Not posted for agreement or approval. If you share from my post, please leave my commentary intact. This has been a public service announcement.

This meme, and several others like it, are going around my friends list at the moment. A lot of the people sharing it are fellow #veterans, and I know why: it’s an idea with strong appeal to those of us who were carefully trained in the capability for great #violence, and then given the tools to put that training to use. It does things to your head, and one way to deal with those things is to convince yourself that it made you meaningfully better in some way.

Unfortunately, it’s crap.

First of all, practically everyone is capable of great violence, and has been since the invention of #gunpowder. You don’t have to be a hulking armored #knight to mow down your enemies, or those you imagine to be your enemies. All you need is a working index finger. Sir Kittenfeeder isn’t as special as you think he is.

(On the whole I think this is a good thing, although the ways in which it’s … not good … are dramatic and horrible and in front of our faces with grotesque frequency. That’s a different conversation.)

Second, yes, there are other levels of violence than the worst, and I think all in all it’s good to have some familiarity with them. But there are matters of scale. Once upon a time I was at least a competent martial artist. I could have trained much harder than I did, every single day for my entire young adult life, and still never have been as good at it as the people born with the capacity to reach the top.

A very good but perhaps somewhat overenthusiastic #kickboxing coach told me I had the potential to be a pro. Some sparring sessions with actual pros—not champions, just those who were good enough to make a little money at it—demonstrated otherwise. Man’s gotta know his limitations.

Third, and perhaps most important … if you go around thinking all day about how capable of great violence you are, you are not peaceful. Oh, you may want to be. You may convince yourself and others around you that you are. If you and they are very lucky, you’ll live your whole life without ever doing anything to break that peace. But you probably won’t—and most likely those closest to you will pay the price.

The capacity to do violence, and the choice of whether or not to exercise it, are pretty much orthogonal. There are dangerous violent people, dangerous peaceful people, harmless violent people, and harmless peaceful people. We may fear and loathe the first, admire the second, pity the third, and not think much at all about the fourth because it’s most people’s default state most of the time. Good thing, too, because otherwise none of us would be here.

But any one of us can be any of the above, in different contexts at different times.

Absolutely, cultivate the capacity for violence if you want. In certain times and places, it’s useful. Other times, it’s at least good #exercise, and can lead to considerable self-improvement. Even as old and busted as I am, I still entertain thoughts of getting back into some kind of training one of these days. I miss it, and it did a lot to make me who I am.

Just remember it doesn’t make you any better as a human being. Doesn’t make you any worse, either. It’s simply part of who you are, and it’s up to the people around you to determine how good that is.

Oh yeah, and stop bragging, because that’s not a good look for anybody.