I have got a story that relates to this that happend to me in college. In college I was one of the orgininal members of the schools aikido club. I had been there for two years and one of the aikido instructors asked me to uke (take falls from throws) for him in a class he was teaching to the karate club. He was going to give them an intro into aikido type of thing. I was thrilled being an ex-member of the karate team I knew some of the old gang and loved the idea of cross training in general. I have always seen martial arts as a community.
I went into the room and was working drills before the class while my training partner Roger (who is an atheist btw) was stretching near me. Two guys on the karate team both vets in the martial arts with over 10 years of experience each were having a philophical conversation. One guy named Alan whom studied Jeet Kung Do (bruce lees art) and thai boxed in thai land before that was discussing personalization of hand to hand weapons with David a nidan (2nd degree black belt) in Tae Kwon Do and amauter kickboxer.
Alan was argueing that a knife was a more intimate weapon to kill another man with than a blunt instrument like a staff and David was argueing the opposite. Intimate was their chocice of words to define the act. I was looking at Roger puzzled and he was just as puzzled as I was about the choice of topics.
As their debate was subjective and relative the debate was a stalemate and they turned to us first, to me and asked, "what is more intimate to kill a person with a knife or a stick?" My first thought ( I was a pacifist at this time too) was" I am not going to be a part of this converstation ", and I made-up the excuse that I need to change to start class and I left. They asked Roger and he told them he need to concentrate on folding his hakama (japanese divided skirt) thus dodging the issue.
I left and did not learned who won that arguement that day but I did make a revelation from it. What makes violance distasteful to most people is the intimcacy of it. What made the question revolting to me was the reality that intimacy is an emotion that can be connected with killing.
I submit that in response to the poster of the other forum and Lintu's mother, that the cognitive seperation of the intimacy that is there with hurting and /or killing another is the missing componet that makes it permissable many times.
Next time your mother (lintu) talks about the reasoning for murdering people in Iraq show her pitures of the dead childern civilians and destroyed homes. Making it personal is the first step to making it intimate and making it intimate is to make it, for most, very distasteful.
