Renouncing Violence

Dear Editor,
    There is still a chance that we may yet – call me crazy – renounce violence, even in this rough-and-tumble world. Just because the next guy is unreasonable doesn’t mean you have to lose your head. I’m sorry, I apologize, pardon me, I know it gets a bad rap these days, yet somehow I believe that sanity will rule the day, that all these thrown stones are just the casting off of our primordial nature, that we who find reasons to hate one another are in our last throes, that we are dancing cartoon swivel-headed flowers bopping to music of the sky-crossing sun. These fancies that I have are but a dream within a dream on the island of Thoreau. I’m sorry, what was I saying, oh, yeah, people say that I’m crazy, yet some day I’ll be proven true, you will find your way to sanity, to reason, to finding your way to working out your problems is a simple matter of choice: Do you want to live in peace or are you living in peace? I’m sorry for the suffering you have caused me, I apologize if you have made my life this living hell, please forgive me if you have never learned anything in your long life to make our world a better place, but I promise now and from this point on that you will do better. Yet in the interim, be my mortician, treat me and mine with the kindness, the diplomacy, the gentle humor of my undertaker.