunday, that was no accident.

Let’s begin with the words of Dr. King:

“Our nation should do a great deal of soul-searching as a result of President Kennedy’s assassination. The shot that came from the fifth-story building cannot be easily dismissed as the isolated act of a madman. Honesty impels us to look beyond the demented mind that executed this dastardly act. While the question “Who killed President Kennedy?” is important, the question “What killed him?” is more important.
Our late President was assassinated by a morally inclement climate. It is a climate filled with heavy torrents of false accusation, jostling winds of hatred, and raging storms of violence.
It is a climate where men cannot disagree without being disagreeable, and where they express dissent through violence and murder. It is the same climate that murdered Medgar Evers in Mississippi and six innocent Negro children in Birmingham, Alabama.
So in a sense we are all participants in that horrible act that tarnished the image of our nation. By our silence, by our willingness to compromise principle, by our constant attempt to cure the cancer of racial injustice with the vaseline of gradualism, by our readiness to allow arms to be purchased at will and fired at whim, by allowing our movie and television screens to teach our children that the hero is one who masters the art of shooting and the technique of killing, by allowing all these developments, we have created an atmosphere in which violence and hatred have become popular pastimes.
So President Kennedy has something important to say to each of us in his death. He has something to say to every politician who has fed his constituents the stale bread of racism and the spoiled meat of hatred. He has something to say to every clergyman who observed racial evils and remained silent behind the safe security of stained glass windows. He has something to say to the devotees of the extreme right who poured out venomous words against the Supreme Court and the United Nations, and branded everyone a communist with whom they disagree. He has something to say to a misguided philosophy of communism that would teach man that the end justifies the means, and that violence and the denial of basic freedom are justifiable methods to achieve the goal of a classless society.
He says to all of us that this virus of hate that has seeped into the veins of our nation, if unchecked, will lead inevitably to our moral and spiritual doom.”

…the “virus of hate that has seeped into the veins of our nation”…

I get curious, I wonder… is hate the virus or is hate the symptom? For your contemplation I offer this idea,

“Hate is a symptom of unmetabolized fear.”

Okay, so I have to admit two things:

First, I have an unrequited love for nonviolence — I can’t explain to you logically why it is unrequited, that’s just how it feels to me. I can share a symptom of this unrequitedness with you — in a time and a place where, it seems to me, common to have lots of tattoos and common to have no tattoos — having just one tattoo seems marginal and points toward the obsessive… so I’ll tell you what my one tattoo says — it is the word Ahimsaa in Sanskrit — the word means ‘without harm’ or ‘nonviolence’… so, like a lost lover, I carry my unrequited flame for nonviolence with me everywhere, usually hidden safely away from prying eyes.

Second, I am a medium caliber Star Trek nerd — I’ve never gone to a convention, but I have owned one of the comprehensive encyclopedias of Star Trek lore… and my love for this question “Can We Imagine a Future Without Violence?” is, in part, Gene Roddenberry’s answer to the question. An answer that I find confusing and perplexing and at least a little frustrating, given my own unrequited love affair with nonviolence. You see, when Gene Roddenberry, envisioned Star Trek as a human society that had disavowed internal violence and exploitation — that was amazing to me. But it always struck me oddly, that the whole structure of this future world was militarized — although only using violence as a last-resort due to the prime directive, refusing to be the initiator of violent engagements regardless of the provocation… I mean, these were big steps forward, even for the 1960’s, still dizzily reeling on the coattails of World War II. But, it struck me as odd, as weird that the presumption of external threats, the presumption that other species and civilizations who had progressed enough for interstellar travel would not have grown past the use of violence. I found that bizarre. But, like I said, I have an unrequited love affair with nonviolence, maybe for others the idea that violence is something you get over or past seems just as incomprehensible and fanciful… maybe…

But the broad cultural influence of Star Trek and other parallel cultural developments were clear, take for example this relatively famous quote from Ronald Reagan’s address to the UN General Assembly on September 21, 1987

“Cannot swords be turned to plowshares? Can we and all nations not live in peace? In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us? What could be more alien to the universal aspirations of our peoples than war and the threat of war?”

Now, some of you probably had trouble taking in Reagan’s words… some of you were probably too busy trying to process the implications of me quoting Ronald Reagan in a positive light. Well, that wasn’t an accident either.

I suggested earlier that “Hate is a symptom of unmetabolized fear.”

So, if you reacted to Ronald Reagan in that way — in such a way that you couldn’t hear the same longing for peace in his heart that is in your own, then I ask you. What fears have you left in your chest unmetabolized? Are those fears preventing you from imagining a future without violence?

Look, if you had asked me last month if I’d be quoting Reagan in my MLK Day follow-up article in a positive way, I probably would have laughed out loud. But I am & I mean it.

We may think differently,

We may have been through different life experiences, different traumas.

But the worlds we dream of are the same.

For those who missed it the first time, in the words of Ronald Reagan, “What could be more alien to the universal aspirations of our peoples than war and the threat of war?”

Now, I have had to struggle not to turn this into an over-revelatory process article , but in prep I read:

Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Kurlansky
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined by Steven Pinker
Doppelganger by Naomi Klein
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X Kendi

Also, since it was my son Simon’s 15th birthday, he requested that we rewatch the 2002 movie Hero ‘directed, co-written, and produced by Zhang Yimou, and starring Jet Li, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Maggie Cheung, Zhang Ziyi, Donnie Yen and Chen Daoming. The historical background of the film refers to the Warring States Period in ancient China, when China was divided into seven states. In 227–221 BC, the Qin state was about to unify the other six states, assassins from the six states were sent to assassinate the king of Qin.’

And despite all my heavy reading — this story is the inspiration I want to end with this morning. When the assassin, played by Jet Li, finally confronts the aspiring Qin emperor, whose aspiration to unite China have been literally soaked in the blood of his enemies. He presents the emperor with a scroll from a master swordsman and calligrapher & the emperor, waiting for his now unavoidable death, contemplates the scroll and says aloud:

“This scroll of Broken Sword’s isn’t about sword technique
but about swordsmanship’s ultimate ideal
Swordsmanship’s first achievement is the unity of man and sword
Once this unity is attained even a blade of grass can be a weapon
The second achievement is when the sword exists in one’s heart when absent from one’s hand
One can strike an enemy at one hundred paces even with bare hands
Swordsmanship’s ultimate achievement is the absence of the sword in both hand and heart
The swordsman is at peace with the rest of the world
He vows not to kill and to bring peace to mankind”

Upon hearing this, the assassin, whose heart has been filled only with a desire for revenge for his murdered family, understands the two words left for him by Broken Sword:

Tianxia

In the movie it is translated variously as ‘Our Land’ or most commonly “All Under Heaven”… it’s transliteration is ‘land under sky’… is that not an apt description of our biosphere, of our mother Earth? It is not the same idea of oneness that inspires Unitarian Universalism.

The assassin understands in that moment that a future without violence can only be imagined in the moment when one chooses to break the cycle of violence. He returns the emperor’s sword, implores him to hold this ultimate achievement of peace in his heart, and calmly walks from the hall to face execution.