On Violence

A strange thing happened in court yesterday. The case of two children - ages 3 and 9 - came before the Judge. DHS, as often happens, was contacted by the police, who had been at a home that was in deplorable, uninhabitable condition. Mom and Dad are both active substance abusers - heroin, primarily. The home was littered with drug paraphernalia, there were shards of glass from a broken aquarium strewn about on the floor and bags of pills within easy reach of the children. The place was malodorous. A dying cat was also found in the home.

I hear stories like this all the time. Many of my clients come from homes in similar or worse condition. The children in this scenario were miraculously - at least at first blush - unharmed by their environment, and they were safely transferred to foster care. Time will tell what the long-term damage may be, but there were no injuries, broken bones or other signs of abuse.

I guess I am a little embarrassed to say that I had a distinct, passing reaction to the mention of the cat, when I heard the DHS worker report to the Judge on the condition of the home. I winced, I felt this weird pang. There is a certain numb neutrality that sometimes sets in when one works in child welfare. Our clients suffer so much, there is so much horror visited upon children, that you have to become numb sometimes.

So why did I react so strongly to the suffering of some anonymous cat? I can't really say. I have a cat, and I don't have a child of my own yet. I guess in some way it's a kind of violence and inhumanity that I can imagine a little bit more. I doubt that makes sense.

But it does seem related in some odd way to a conversation that Mike and I had while walking to work yesterday. We were talking about going to the movies this weekend. He mentioned that he wanted to see "Sin City." "NO WAY," I immediately proclaimed. I had read a review which mentioned the film's relentless violence - castration, decapitation, God knows what else.

"How about 'Gunner's Palace?,'" I suggested instead, referring to the documentary about US soldiers in Iraq.

Mike was perplexed. He couldn't understand why I would rather see a movie about REAL violence, rather than one in which the violence is make-believe, and highly stylized.

I can't quite say why one brand of violence disturbs me more than another, or why my reactions to different forms of violence are inconsistent. It does seem difficult though, to really grasp the cruelty of the world, the things that people do to each other, to children - and apparently to animals, too. Maybe if I am exposed to something that has the hard smack of "reality," I think it might help me understand a little bit more about how to make things different.

In any case, it has been raining torrentially all day long, and these are the kinds of things that come to mind.