What makes an act an act of violence?
This morning I awoke to news that a North York man killed another with a machete. Yes, there were wounds, but more than the wounds, there was the result, and perhaps it is the result that marks this homicide as acutely violent: a man’s utter erasure. Never again will this man bask in the sublime miracle of self-aware sentience. When people of the First Nations first used the term “cultural genocide” to describe their erasure at the hands of white colonists, the descendants of white colonists—people who look like me—ridiculed their use of the term. “How can you equate your experience to, say, the horrors visited upon the Jews of Nazi Germany?” we asked. And yet, on reflection, I begin to see that if you erase the hallmarks of a person’s identity, then you destroy them as surely as if you had hacked them to death with a machete.
The descendants of white colonists—people who look like me—suffer an erasure, too, but ours is self-inflicted. Through our digital revolution, we undermine our storytellers. We say our new media enable us by creating opportunities for participation, but the only way we know to participate is to hack one another to pieces. Through unfettered urban development, we bury the homes we knew as children and raise in their place outsized towers that have no regard for the human scale. We lose ourselves like ants in the shadows of elephants. We sniff the air and mock the talk of cultural genocide saying: “We have no need for storytellers or for a sense of place in the world.” But we are mistaken.
A strange literalism has infected our world. We have blinded ourselves to the distinction between a thing and the representation, between a person and the image. This has produced perhaps the most egregious erasure of all—the erasure of a numinous surplus that inheres in all beings. Thus the seemingly innocuous act of tearing a poster from a board becomes an act of violence.