How the West is run; Do we really have "no choice" but to join in an addictive cycle of violence?.

MAYBE I SHOULD BLAME IT ON THE WEATHER AND on the summer cold I had going into the long weekend. If it had been nicer out and I had been feeling well, my wife and I wouldn't have watched three suspect movies in three days. We would have found something more productive to do, like aerate our compost heap.

The shelves at Blockbuster were already thinned out, but they had a "Rent one, get one free" offer. I picked up two movies I'd never heard of. My wife said, "Get something with some suspense to it," so I selected Hunted, which promised suspense but delivered only choreographed gore. The other flick, Heaven's Prisoners, was based on a book by James Lee Burke, whose writing I enjoy, so I took it as the freebie. Neither would get a "thumbs up" from me. In fact, they both left me vaguely disturbed.

It was on the third day when we were sitting through the gorgeous but mindless Open Range at the local theater complex that I began to pick out a recurring pattern that was leaving me more irritable than my cold symptoms: In each film the heroes as well as everyone else were dead certain that the only way to respond to perceived threats was preemptive, go-it-alone violence.

The "heroes" were surprised when preemptive violence only aggravated the situation. And they were shocked--shocked, I tell you--when they returned from their gruesome attacks on others to find that the loved ones they had hoped to protect had been hurt or even killed after they were left behind. This led, of course, to retaliatory attacks, and so it went, in endless rounds of violence punctuated by wooden dialogue that might have been written by Oliver North or taken from a bullied 14-year-old boy's vengeful daydreams.

But even trite dialogue can be revealing, and it was while listening to Open Range director and star Kevin Costner mumbling incoherent platitudes that it all clicked for me. After mutual taunting and endless rounds of escalating violence, Costner comes to the brilliant realization that this might get really nasty. "But they leave us no choice," he says.

No choice? Having no choice is a troubling moral state. Having no choice but to take a harmful or immoral action is the very definition of addiction. Of sin. Addiction indulged never gets better. It always gets worse. An addict will always find a good and satisfying reason to indulge the behavior in higher and higher doses.

We see this same "no choice" dynamic laying out in Iraq, between Israel and Palestine, and in Northern Ireland. Closer to home we see it in gang fights, feuds between rappers, and even in our justification of the death penalty. No choice but to go it alone, guns blazing.

And indeed, under the wide western skies Costner sees only one narrow choice: shotgun or pistol. He is willing to kill and to die to "set things right" but not to venture forth to actually talk and negotiate and call upon the rule of law. "That will take too long," he rationalizes. His only strategy to address injustice is to blow it to smithereens. And so the myth of redemptive violence gets played out one more time.

BUT HERE'S THE DIFFICULT FACT OF OUR FAITH. IN THE AUthentic Christian tradition, redemptive violence only works if you're the one on the cross, not the one doing the nailing. Our redeemer managed to remain strongly, courageously, nonviolently loving to his persecutors unto death--his own death. This is a hard trail to follow, and I'm sad to say that those who claim Jesus as Lord have too often lost sight of it in the past two millennia.

The cowboy still had choices aplenty, and I'm not including or advocating the choice of turning tail and running. What I'm talking about are the mature choices that you and I enact every day in our homes, workplaces, and neighborhoods: listening to others, speaking out, creating and supporting structures of justice, uniting with others to challenge unjust powers, and engaging in nonviolent resistance.

Perhaps some readers already have their pens or keyboards out to tell me, "You're naive. You don't know 'these people.'" To which I respond: I'm not naive. I do know these people. I just don't want to become what these people have become: people with no choice but to brutalize and retaliate and put yet another round of fellow human beings up on the cross. We need a better myth to live by. USC 

By TOM MCGRATH, editorial director of Prepare the Word: Homilies from the Heart That Hit Home (TrueQuest Communications).