by Tom Pantera
Columnist

Two days before my college graduation in 1981, a friend of mine had a party at a bar. Her old boyfriend showed up. He used to beat her and obviously, was not welcome. I hadn’t actually met the guy, but everybody who had was very upset.

A friend of the host’s turned to me at the bar. “If I start something, will you back me up?” he asked.

I’ve never been one for fistfights – the last time I had one was in seventh grade – so I struggled to come up with a delicate answer. I had visions of my mother showing up for graduation and seeing me with two shiners and fewer teeth. Finally, I said, “Well, let me put it this way: If you do, I guess I’d have to, but I’d really rather you didn’t.”

“Okay,” he said. He didn’t start anything.

The 1960s radical H. Rap Brown famously said, “Violence is as American as cherry pie.” As you can tell, I’m not a violent person. I’ve been around fights, of course, but I’ve been able to successfully avoid getting in the middle of them. I think that seventh-grade fight was the last time a punch was aimed at me.

So it’s hard for me to really relate to people whose first solution to any problem is to go out and mess somebody up. I just don’t get it. Some people find that kind of thing fun, but it sure isn’t my idea of a good time. Maybe it’s a question of pain tolerance. I just don’t think hurting is fun. Others apparently don’t agree.

I think they may be in majority, judging by what I see around me every day. And H. Rap Brown was right; we are a violent people. That’s true even for those of us who don’t find it amusing as adults. I grew up watching, and being highly entertained by, Road Runner cartoons. I’m a huge fan of Batman, who likes to kick ass and take names. I like the occasional shoot ‘em up video game. Karon and I spent most of Christmas Day watching John Wayne westerns on AMC, where fisticuffs and gunfire are more than just plot points. Hell, as I write this, we’re watching “Air Force One.”

Still, I don’t like the idea of punching or being punched, much less shooting or being shot.

This isn’t about gun control, either. And it’s not about violent video games or any other silly reason people point to when they decry the American penchant for violence.

In fact, it isn’t even about America. Even a cursory glance at the evening news shows that in most of the world, life remains nasty, brutish and short. People are killing each other for reasons that go back millennia; it’s instructive that after Yugoslavia broke up with the fall of Communism, the old ethnic hatreds reasserted themselves and people went right back to killing each other, as though the intervening decades had never even happened.

Nor is this a recent development. Some Americans are so proud of our Judeo-Christian heritage, but if you read the Bible there’s violence that would make the most bloodthirsty serial killer blush. And it isn’t just the old testament. If you saw “The Passion of the Christ,” you saw a pretty good representation of what Jesus’ death was like. It made the “Saw” movies look like a Disney cartoon. Mel Gibson made torture porn for Christians.

It’s hard not to conclude that violence is simply a deeply engrained part of human nature, bred in the bone and ineradicable. If you read history, you find out that people were killed regularly, for the most minor of reasons. Sometimes it happened in large numbers; sometimes it happened gradually and individually. Sometimes, it wasn’t even a single act; peasants died by inches over years, but the violence was no less deadly.

That’s why, as much as I personally believe this nation needs gun control and a lot of other things, I don’t have much faith those things will make more than a small dent in our violence problem. In the end, we are animals – thinking animals, but animals nonetheless. There are within us passions we cannot control. It’s a safe bet that every one of us, at some time, have fantasized about taking another life. Most of us never act on those fantasies. Most of us have a kind of governor that slows us down before we go out of control. But a significant number of us have no such governor.

That’s what’s so scary about so much of the violence we see around us. Maybe we can’t find an answer to it because there simply is no answer. Or if there is one, maybe it resides so deep in the human soul that we can’t access it. To the extent we can do anything about it, maybe we can think about ways to teach people who ordinarily wouldn’t to listen to that small voice that keeps us from crossing the line into violence. But that’s assuming that everyone hears that voice, or even has it somewhere. If a person has no such voice, we can’t make them hear it.

Maybe the closest we can come is knowing that the impulse toward violence resides in each of us. Forewarned is forearmed and, optimistically, perhaps just being aware of the tendency can make most of us avoid it.

But there always will be a few of us for whom it won’t matter. The taste for cherry pie may be so deep in some that it will always overwhelm the better angels of their nature.