Spiritual poverty & disrespect for life are causes of violence

The Boston Herald

I used to think it was congestion that made people mean. People living too close to one another. People squeezed into tiny apartments. People made to share small rooms.

But it isn't that at all. People huddle together in tents and rooms and apartments all over the world, and most don't wind up killing one another with guns or with knives, or the way many of us do in small, hurtful ways.

An old man, at least in his 70s, so shrunken that his head didn't come to the top of his steering wheel, pulled out of the bank the other day in front of me, forcing me to stop short, forcing me to come within an inch of his car, and he gave me the finger.

I laughed because I was so stunned. If it had been a young guy, I wouldn't have been shocked at all, but this man was old. Old enough to know better. Old enough to remember more cordial times.

Did he live in a crowded hovel? Was he deprived of space? I don't think so. He was driving a big, new car. Had the world changed him, then, I wondered? Had he been watching so much TV that this kind of mean-spirited behavior had rubbed off? Or was he just a cranky, old, quick-tempered man who maybe had an argument inside the bank? Who knows any more. Who can figure these things out?

Last Friday night in Randolph, a 17-year-old boy pulled a large kitchen knife on a young woman at a high school football game. The woman screamed and a police officer on detail, William Pace, came running and knocked the knife out of the kid's hand, held it under his left foot and was attempting to handcuff the boy when he was jumped from behind by a gang of kids.

"The defendant and the other youths started kicking him in the chest, side, stomach and head, causing him to become semi-conscious for a short period of time," Lt. Richard Crowley said.

If this had happened anywhere but Randolph, it might not have jolted me. But Randolph is where I grew up. Randolph is where my parents fled to get away from the city. Randolph was the culmination of their dreams and the seedling of mine.

And now - even though it hasn't looked like the small town it was for many years; even though it is overbuilt and underzoned; even though most of the fields in which I played have been bulldozed and paved and condominiums sprout where trees once grew; even though the town has changed physically - I believed that underneath it was the same. A nice place to live. A nice place to grow up.

And maybe it is. Maybe it's as nice a place as you get these days. And maybe this "incident" was nothing at all.

But I can't help but think that 30 years ago, if I had been able to look into the future, if I had been shown this scene, I would have said it's fiction. Because 30 years ago if a kid had pulled a knife on someone and a cop had wrestled him to the ground, the kid's friends would never have interfered.

They would have been too afraid. They would have scattered and run.

Why? Because police were respected back then. All adults were respected.

Today, poverty is blamed for all of our social problems.

If people had more money, they wouldn't be so hostile, we are constantly told.

And poverty IS to blame, but not the dollars and cents kind. It's poverty of the spirit that's killing us, and it starts so small you hardly notice. It starts with gestures like the kind the old man made and evolves into words, and disrespect grows and then comes contempt, and the words and the gestures spill into violent actions.

I don't have a solution for this. Just a suggestion.

Respect needs to be taught at home. That's where it begins.

That's where all behavior is learned. Respect for life.

Respect for people. Respect for ourselves. For disrespect leads to gestures and actions that demean us all.