Transcript
Hello everyone welcome to another daily gym today is wednesday february 14th valentine's day 2024 today i want to talk about, when are we finally going to realize that violence doesn't solve violence, violence does not end violence and i don't understand why we don't get this through our our heads but also through our hearts um and if it does end violence it temporarily ends violence i I think so many places around the world, so many cultures, so many societies believe that if we punish people, that if we instill fear in them, then that will resolve violence. If someone punches me, I should punch them back equally, if not harder, or maybe sometimes much harder so that the violence ends and they will just be living in terror. I think we get so angry at people we call terrorists, yet we engage in very similar actions.
I'm very frustrated today. I had a wonderful call with my friend Caleb that was an episode, podcast episode that just released today about music-assisted therapy and sound healing and more. And I get off the call and I come down and I realize that many people have been shot and killed. Some killed at a parade celebrating the Kansas City Chiefs American Football Championship victory.
And I'm so tired of seeing violence. I'm so tired of us responding to violence with either confusion as if, oh, we don't know where the violence came from, or coming at it with more violence. Well, if we only lock these people up, then it wasn't resolved the conflict. No. Or as in what we do with war very often, if we only bomb these people until they don't exist, then it will end the conflict. No. You think that the relatives aren't going to seek vengeance and spite against you? Of course they are. Or at least there's a very high likelihood if they get over their terror, but they may spread that terror and that fear back to us in some way.
Why do so many of us own guns here in this country? Why do so many of us think that, well, the solution to somebody else having a gun is me having a gun? Because if we all had guns, then we'll all be safer? safer? Maybe that's just leftover mutually assured destruction theory from the Cold War that if everyone has nuclear weapons, then we're all safer, yet at the same time, most countries worked quite hard to make sure not all countries had nuclear weapons, because I don't think we fully believe that if every single country or region had nuclear weapons, we would all be safer.
As we saw today, there were something like 800 police officers at the parade. No, it was probably a big parade. I don't know how many people, but I would imagine hundreds of thousands, if not like a million people, showed up at the parade.
And all it takes is one person or two people to shoot a gun for a few seconds, and it can kill a lot of people. So if everyone had a gun would it really resolve it maybe it would stop them from killing as many people maybe if people know how to use the gun, i just don't think giving everybody a powerful dangerous weapon that can be used against others or themselves is the solution to stopping people from using weapons towards themselves and others.
But i don't think we have these conversations i watch television and listen to some podcasts here and there and i just don't think we have deep emotional conversations about why we actually, have guns why we think that the best way to resolve conflict is through punishment and deterrence, why we kind of root for vengeance in a way and root for spite. And there was an article many, many months ago, maybe years ago, talking about how we don't necessarily.
Do punishment for deterrence most of us do it for spite you hurt me so i'm going to hurt you back i want you to know how it feels well one way to have the other person know how it feels is to tell them how many people do we have in this country who are hurting so badly from covid from the the recession before, from broken relationships, from death, from addiction, from loneliness, lack of romance. I mean, it's Valentine's Day, right? How many people are hurting and we just don't talk about it. And we express our emotions by shooting somebody or we express our emotions by by blaming somebody or express our emotions by throwing someone in prison, or outcasting someone, excommunicating them, shunning them. What if we actually talked about what was going on? And not just about the surface level stuff, but the deep stuff. How many people lost people during COVID? How many people had relatives who died? And we haven't talked about it. How many people lost their jobs? We haven't talked about it. How many people got divorced? We haven't talked about it. How many people are still living in fear of getting a disease that might cripple them, how many people have long COVID, how are we just not talking about the stuff that are impacting us and just pretend everything is fine. So today that's what I wanted to talk about a little bit just to show how frustrated I am that we're not having these conversations and frankly invite Invite anyone who wants to talk about these things to join me on the podcast for a long-form conversation. We can talk about guns and emotion. We can talk about COVID. We can talk about grief. We can talk about whatever. Let's just start talking about the real stuff so that we stop expressing it with violence.
Talk to you all tomorrow.
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