i am now home from a weekend spent with my sister, my mother, my grandmother, my two great aunts, one of my mother's cousins, and the wife of one of my mother's cousins.

wow, but i disagree strongly with some of my relatives.

i think that killing innocent people in the guise of striking back at those who have hurt us makes us the same as those people who just planned and carried out killing thousands and thousands of people by crashing planes into the two world trade center towers and into the pentagon and into somewhere else (we don't know where, since the plane crashed, thank the gods, into a field in pennsylvania instead of into another building).

i think that this is unacceptable.

at least some of my relatives think that it's just fine that if we do that, it will make us the same as those people, and think that "that's just fine" that it will continue the cycle of violence, and that this will end up with more people who survive the violence and who think that the thing to do, the thing that will solve this once and for all, will be to go kill some innocent people and maybe some of the ones who are responsible, as well.

since when is "but he hit me first!" an acceptable justification for violence? i don't recall it being acceptable when i was a child. now that i'm an adult, and i can do more damage than simply biting my sister's nose, why is it okay now?