‘The thing what hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.’ Ecclesiastes 1:9 (King James Bible version)
We are confusing the current virtual world of extremely visible, easy access violence with its former absence from our daily realities. It was not absent. It was hidden in the shadows of the pre-world-wide-web. Horror, terror, barbarity have writ large one part of human history if you chose to selectively read only those chapters. Crimson splashes colour across the worldscape and demands our attention for selective sensationalist overload today. When we are thus saturated our empathies are misdirected and our hearts are hardened to our own inhumanities. Yes, even this violence of mind and body has an ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’; ours is always justified and theirs is always unjustifiable when both are, at root, wrong, wrong, wrong.
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