Turf Wars: How They Start and Why They Never End (A Metaphor)
“The road of ‘God is on our side, and he shall surely smite our enemies’ is a wide road. A lot of parades have gone down that road. It doesn’t take much courage to travel that road; just fall in step and follow the crowd.” Brian Zahnd
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On a typical midwestern high school campus, a feud raged between rival gangs over race and turf. One day after school one student sucker punched another boy from the other side of the ongoing war. He spun his stunned victim around and proceeded to pummel his prey with jabs and crosses, not giving the other time to raise his hands high enough to block any of the punches that landed on his head and torso. Vicious blows and kicks landed as planned until the attacker walked away leaving his foe laying in a pool of blood on the school quad lawn.
An ambulance arrived and sped the unconscious boy to the nearest hospital Emergency Room where he was treated for a broken nose, three broken ribs, a severe concussion, and a burst spleen. To save his life, the doctors put him in an induced coma and told his family to hope against hope. Many months later he woke up in his hospital bed only to face another year of PT and plastic surgery just to be able to talk in one syllable words and eat through a straw. He would never be able to walk or function normally again.
In the meantime, the boy’s friends and his four big brothers found his attacker and beat and tortured him mercilessly from head to toe, leaving him in a heap at the same spot he’d left his victim. His injuries made the other boy’s look like a skinned knee. Not satisfied, they brought hell down on his friends and family, burning down their houses with innocent women and children inside. They shot and stabbed others on a rampage of vigilante justice. In the end, fifty lay dead and seventy-five sustained life-threatening injuries. An eye for an eye was swapped for a hundred eyes for an eye.
It wasn’t fear that prevented the police department from intervening, but a sense that the original attacker got what he deserved, that vengeance was satisfied and justice (such as it was) had been served.
From then on, the entire community was polarized as the rhetoric swirled around whose guilt was the more egregious. The campus feud between ethnicities morphed into a city-wide war. In the years to come, many more were murdered in cold blood, families were divided, and chaos prevailed on the streets. A few called for peace, but most were fraught with hate and violence. The city was never the same after that.
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“Alas, many in the West still suppose implicitly that violence can be redemptive. The ‘Superman’ myth, or the ‘Captain America’ complex, has been shown to underlie the implicit narratives, of generation after generation of American leaders, generating the belief that the hero must use redemptive violence to restore the town, the country, the world to its proper state. Unless we address this, peace will remain a romantic dream while the world – the world in which you will bring up your families – becomes increasingly dangerous.” NT Wright
