When violence is the answer ...

[Bruce Wayne]

8. Interesting, if still gratuitously provocative.

Of course when you make these two statements mean the same thing, you're not being honest:

violence is the answer

there is a time and a place for violence

Violence has its place, of course, like when the Redcoats are coming or punks are off wilding through Gotham Park. But if we hope for a civil society, it makes little sense to casually go about contributing to the social tolerance level of incivility.

As Martin Luther King pointed out in the 1960s: violent resistence will justify violent responses by the forces of oppression in this world. But nonviolence under the same provocation, will only expose the opressor as a force for evil.

But why stop at a busted lip? If you rip their fingernails out, they will also remember your statement. Or what if you rip their puppy's tail off while making some casual observation? Would that not help drive home your point? Perhaps next time a friend invites me to the opera or asks me over to an elegant birthday party for a coworker, I'll drive a red-hot poker through my eyeball and hang a little flag on the throbbing skewer that reads, "Don't forget: La Traviatta on Thursday with Vicki." Then I shan't miss a true evening to remember.