The number one driver of violence is the enormous hatred we have for ourselves

You can call it selfishness, you can call it jealousy, you can call it ignorance or you can call it greed but whatever you wish to call it the number one driver of violence is simply the hatred and complete disdain we have for ourselves.

There are no truer statements than the one that credit is given to Eleanor Roosevelt which says “no one can make you feel inferior” and the one I coined that says “our only true limitations are those we place upon ourselves”, both meaning that no one else’s causes you more pain than the pain realized when you know within the depths of your very soul that you are the main reason your life is stuck where it is today and every day.  Anyone may have the strength to knock you down but only you can give them the power to hold you there. You can set up all the barriers you want, you can set up all the obstacles you wish and you can put up as large or high walls and hurdles as you please but you will never stop me from achieving that which I find the inner strength to achieve.  I am the master of my destiny and the controller of my life and nothing anyone can say or do will ever succeed in stopping me unless I make the decision to allow it.  You see people defeat is only possible with your permission and only your permission period.  If even God himself cannot enter your soul without your permission knows that in order for anyone else to occupy even the smallest of places within your soul, you have to allow them.

I pen this article today after learning some very irritating, frustrating and upsetting news.  My nephew, Sam has a really good friend that I call Stretch and over the years I have gotten to know this young man and yes made him a very big part of my family.  I saw his struggles and his pain; we did all we could to help him overcome his surroundings and emerge as the bright, thoughtful, caring and great man he is.  His future was bright and he had corrected his past to make a brighter future.  He was on his way to the life he had worked so hard for and dreamed about often.  Yesterday he was leaving to head to a basketball training camp and college when a car drove by, a shot rang out, he was struck in the knee and now the doctor says his basketball dream maybe dead.  In my search for why someone had decided to fire a weapon toward him, I learned that he had already been accompanied there before with a child-hood friend who refused to be a real friend and participated in drinking and partying instead of focusing on what he was there to do.  He and this so-called fiend were dismissed and he came home only to find that others believed in him as much as we did and fought to get him reinstated.  Not only did that fight to get him back but they had already arraigned for employment for him there as well to keep him busy doing the down times.  Now as he was about to journey back and begin again, some coward and hateful person decided that since they could not have what he was working toward that they would make sure he didn’t get it too.

You have to really hate yourself and who you are to deny anyone their dream.  You have to really hate who you are in order to commit violence upon anyone or consider causes harm, injury or death to another.  You have to really hate yourself in order to even allow the faults or perceived faults of another person to control, direct or take over your own existence.  If you are spending any amount of time concerned with what others are doing instead of keeping a very close eye on what you are doing, then you must love them more than you love yourself.  Consider this, if you are as happy with who you are as many pretend to be, would it really matter if your neighbor yells all the time?  Would anything anyone else do, affect you in such a way that you consider violence upon them unless you hate who you are so much that it is easier to focus on them instead of attempting to change yourself.  This may just explain why out of the many years, decades and eons of time, violence has never really been properly justified and still to this day does not make sense to anyone.  The hatred you feel for yourself is so strong that you turn it towards another because it is easier for you to justify harming another than it is to fixing yourself.