I don’t like violence. It dehumanizes the aggressor and causes untold suffering to the victim. In its wake the family, friends and the society are left to deal with their own pain and fear and sadness. Yet we often cheer violence, support it and make media heroes of those who foster and commit it. The contradictions in our position on this issue are astounding.

Some years ago I came across a press photograph of a grieving mother and father who had lost their daughter in a terrible tragedy. There have been many such photos that we have grown accustomed to seeing. It could have been from an event in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco; or in London, South Africa, Scotland, Germany; or one of the horrific events in Iraq or El Salvador. That particular photograph did not come from a major international centre of crime, or from a war zone. Rather, it was from a massacre of innocent people in Australia, in Melbourne, a ‘peaceful’ city under the southern cross.

We hear stories of random violence and of patterns of violence. Violence occurs in the streets and in the ‘safety’ of our homes, caused by strangers, or those we know. It occurs to the elderly, to the middle aged, to the young and to infants. The victims are male and female – the perpetrators are mostly male. I remember vividly those migrant parents in that press photograph -- the mother (now mourning in black) lighting candles at a funeral.

I am less afraid of the criminals than I am of the law-abiding who support them. What do we do with the law-abiding bigotry; the law-abiding intolerance; the law-abiding promotion of gratuitous violence in the media; the law-abiding institutionalization of poverty and homelessness; the law-abiding environmental destruction; the Christian affront of a just war? I am afraid for my children that the violence, anti-semitism, racism and sexism put forward under the guise of patriotism, honour, religion and power might grow rather than diminish.

Events of human violence raise questions of who we are in relationship to one another. The fourteen young women in Montreal, the people in Killeen, Texas, those in Melbourne; who are they in relation to the men who took their lives and who are we in all this. And what will we do? Social systems require trust and faith in others. To not trust is to not love. To not live is unthinkable. To not be loved is intolerable.

Events like this remind us how vulnerable and fragile we are when one person, propped up by all the systems and individuals who exploit weakness and bias, can wound so many of us so thoroughly. We must alter the circumstances in which violence is fostered. We must understand that the politics of violence is a weakness and the economics of violence is always a loss. If we wish our children to love then we must also wish them peace. The weak come forward with a clenched fist – the strong with an open hand.