Revenge

Revenge is a passion to get even.  It is a hot desire to give back as much pain as someone gave you.

The problem with revenge is that it never evens the score.  Fairness never comes.  The chain reaction set off by every act of revenge ties both the injured and injurer to an escalator of pain.  Both are stuck on the escalator as long as each party believes they are giving the other person the pain they deserve.

Family feuds, gang, and tribal wars go on until everyone is dead.  The reason is simple.  No two people ever weigh pain on the same scale.  The pain I receive always weighs more to me than the pain I give you.  The pain you receive from me always weighs more to you than the pain you gave me yesterday.  It never balances out between people, families, tribes, or countries that are adversaries.  It never has and it never will.

An eye for an eye becomes a leg for a leg and then a life for a life.  No matter what the weapons, words, clubs, arrows, guns, bombs, or nuclear missiles, revenge locks us into an escalation of violence.  Gandhi was right; if we live by an eye for an eye the whole world will be blind.  But it never stops at an eye for an eye; it always escalates to a life for a life, until a whole ethnic society is annihilated.  We have seen it in the last few years in Bosnia and Rwanda with million of people murdered as revenge was played out. 

What is the answer?  Do we go on with escalating revenge until we are all dead?  Is there some way to heal the pain and stop the revenge?  Yes, there is a way to stop revenge it is called Forgiveness.