The news story seemed impossible to process: a young man had severely injured a six-month-old

infant. His reason? The baby had wet her diaper and cried from hunger. In another headline that

same week, an argument over a parking space ended with gunfire. The victim's offense? He had

"disrespected" the shooter by taking a spot the shooter wanted.

These aren't isolated incidents. Scroll through any day's news and you'll find variations on the

same theme: minor conflicts escalating to devastating violence, human lives destroyed over

slights so small they barely register as conflicts at all. We've entered an era where a baby's cry

can trigger abuse, where a perceived insult can justify murder, where the gap between

disagreement and destruction has collapsed to nothing.

The question that haunts us isn't just about justice or prevention. It's about something more

fundamental: In a world where violence erupts from the smallest spark, where does forgiveness

even fit? And perhaps more urgently, how did we get here?

There was a time, not so long ago, when children were raised with a different blueprint for being

human. You addressed your elders as Mr. and Mrs., not because they were superior beings, but

because respect was the baseline. You said please and thank you, acknowledging that other

people's time and effort had value. You learned to say I'm sorry, taking responsibility when you

were wrong. You listened to others, recognizing that their experiences and thoughts mattered as

much as your own.

These weren't just quaint customs or empty politeness. They were the architecture of a society

that understood a crucial truth: you are not the center of the universe. Other people have equal

worth. Your feelings, while valid, don't justify harming others. Disagreement and discomfort are

normal parts of life, not attacks on your existence.

As one mother used to tell her children: "You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar." It

was more than a saying about tactics. It was wisdom about how to move through the world

without leaving destruction in your wake.

But something has shifted in our cultural landscape, and it's hard to ignore the role of leadership

in that transformation. When people in positions of power and influence routinely call opponents

degrading names, dismiss inconvenient facts as lies, and treat disagreement as warfare, they're

not just expressing their own frustrations. They're teaching by example.

The message filters down through every layer of society: This is how you win. This is how you

handle people who challenge you. Respect and truth are for the weak. Humility is a character

flaw, not a virtue. If you have the power to humiliate someone, use it.

The highly educated professional internalizes this in their social media debates, feeling justified

in their cruelty because they're fighting for what's right. The person struggling to make sense of

their place in the world learns that might makes right, that the loudest voice wins, that people

who disrespect you deserve to be destroyed.

And somewhere in this moral ecosystem, someone decides that a perceived slight in a parking lot

justifies pulling a trigger. Someone loses the capacity to respond to an infant's crying with care

instead of violence.

This brings us back to forgiveness, but with a terrible complexity. What does forgiveness mean

when the harm is so senseless, so disproportionate, so devoid of basic humanity?

Traditional understandings of forgiveness emphasize letting go of resentment, choosing not to be

defined by the hurt inflicted upon you. It's about freeing yourself from the poison of bitterness,

reclaiming your peace from those who wronged you. Forgiveness doesn't require forgetting what

happened or excusing it. It doesn't always mean reconciliation. It's primarily a gift you give

yourself.

But when someone murders your loved one over a parking space, when someone abuses an

infant for being an infant, we're not dealing with a mistake or even a terrible decision made in a

moment of weakness. We're confronting something that looks like a fundamental absence of

humanity.

Can you forgive someone who seems utterly disconnected from human empathy? Should you?

Must you?

The answer, perhaps, is that forgiveness in these cases isn't a moral obligation but a personal

choice that survivors make for their own healing. Some families find peace through forgiveness.

Others find it through justice, through advocacy, through ensuring such violence never happens

again. Neither path is wrong. Both are attempts to reclaim meaning from senselessness.

But there's a deeper issue we must confront: What do we do as a society when faced with

escalating violence born not from desperation or even passion, but from egos so inflated or

psyches so damaged that the smallest perceived slight feels like a mortal threat?

This isn't primarily a question of forgiveness. It's a question of protection, prevention, and

ultimately, values. What kind of society do we want to be? One where might makes right and

cruelty flows from the top down? Or one that returns to the foundations that make civilization

possible?

Those foundations aren't complicated. They're the lessons many of us learned before we could tie

our shoes: Treat others as you want to be treated. Control yourself. Other people matter just as

much as you do. Your discomfort doesn't justify their destruction.

When leaders model these values, when parents teach them, when communities reinforce them,

they act as circuit breakers. They create space between anger and action, between disagreement

and violence. They remind us that we're all navigating this life together, that our shared humanity

matters more than our momentary irritations.

There's no simple solution to the violence we see in our headlines. But we can start by

recognizing that the erosion of basic respect and dignity isn't a minor cultural shift. It's a moral

crisis with body counts.

We can demand better from our leaders, refusing to accept cruelty and contempt as normal

political discourse. We can model better in our own lives, even when it feels like swimming

against the current. We can teach the next generation that humility isn't weakness, that empathy

isn't naïveté, that there's strength in saying I'm sorry and wisdom in listening before speaking.

And when we're faced with the question of forgiveness in cases of senseless violence, we can

hold two truths simultaneously: that forgiveness may bring healing to some, and that protecting

the vulnerable from those who've lost their humanity matters just as much.

The mother was right, after all. You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar. But the deeper

wisdom is this: we're not trying to catch flies. We're trying to remain human in a world that

sometimes seems determined to forget what that means.

The question isn't whether we can forgive every act of violence. The question is whether we can

remember, teach, and embody the values that prevent such violence in the first place. Whether

we can choose honey over vinegar, not because it's easy or always effective, but because the

alternative is drowning in a sea of our own making.

That choice, renewed every day in small moments and large ones, might be the most important

act of all.